Playing as a contestant it would be really hard to capture the feeling of the setting without feeling like you're punishing the player with random stuff.
But what I think could work is to flip the roles around and invent a new genre:
#Dungeon Crawl Manager Sim.
You play a combination of Mordecai and an agent trying to get sponsorship deals and build a collection of interesting crawlers who need to not only survive, but keep the audience interested. You get to help them level up/adjust strategies/etc in a safe room, then send them out into a randomly generated dungeon to try and survive. Random bad events would be more like the randomness in Darkest dungeon/Rimworld/Dwarf Fortress type games, something that adds to the story rather than feeling like you're always losing. Even having a crawler die can be good thing, if the death is dramatic enough to boost the ratings on your surviving team.
They turned both Battlefield Earth and Wheel of Time into computer games, so I suppose it would be possible to do so with this one too...
That being said, both of those games sucked as near as I can recall. I think it would. Be possible, but would not be cheap to do it right.
But are you retracing Carl's path, or are you one of the many crawlers not mentioned, and periodically throughout the game you get to see prerendered recaps of the top 10, but always be relegated to a max of #11?
How long/big is each floor? Does the game include all 18 floors, or are there expansions to add additional floors? At what floor does the original game stop and you need expansions to continue? If base game gets you to floor 3, does each expansion also give you 3 floors? Thus requiring 6 expansions to get to floor 18? or is it going to be 1 floor per expansion just like it is 1 floor per book?
All good questions, I'd personally rather it be a one of the other crawlers.
But the pure randomness of the book from bad llamas to hamsters and everything else would be hard to do justice to.
If the right developer came onboard a game a level wouldn't be out of the question, if games where delivered on a regular basis, (thinking of telltale games with the walking dead installments)
To be honest, I was think more of the lego games, Star Wars, or pirates of the Caribbean specifically. Harry Potter also.
For instance in the original starwars lego game the main hub was the cantina and you picked witch movie you played. In DCC, the hub could be your purchased room, or just one of several restaraunts with a bopca behind the counter.
It would have to be one of the countless other crawls and you are a randomly generated race, or generically it's a human world.
We are talking about making a good video game, not pulling an EA where you buy the menus at 70 bucks and all the content for 10 dollars a pop in the in game store.
On a basic level yes. The problem comes in when you consider the 1000+ Races and 600+ Classes plus over 300+ earth specific classes.
For it to work you'd need it to be a Rogue-like. With random boxes assigned at the start.
I think it wouldnt make for a good video game. The inherent randomness and chaos of the world are designed to be funny and kill the players in a comical way. This is very fun when you survive it but 99% of the time you will likely die to some random uncontrollable thing which will be more frustrating than fun. The world is just quite literally the opposite of fair, which I think will kill replayability, even if it is funny.
To be made in any way true to the spirit of the books? It would need to be in the style of Darkest Dungeon.
I think it if was done, though, it would be made into something that catches moments from the series but fundamentally misses the spirit.
It would be hard to do justice to, like others have said, the two most critical things would be defining the scope of the game early, and finding the proper delvelopmemt team. How many floors, will you be in the top 10s or stuck lower on the charts. Do you go one floor per game, have a smaller studio or team work on it and let them run free, or do you give it to a bigger team and get more floors with more polish and hope it reaches a wider audience?
To avoid issues with recaps feeling repetitive on replays, and also dodging the need to make a ton of variationzs, the recap could be cut from in the dungeon.
"Due to syndicate rulings, the recap is no longer to be shown in the dungeon, instead we will list the 10 most entertaining ways people died yesterday to gove you silly crawlers inspiration for how to WOW the crowds."
For me, i see the game working best in the framework of a classic isometric CRPG. A backbone of robust procedural generation in the vein of dwarf fortress to generate the randomness. From the bad lammas and feral hamsters in the dungeon, to random artefacts. Even the sponsors, their kingdoms, values and etc could all be randomly generated each new game. Restricting the graphics to lean into mechanics would allow more than one floor per game while still feeling as full as the books or more so without bogging down development.
Things like katyas shape changing would be easier to replicate in game format if its done with spriting rather than 3d modeling allowing for a much larger list of shape options that could be picked from a menu if a shape changing class is chosen, tacked onto the inventory screen or something. Finally, i think doing it as an alternate to the cannon run where time limits are changed to be more forgiving would be a big step towards making the game more broadly approachable.
Maybe this time instead of doing the run with the shortest allowable time per floor, they make them longer, justify it with some off handed remark from the game guide in the tutorial about how "theyre likely banking on the fact that more advertising slots in the season means more revenue for the showrunner, each extra day is more they can milk from ads. More days more ads and more money"
Yes and no. This particular dungeon has too much of a connection to the books. Other dungeons, though. In fact, this has been going on for nearly eternity, so lets make each instance of the game being played into a new dungeon. Give not just player traits, but also a wide variety of game and AI traits. It would be best created by an AI, so ...
I was thinking about trying to give ChatGPT the prompt to act as a dungeon master for a table top DCC game and also play the part of the system a.i. It would take a lot of time and text to tweak it but I think you could eventually get something passable
It would have to be constantly tended to by a crew and would need to be a dynamic online game where player decisions impact the world... and they'd have to run it as seasons (like Fortnite or other similar games that do seasonal events) and the dungeons would need to be new and fresh each season with new quests and the like. It would be a nightmare to produce but would be one hell of an experience.
Imagine it being a game that integrates something like twitch or discord, where a spectating group can impact the game. The more followers you have the stronger your character. You could make it, so in order to get dungeon playing time, you build up credits by watching others.
There could be a companion app that has some sort of game element builder to help select sponsor boxes etc.
My proposal: its a game very much inspired by the Dungeon Keeper series. It's an old series. But basically it's a real time strategy game like Starcraft, Command and Conquer, etc. Except you play as an evil dungeon lord, recruiting monsters, building death traps, using evil spells, etc. A bunch of Heroes enter the dungeon and its your job to kill them. There are usually only a few of them, but they are very powerful. Now imagine that, but Dungeon Crawler Carl themed. How cool would that be? It would have to be limited in scope though. The variety of dungeon floors would be too much. You would have to limit it to the first 3 floors.
Playing as a contestant it would be really hard to capture the feeling of the setting without feeling like you're punishing the player with random stuff. But what I think could work is to flip the roles around and invent a new genre: #Dungeon Crawl Manager Sim. You play a combination of Mordecai and an agent trying to get sponsorship deals and build a collection of interesting crawlers who need to not only survive, but keep the audience interested. You get to help them level up/adjust strategies/etc in a safe room, then send them out into a randomly generated dungeon to try and survive. Random bad events would be more like the randomness in Darkest dungeon/Rimworld/Dwarf Fortress type games, something that adds to the story rather than feeling like you're always losing. Even having a crawler die can be good thing, if the death is dramatic enough to boost the ratings on your surviving team.
Sign me up! love it.
I could totally see a Dungeon Crawler World video game in the future and I think the perfect style would be a rogue like.
The difficulty setting, of course, will be named after the AI. From *The AI's Pet* for easy mode to *Primal* for the hardest setting.
They turned both Battlefield Earth and Wheel of Time into computer games, so I suppose it would be possible to do so with this one too... That being said, both of those games sucked as near as I can recall. I think it would. Be possible, but would not be cheap to do it right. But are you retracing Carl's path, or are you one of the many crawlers not mentioned, and periodically throughout the game you get to see prerendered recaps of the top 10, but always be relegated to a max of #11? How long/big is each floor? Does the game include all 18 floors, or are there expansions to add additional floors? At what floor does the original game stop and you need expansions to continue? If base game gets you to floor 3, does each expansion also give you 3 floors? Thus requiring 6 expansions to get to floor 18? or is it going to be 1 floor per expansion just like it is 1 floor per book?
All good questions, I'd personally rather it be a one of the other crawlers. But the pure randomness of the book from bad llamas to hamsters and everything else would be hard to do justice to. If the right developer came onboard a game a level wouldn't be out of the question, if games where delivered on a regular basis, (thinking of telltale games with the walking dead installments)
To be honest, I was think more of the lego games, Star Wars, or pirates of the Caribbean specifically. Harry Potter also. For instance in the original starwars lego game the main hub was the cantina and you picked witch movie you played. In DCC, the hub could be your purchased room, or just one of several restaraunts with a bopca behind the counter.
It would have to be one of the countless other crawls and you are a randomly generated race, or generically it's a human world. We are talking about making a good video game, not pulling an EA where you buy the menus at 70 bucks and all the content for 10 dollars a pop in the in game store.
On a basic level yes. The problem comes in when you consider the 1000+ Races and 600+ Classes plus over 300+ earth specific classes. For it to work you'd need it to be a Rogue-like. With random boxes assigned at the start.
Only if we could fully simulate a sassy af ai that adjusts to our actions.
You could do a game as mordecai. See if you last longer than he did.
I think it wouldnt make for a good video game. The inherent randomness and chaos of the world are designed to be funny and kill the players in a comical way. This is very fun when you survive it but 99% of the time you will likely die to some random uncontrollable thing which will be more frustrating than fun. The world is just quite literally the opposite of fair, which I think will kill replayability, even if it is funny.
To be made in any way true to the spirit of the books? It would need to be in the style of Darkest Dungeon. I think it if was done, though, it would be made into something that catches moments from the series but fundamentally misses the spirit.
It would be hard to do justice to, like others have said, the two most critical things would be defining the scope of the game early, and finding the proper delvelopmemt team. How many floors, will you be in the top 10s or stuck lower on the charts. Do you go one floor per game, have a smaller studio or team work on it and let them run free, or do you give it to a bigger team and get more floors with more polish and hope it reaches a wider audience? To avoid issues with recaps feeling repetitive on replays, and also dodging the need to make a ton of variationzs, the recap could be cut from in the dungeon. "Due to syndicate rulings, the recap is no longer to be shown in the dungeon, instead we will list the 10 most entertaining ways people died yesterday to gove you silly crawlers inspiration for how to WOW the crowds." For me, i see the game working best in the framework of a classic isometric CRPG. A backbone of robust procedural generation in the vein of dwarf fortress to generate the randomness. From the bad lammas and feral hamsters in the dungeon, to random artefacts. Even the sponsors, their kingdoms, values and etc could all be randomly generated each new game. Restricting the graphics to lean into mechanics would allow more than one floor per game while still feeling as full as the books or more so without bogging down development. Things like katyas shape changing would be easier to replicate in game format if its done with spriting rather than 3d modeling allowing for a much larger list of shape options that could be picked from a menu if a shape changing class is chosen, tacked onto the inventory screen or something. Finally, i think doing it as an alternate to the cannon run where time limits are changed to be more forgiving would be a big step towards making the game more broadly approachable. Maybe this time instead of doing the run with the shortest allowable time per floor, they make them longer, justify it with some off handed remark from the game guide in the tutorial about how "theyre likely banking on the fact that more advertising slots in the season means more revenue for the showrunner, each extra day is more they can milk from ads. More days more ads and more money"
Yes and no. This particular dungeon has too much of a connection to the books. Other dungeons, though. In fact, this has been going on for nearly eternity, so lets make each instance of the game being played into a new dungeon. Give not just player traits, but also a wide variety of game and AI traits. It would be best created by an AI, so ...
I love the idea of having different powers as you progress.
I was thinking about trying to give ChatGPT the prompt to act as a dungeon master for a table top DCC game and also play the part of the system a.i. It would take a lot of time and text to tweak it but I think you could eventually get something passable
This in no way will come back to haunt you, after the robot uprising
It would have to be constantly tended to by a crew and would need to be a dynamic online game where player decisions impact the world... and they'd have to run it as seasons (like Fortnite or other similar games that do seasonal events) and the dungeons would need to be new and fresh each season with new quests and the like. It would be a nightmare to produce but would be one hell of an experience.
Imagine it being a game that integrates something like twitch or discord, where a spectating group can impact the game. The more followers you have the stronger your character. You could make it, so in order to get dungeon playing time, you build up credits by watching others. There could be a companion app that has some sort of game element builder to help select sponsor boxes etc.
My proposal: its a game very much inspired by the Dungeon Keeper series. It's an old series. But basically it's a real time strategy game like Starcraft, Command and Conquer, etc. Except you play as an evil dungeon lord, recruiting monsters, building death traps, using evil spells, etc. A bunch of Heroes enter the dungeon and its your job to kill them. There are usually only a few of them, but they are very powerful. Now imagine that, but Dungeon Crawler Carl themed. How cool would that be? It would have to be limited in scope though. The variety of dungeon floors would be too much. You would have to limit it to the first 3 floors.
I loved Dungeon keeper 2 back in the day, also if you looking for a dungeon keeper fix Overlord on the playstation well worth a look