While you wait for the NFT release and while we work on the game, NFT art, and all the little things, we wanted to share a little about our philosophy around the game design for Daedaland. What we learned over the years is that you do not rush things when doing software development. Even less so when building user experience-rich projects like a game. For this reason, we are designing all aspects of the game in advance, while in parallel working on developing the base components for the game like procedural map generation, navigation and networking. The aim of this writing is to create clarity in what the team is doing behind the scenes and share our thinking and principles of game design for Daedaland.
The Game
We are building a 3D action game where you will play as one of our Master Seeker NFTs.
A game session begins in an unknown location somewhere in a dark and mysterious labyrinth. Your goal is to find the secret room which contains a treasure. You may also want to collect the coins you find on your adventure. They may come in handy later on. But beware, there are forces at play which do not want you to succeed. You will need to find a way to avoid traps, deal with monsters and outplay the opposing player in order to be the first to find the treasure room and loot the treasure.
You will have the ability to dig through walls and each of the 16 different character classes will have a unique ability to use during the game. Characters come with randomized attributes, but you will be able to level up and assign extra attributes as you wish. You will also be able to boost your stats through items.
The game will be primarily aimed for in-browser play, but we are open to expansion to desktop and mobile.
Design Pillars
Design pillars are the core of any game. It is paramount to establish and clearly define what each pillar represents. Everything else that is added to the game must stand on those pillars.
Accessibility
There is a lot of buzz currently about what accessibility really means. Accessible does not mean easy. Accessible is understandable, intuitive. We all heard the famous “easy to learn, hard to master”. This is exactly what we mean by accessibility. We want every single player that tries our game to know what they are supposed to do without needing to tell them, at least to be able to play the game at a basic level and have fun.
Replayability
We aim for a short-cycle gameplay loops: jump in a game, explore, fight and loot. In order to not make this repetitive or boring, we are planning various features and mechanics to spice up the experience. Some of those are procedurally generated maps, unique character abilities, intricate trap and combat design, where with training and skill you will be able to outplay your opponents.
Customization
The Seeker characters represents you in Daedaland. We want to give you options to play the game as you want to play it. You will be able to gain experience and pick the attributes you want to focus your character on. Collect various items, weapons and utility tools for each occasion. Some items will also be upgradable, making them ever so stronger.
Thrill of the Unknown
The labyrinth is a formidable place. Dark and dangerous. You never know what lurks in the shadows, just behind the corner. We want the players to feel a sense of excitement (and a little bit of dread) while playing — you better be attentive at all times to make out the most of each situation.
Play to Earn
We feel it is important for the players to be able to exchange the time they invest in a game for something of value. While we do plan to incentivize player on-boarding by providing periodic rewards for playing the game, we feel this is not sustainable long-term. We feel a game ecosystem must be able to sustain itself in isolation. This means that a stream of new players is not required. To achieve this, we must first and foremost ensure the game is fun to play. This is our top priority and we aim to do this by introducing various mechanics where players can develop skills and tactics to outwit their opponents. We plan to keep ourselves honest by involving the community in alpha- and beta-testing rounds. We believe the play to earn part comes from the desire to progress and be the best, which will be accomplished by finding or crafting the best items. Those items can be traded on the marketplace which is where the main part of the P2E component comes from.
Goals
Finally, let’s touch a little on what we aim to achieve with this project. First and foremost, we want to make a fun game you can play casually for a few minutes at a time. We also want to let people be able to go nuts and try to optimize every single mechanic and game interaction — find the optimal stats for each character class, best and fastest way to cover as much ground as possible etc. As a gamer, watching pros play out such strategies in other games always inspire me to want to play that game. And we know many share the same sentiment, this is one of the reasons why Twitch is so popular.
Making a game of any complexity is no simple task. It takes skill, time and perseverance to make it happen. We are certain we have the team to do it. It will take time, but we will get there.
We want to include you in the process. Please feel free to join our Discord, even if you are not interested in NFTs, we would like to hear all opinions. Speaking of NFTs, we have designed them in many varieties with lots of different traits. We hope you will love them and that they can represent you if you so choose. Our plan is to have the NFT sale some time in April which will help us to expand the team and put full focus on the game development.
We hope to see you in Daedaland… Discord server (for now).
Follow us on these channels:
Website: https://www.daedaland.com/
Discord: https://discord.gg/6QFNvpCnyF
Whitepaper: https://whitepaper.daedaland.com/
Medium: https://daedaland.medium.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/daedaland
Telegram: https://t.me/daedaland
— Zoran
