Bring back the Dungeon Delver!
What's the hook?
Cellbloc Studios introduces Dungeon Wars, a re-imagining of the classic first-person RPG dungeon delver updated for the online multiplayer environment of the 21st century. In Dungeon Wars, you will create and crawl the dungeons, competing to prove yourself as the best delver. Dungeon Wars is being developed as a stand-alone game for PC and Mac as well as an integrated web client.
What is Dungeon Wars?
The core idea of Dungeon Wars was inspired by the bygone first-person dungeon crawlers of yesteryear, such classic video games as Bard's Tale and Wizardry. That genre has largely been replaced in the modern era by the first person shooter, in no small part because the modern format allows you to play with your friends. We think we have a solution to that problem.
Dungeon Wars will be an online, Free-to-Play platform where you and your friends can interact, challenging one another to earn the highest score in asynchronous, first-person dungeon crawls in levels of your own design.
How do I win?
When you play Dungeon Wars, you will be given your own Hoard of Gold. Protect your gold! In addition to being nice and shiny, the size of your Hoard will determine your ranking among your peers. (As you know, bigger is better!) Not only will having a large Hoard give you status, it will also influence how much gold you can steal from others. Just like in the real world, it takes money to make money!
You can increase the size of your Hoard by stealing gold from other players. But watch out, because they will also be trying to steal gold from you!
How do I protect my gold?
To defend your Hoard, you will build a Labryinth from your library of traps. Spiked walls, angry trolls, exploding runes -- all will be at your disposal to create a deathtrap that only the most clever and powerful delvers will be able to survive. Even if they do survive your Labyrinth to reach your Hoard, they will still have to make it out alive to claim their share of your gold.
How do I get more gold?
Once you have built your Labyrinth, you are free to delve through Labyrinths built by other players. Just like in the classic games that inspired us, you'll assemble a party of 4 delvers and equip them with weapons, armors, and magical trinkets to give them a fighting chance.
Each delver will be able to attack traps or defend against trap attacks. In addition, each delver will also have a unique ability that may make their dungeon crawl easier. Be careful selecting your team, as some delvers won't work well with others.
How do I get better at the game?
Both your delving party and dungeon traps will be assembled from your personal library of collectible cards. Cards will be divided into delvers, delving equipment, and traps. Each card will belong to at least one of 5 Elements (Fire, Air, Spirit, Water, Earth) which determines the philosophy and strategy of the card, as well as which other cards it can work with.
Our plan is to have an initial set of 360 cards, with more sets to come in future expansions. Cards will be sold in booster packs of 11 cards (7 common, 3 uncommon, 1 rare per pack).
How do I play with my friends?
Everyone who plays the game will be making Labyrinths and then delving others. Your success at these endeavors will largely be determined by your strategy and the cards you have available to you.
Since Dungeon Wars wouldn't be any fun alone, just like in the real world, players will be able to trade and sell cards to one another as they see fit. Give away your extra commons to your little brother, or sell your unused rares to someone who wouldn't play them as well as you would. Once you buy Dungeon Wars virtual cards, they are yours do do with as you will, just like real cards.
Who is Cellbloc Studios?
Mainly, we're a collection of people who like games. More specifically, we're a collection of people who like games who get paid to make games. Together, we have decided that it just might be more fun to make the games that we want to make rather than make someone else's games. And Dungeon Wars is the game we want to build.
We're led by James Simpson, better known in the Southeast as Doctor Unity. These days, James programs in and teaches on the Unity3D engine, though he cut his teeth on many other languages and platforms in his 25 years of experience in game development. Naturally, we'll be using James' expertise in Unity3D as the foundation for Dungeon Wars.
The core Cellbloc Studios team assembled for this task includes -- from left to right in the photo above -- Walter (programmer), Jonathan (modeler), James (designer, lead programmer), Jeremy (animator), Bryon (texture artist), and Jorell (concept artist). Don't let the fact that we're all trying to look really cool fool you; we are all very excited about this project.
What is in it for me?
Obviously, to make this game come true, we're going to need a little help. We can only work so fast if we stick to building Dungeon Wars in our "free" time, so if you want to play this game, we'd like you to consider giving us a hand.
Just because we plan to release our game in a Free-to-Play environment, don't think we're asking for something for nothing, however. Donating to our project will earn you the opportunity to help us beta test and some virtual booster packs of cards at great prices. Higher reward tiers will earn you some Kickstarter-exclusive traps, delvers, and equipment. We're also willing to allow you to influence our designs as we build the game. We'll go so far as immortalizing especially generous donors in our game, as either unique traps or unique delvers (with special equipment cards)!
Take a look at our rewards tiers and see if there's something you like. Maybe we can help each other out here, what do you say?
Risks and challenges Learn about accountability on Kickstarter
Building a game with the scope that we envision for Dungeon Wars is a daunting task. To begin with, we will need a mountain of artwork, both 2- and 3-dimensional for the delvers, equipment, and traps. Programmers will spend hours animating the 3D models, building controls for the NPCs, and interfacing you the player with the environment. We do this everyday, and we have a very good idea of how much time this will take.
Once all of those parts are assembled, the hard work begins. In order that you might play with your friends, we will need live web servers to host it, databases to track it, networking to run it, bandwidth to get it to you, and security to make sure that annoying kid down the street isn't cheating. Acquiring these assets and ensuring that they are all appropriately implemented for security and durability will take time and effort. Unfortunately, time and effort can be costly, something we know from our experience in building these types of game in the past.
Our goal is to release Dungeon Wars in September 2013 as a stand-alone game for PC and Mac, as well as an online game. We do plan to eventually create other platform-specific releases for mobile phones and Facebook sometime in the future (time and money dependent).
It is our intention that the maintenance of the game shall pay for itself through the sales of booster packs (and hopefully many future expansion sets). Before we can get to that stage, however, we will need to start-up capital to get this project rolling forward. While we here at Cellbloc Studios have the knowledge and relationships to begin working on Dungeon Wars, if we want to breathe life into our grand vision, we will need help. Specifically, we will need financial help.
FAQ
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Our initial goal is to release on PC/Mac. Once we have those up and running, our secondary objective is to create mobile clients for Android/iOS. So although tablets aren't in our immediate plans, we do plan on getting there eventually. (While I can't promise anything, I will admit that at this moment, we are considering making mobile releases a potential stretch goal.) As of October 24, we are additionally considering a release for Linux.
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We intend the game to be online, where you will find leaderboards that link you to other players. We're working on designing the leaderboard right now so that we can attach it to the Kickstarter to give people a better visual idea of what we have in mind. Players should be able to see who has the most gold, how deadly that player's dungeon has been, and maybe which elements or trap classes make up the plurality of its traps. Players should be able to select which dungeon to delve directly from the leader board. The leader board may also make suggestions based on your history, and show your standing in relation to the overall leader and your friends list.
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We are working on a way to scale the dungeon experience, accounting for variable power traps and delvers, without drastically changing the time it takes to complete a dungeon. (Our goal is a <30 minute crawl.) Balancing is a very important issue -- probably the most important issue. We're still working on the exact mechanic.
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We've been playing MMOs for years, and are keenly aware of the problem presented by an in-game economy. Since gold is our metric for success, we don't want to require you to spend it on booster packs, the very thing that will increase your changes of success. Therefore booster packs of cards will only be purchasable with real currency.
Each player who has on operating dungeon will be given a default starting allotment of gold. Dungeons will require management, but not maintenance. Therefore, we will require users to check in on their dungeons frequently to make sure everything is running smoothly. We don't intend to charge gold for maintenance, but players who do routinely check in to make sure all their traps are running smoothly will be rewarded with an allowance of extra gold. (Think of it as a dungeon keeper who checks in on his slave goblin miners to be sure that they are mining and not sitting and drinking all day. We do.)
To reward players who are exceptionally good at acquiring a large hoard, we intended to offer in-game items that can be bought only with gold. The will include special traps, delvers, and equipment, but also things such as dungeon themes, special trap pieces, and other status symbols that high-earners can use to show off their wealth to dungeon visitors. We intend all of the items to be limited in quantity to increase desirability, but plan to releasing new luxury items very frequently. We can tie the gold price of these items to the quantity of gold in the world, effectively pulling gold off the market, so to speak, to keep the economy in check.
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Don't think of Dungeon Wars as a digital collectible card game, but as a dungeon crawler that uses digital collectible cards as storage discs for elements of delvers, equipment, and traps. You'll never actually play a game with the cards; you'll use the cards to set up the delve environment. You'll then play a dungeon crawl like an old-fashioned delver.
We will not be printing cards, physical cards will not be required to play the game. (We are not making a CCG version of Skylanders.)
34
Backers
$1,412
pledged of $60,000 goal
Funding Canceled Funding for this project was canceled by the project creator on October 25, 2012.
Funding period
Oct 22, 2012 -
Nov 28, 2012
- First created · 0 backed
- Has not connected Facebook
- Website: cellblocstudios.com
Pledge $5 or more
5 backers
Backers who pledge $5 will receive 2 booster packs of digital cards for use in game play plus the opportunity to join the game beta test (beta testers will get their name in the game credits).
Estimated delivery: Sep 2013Pledge $15 or more
9 backers
Backers who pledge $15 will receive 4 booster packs of digital cards for use in game and the opportunity to join the game beta test, plus 1 limited edition Kickstarter promo card for use in game (card will be randomly selected from a set of 10). This reward replaces any rewards earned for a $5 donation.
Estimated delivery: Sep 2013Pledge $25 or more
12 backers
Backers who pledge $25 will receive 10 booster packs of digital cards for use in game and the opportunity to join the game beta test, plus 5 limited edition Kickstarter promo cards for use in game (cards will be randomly selected from a set of 10). This reward replaces any rewards earned for a $15 donation.
Estimated delivery: Sep 2013Pledge $60 or more
1 backer
Backers who pledge $60 will receive 10 booster packs of digital cards for use in game and the opportunity to join the game beta test, plus the complete set of 10 limited edition Kickstarter promo cards for use in game, plus a t-shirt with the Dungeon Wars game logo. This reward replaces any rewards earned for a $25 donation.
Estimated delivery: Sep 2013Add $15 to ship outside the USPledge $120 or more
2 backers
Backers who pledge $120 will receive everything at the $60 level, but donors at this level will receive a complete set of collectible cards (1 of each common, uncommon, and rare) instead of any booster packs.
Estimated delivery: Sep 2013Pledge $200 or more
0 backers
Backers who pledge $200 will receive everything offered at the $120 reward level, plus one unique delver card and one unique equipment card for use in game exclusive only to Kickstarter donors.
Estimated delivery: Sep 2013Pledge $300 or more
2 backers Limited (198 of 200 left)
Backers who pledge $300 will receive everything offered at the $200 reward level, plus one unique trap card for use in your dungeon exclusive only to Kickstarter donors.
Estimated delivery: Sep 2013Pledge $500 or more
0 backers Limited (60 of 60 left)
Backers who pledge $500 will receive everything offered at the $300 reward level, plus the opportunity to work with our concept artists and modelers to create a trap for use in the game.
Estimated delivery: Sep 2013Pledge $1,000 or more
0 backers Limited (35 of 35 left)
Backers who pledge $1,000 will receive everything offered at the $500 reward level, plus the opportunity to have your likeness and/or name become a rare delver for use in the game.
Estimated delivery: Sep 2013Pledge $5,000 or more
0 backers Limited (10 of 10 left)
Backers who pledge $5,000 will receive everything offered at the $1,000 reward level, plus in-game executive producer credit and a piece of signed and framed concept art.
Estimated delivery: Sep 2013Pledge $10,000 or more
0 backers Limited (5 of 5 left)
Backers who pledge $10,000 will receive everything offered at the $5,000 reward level, plus exclusive consultation with the Cellbloc development team regarding game mechanics and development, including a private party thrown in your honor.
Estimated delivery: Sep 2013
