Blightbound is a multiplayer dungeon crawler that tasks three heroes to venture down from their mountain refuge to face the abominations of the Blight - a mysterious and corrupting fog that enshrouds the land.
- The Blightbound Steam Page
Challenge Room Creation
Blightbound missed end-game content. Challenge rooms were a good solution for this problem. The purpose of these rooms is that the players who are fully geared can still challenge themselves in new environments created to be more difficult and unique than the regular levels.
Before creating the challenge rooms I had some very simple ideas. Every challenge room that I had was created with one core idea in mind.
To create a block out I had to learn the custom engine Ronimo used for blightbound. I had some experience in this engine since I had created a custom level for their other game 'Awesomenauts' years before.
Rift of Paths
This was the first challenge room that I created. The intend was to divert from the core of the game. In Blightbound you are supposed to work together and stick together, the classes are made to synergize. However in this challenge room the heroes are separated and have to fight for themselves. In some rooms two heroes join each other and fight together against the waves. At the end of the challenge room there is a climactic battle against a buffed up 'beamer' enemy. The players are challenged by all the fights, especially since it challenges them by subverting expectations. In the end this was one of the challenge rooms that we chose to continue refining and developing because it challenged the player well.
Rift of Overloading
For some context; the top video was the final challenge room that I made and the bottom one was an in-progress version but has actual gameplay.
In this challenge room the players were challenged by a continuous wave event that kept going even if they didn't clear the waves. This makes it increasingly difficult when you fail to clear a stage. The earlier iterations of the challenge room were a bit harsh on the performance so a lot of my work also focussed on making the room more performance friendly while retaining the intended challenge. In the end this was one of the challenge rooms that we chose to continue refining and developing because it challenged the player well.
Rift of Protecting
In this challenge room there was a big pressure plate in the middle on which you have to stand to charge up the progress bar. When no players are standing on it, all enemies die and the room reverts to the last checkpoint that you reached. The main challenge of this room was to keep one player separated from the rest and still challenge them with various enemies. I also included enemies that have some knockback or area of effect abilities to try to empty the pressure plate. Also these enemies would serve as targets for the other heroes since they have to prioritise correctly so that their middle man doesn't get killed or pushed off.
Rift of Beams
In this challenge room there are a lot of lasers and two boxes. The players can take one or two boxes to block the lazers while they have to fight enemies. So they have to juggle two hazards; enemies and lazers. The hard part comes when a player dies and has to find a way stay safe from lazers and enemies while another revives them. This challenge room did challenge the players a lot, especially the rogue since they are very squishy and have to get close to enemies to hit them.
Rebalancing Items
A lof of items in the game were unused by players. The players that played the game in the endgame stage always reverted back to builds they had made and always looked for crazy synergies between items that exist to create new ones. There is a big difficulty spike on harder challenge ratings in this game and therefor the items compete heavily with each other. One of the big constraints another developer set up is that no item should synergize with itself. And so I went to look at the metrics to see what items were underused an buffed said items. I researched what builds were common and how to potentially create new builds with redundant items. I implemented all item changes that I made myself in a custom engine.
Finding a player retention gap in gameplay time
When playing the game a lot I found out that there are two major times of enjoyment in Blightbound. The early game, when you're figuring out the world, levels and characters and the late game when you have everything and are building crazy builds with all of your amazing loot. The problem is that a lot of players don't get to the late game stage because everything between it can be a lot less engaging. Essentially the player will have to grind a lot for loot in levels they've played a lot of times already. I had some solutions, most of them included giving players more legendary items so that they get to that theory crafting stage. The solution became; adding legendary items to new character unlocks. There were more solutions but a lot of them required some time from other developers and since the game was in late stages of development we couldn't implement those anymore. I went to work and added a legendary item to every hero that doesn't come (when you unlock them) with a special item or trinket. I also buffed all of the special unique hero trinkets so that they become more usable aswell. This way the player is sooner introduced to legendary items and will start that buildcrafting earlier in their game cycle.
Creating a consumable system
The game needed another resource sink since when you've played a lot common items start to pile up. When creating this system I first thought of a very versatile system where every component added a different effect and you could customize your potions that way. This however seemed like it would take too much time to implement. So I made around 15 consumables, each useful in its own build. The consumables should be relatively cheap when compared to item crafting since they are a one-time-use for a run.