this post was submitted on 10 Jan 2025
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Pixel Dungeon

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Hey Rat Punchers, happy new year once again!

After a bit of a holiday break, I'm back to work on Shattered Pixel Dungeon, which includes laying out some plans for the coming year! This post starts with a year in review, and then lists the major changes and additions that I have planned for Shattered Pixel Dungeon in 2025 and beyond.

Read The Full Post Here!

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 hours ago

The only gameplay changing things you unlock are characters, and their option unlocks are so easy to achieve you might as well call them locked behind a tutorial. Challenges are locked behind a completion of the game to not overwhelm the newbies and to not put the expectations of the challenges if they didn't even beat the game. Challenges don't add content nor brutally change the game, they just restrict it or make it harder by tweaking some values. The rest is not really game changing, seeds and daily runs just change how the layout of the dungeon is generated, but so is starting a new run. Alchemy recipes are locked, but you still can craft them without having the recipe, thus not being a game changing options. You just don't know you can do it yet. You can, though.

A whole new boss, though, is significant content added through progression, defining characteristic of rougelites.

SPD is already replayable enough. Achievements and the random nature and variety this game holds naturally is enough to keep players replaying it. A new boss won't add more replayability to that, as you are just asking the player to do a second run to see new unlocked content. Content that will only satisfy the player once. Different updates, the kind of updates Evan focuses around, updates that interact with the rest of mechanics of the game, that enhance gameplay, are the long term updates that actually promote replayability. By implementing this "new boss" you only fall on spirals of new fast content (as this new content doesn't encourage replayability, it has to arrive faster than the one we currently receive) that works well for bigger teams (as they can make these type of updates fast enough), Evan can't, he is just one person working on this whole game by himself. It is better for content and replayability to make these updates because, while they don't produce that growth or momentum you were talking about, it does promote replayability. Another problem these kinds of update have is that they are also overwhelming for new players, as it is not as natural as the already present content in the game, and it will overwhelm new players in the long run. This will only ruin the simple nature of the game which has, in the end, the opposite effect of what you want to achieve, as it discourages new players to join in due to the complexity of the game, if it followed that direction.