“A Game Which You Do Dungeon Adventures, But This Time Only By Monopoly “
People say, “I always want to play a game where you could be an alchemist,” well, in The Dungeon Alchemist, you could do it exactly.
In the typical roguelike dungeon crawling game, you play as adventurers. You explore the world and interact with it through combat, but in this game, you’re only a potion shopkeeper. You cannot leave your lab and shop stall; you can only explore this world by selling potions.
The game mechanics emphasize the influence of your product by directly showing their effect. After adventurers buy your potion, you can view their state on your dungeon maps. Adventurers with your potions are more likely to win battles in the dungeon, and they could bring more gold after they win. So, richer adventurers could purchase more of your potion and explore more of the dungeon. So, there you have it – dungeon exploration by potion monopoly!
Genre:
Business SLG 2D
Project Duration:
5 Months
Tools:
Unity, Blender, Photoshop
Dungeon Alchemist Design Process
I spent my first month finding image, audio, video references for the project, in order to create an “emotional anchor point”, which later turned into this “Voice acting script”. By using this “anchor point”, I could keep to the same expected outcome without losing the way in the daily development.
After collecting all the references, I began to work on the paper-based prototype. In this game, players don’t have to explore the dungeon and do combat dirty work on their own, instead they just watch adventure fights with their potions. With that concept, I came up with an auto-battler prototype, which later was used in the demo game.
The potion crafting mechanics also came from the paper prototype; using classic chess as inspiration, the crafting mechanics seem surprisingly fun to play with.
The last image is a graph presenting how in-game economics work. I tried to construct an internal loop in terms of gold, which is the currency in the game.
“A Whole Town Have Been Missing For Ten Years, Now It Magically Appears. But Where Is everyone? And What’s In That Strange Museum?”
For a period of time, I was deeply fascinated by the idea of “fictional history museum”, imagine a museum full of alien artifacts and incomprehensible murals, imagine seeing the history of a world you’re never heard of…
And The Pando’s Museum is just like that imagination. This game has no combat, no enemy, but it’s also not a typical “walking simulator”, it’s a tour experience in a digital museum, and the condensed history of long-gone souls once lived in the small town, Pando.
Genre:
Experimental 3D
Project Duration:
6+ Months
Tools:
Unreal Engine5, PR Pro, Blender, PS, etc.
Gameplay:
“By eavesdropping our citizens, reporting their crimes or suspicious activity, we could make our great nation more secure than ever!
This is a short project I’ve been working on in the last month, inspired by “Unheard” and “Papers Please”, combining smart phone app and tabletop materials, I managed to create a fun and immersive experience of being a phone-tapping agent.
Genre:
Experimental Tabletop
Project Duration:
1 Months
Tools:
Unity, Photoshop, Blender, PR Pro
Zaheer Cheng 