This week started with me confronting what had been giving me such unease about the new dungeon system: pacing. Right now we can fit roughly 8 battles into a 4 player game while staying within the hour mark. That would allow for, say, 4 dungeons that consist of two battles. Not a very satisfying dungeon crawl. General pacing would have to be improved to make room for more dungeons.

I then had a realization that we could dramatically improve multiplayer pacing by resolving everyone’s combat simultaneously during the end of the round. Which then led to the realization that we could improve it even further than that by making sure _everyone_ is in combat on the same schedule by placing battles on a timer. Naturally the problem is that doing this requires redesigning pretty much the rest of the game and even theme around it.

I wrestled with the concept for most of the week but eventually realized it was too dramatic a shift for this late in the game. I do think it would result in a better game, though. Something for the sequel.

With that realization I went back to the dungeons and realized that even with the relatively minor pacing tweak there just wasn’t enough headroom for the dungeon system. And in the process of considering throwing away most of the existent game I began to realize something. Our current branch system isn’t that bad. It’s just lacking content to give the branches relevance. We already have a hint of it with classes that allow pvp interactions on the map- better not get too close to that class, or they’ll bite you! Better follow that class if you want to steal their heals! The real problem is that the lack of player abilities that allow for map placement was missing which would add a longer lasting layer of branch strategy. And a little more fundamentally, the branches are lacking a certain reward for traversing them in order to create situations where you want something a branch has but don’t want to deal with another player’s traps.

I got so used to never adding much content to each version of the game that I have begun to actively misdiagnose the problems with each version as systems rather than just missing content. Honestly, I suspect previous versions were similarly mistreated.

So at this point it’s more a matter of adding a little bit of extra seasoning to the current version before going on to adding the missing content to it. I’ll also need to trim the length of the branch system a little bit and start to speed up some animations that slow the pacing down to improve it a little less invasively. I still feel a little uneasy about some of these additions but at least the problem of game length that has haunted me isn’t too hard to fix with the branch system.