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I was talking about my autobattler roguelike game with PrettyFrenchMan this week, and he linked me the Auto chess formula: a blog post with different ideas on mixing existing genres with autobattler. The vision I have for my game is quite close to the Mothergunship X Auto chess idea. An interesting read that made me think a bit more about the shop I want in my game.

A nice shop

A lot of my experience of autobattlers comes from Teamfight Tactics. Here you have a shop, where you can spend your money in different ways:

• Buy characters for your team
  This is a core mecanism: You buy characters to build your team, and whenever you get 3 copies of the same character at the same level, they merge into the next level version.
• Level up the shop
  It’s a way of getting permanent, non-random progression. In TFT it gives you more chance of getting hier tier characters and an additional spot on your team.
• Reroll the content of the shop
  It’s a money sink to try and hit the characters you need for your team.

You can also choose to keep the gold, and get interest next round.

You lookin’ for parts?

In my game, I want the player to buy turret parts and assemble them. To upgrade part, just find another copy of this part and add it to your existing turret, so to get a fully upgraded turret, you need to find the same parts twice.
In addition, you can also spend gold get permanent progression, but unlike in TFT, I would like to split the team size progression and the tier progression:
To increase your team size, you just need a turret base. If all you want is a lot of poorly designed turrets, just buy a lot of base a drop cheap part on them. But you could also decide to spend gold researching better technologies, unlocking new parts and bonuses for this familly of turrets.

One question still to be answered is how to manage the randomness of building a team: if you unlock only a subset of parts, you will have more chance to find them in the shop, which reduce the randomness of each run. Research could require random loots to be available? Maybe the player will need to select more dangerous path, but with more chances of yielding the research components they need?
This still needs to be tested!

Bunch’o links

This week I also wanted to share 2 videos:

• An interesting video by Veritasium on what it takes to gain expertise

• Even though I never played Shadow of the Colossus, I got hooked by the remarkable story telling of this 2019 video by Jacob Geller