Burrow of Evil

The concept statement

Burrow of Evil is a side-view game where you play as the awakened monster with the goal to gather other monsters around and create your own evil monster kingdom. Heroes will try to stop you and ruin your progress and the monsters are not the smartest species around so you will need to overcome lots of obstacles to create your empire.

Genre

The game will have side-scroll strategy, management and base building genre. I chose those genres because I have a passion for them and I’d like to have more experience in making them and because I think this combination of genres is not explored enough.

Concept creation

The original game concept was to make something like Craft the World or Oxygen Not Included and Castle Story because I love those types of games and I was curious to try and recreate their AI schemes. After thinking about how to make the game a bit more unique I thought that it would be cool to play as the monsters (because who else lives under the ground and looks cool).

Considering the time limits and my lack of knowledge about tile maps I realised that I need to simplify this idea. An easy simplification to come up with was to have fixed set of rooms that you could build and to make some of the gameplay text based, exactly like fallout shelter!

I decided to play fallout shelter to see what worked and what didn’t in their case and that helped me imagine my game clearer. My game will try to expand on the expeditions, where you send out a minion into the outside world to gather resources. Another thing I would like to expand on would be raids (being raided). Heroes raid monster dungeons all the time (and most of the time they kill most monsters) in most fantasies and I thought it would make the player feel like an actual evil being (since they are usually weaker than heroes). However, the player would likely not appreciate if every time they are raided, they lose all their progress so I would like to introduce a few mechanics to help the player build back up quickly and keep progressing.

Audience and competitive analysis

The target audience of the project lies somewhere in between competitive and casual players, closer to the casual side. The project will not require long game sessions and the penalty for playing badly will not be too great but it will require some thought to achieve optimal results and it will grant the player lots of freedom of choice.

Other games with similar audiences would consist mostly of phone games (like clash of clans and clash royale) and some rare side view strategies like Craft the World and Fallout Shelter. I think the popularity of those games will help my product since most of them are quite old and people would welcome the new game in an under-developed area of side view strategies.

Game treatment

GAMEPLAY/BACKSTORY:

The game takes place in a generic medieval fantasy world with magic, heroes, and monsters. Monsters appear and bother people and heroes fight them. An evil being/spirit (player) appears and wants to create an evil empire for the betterment of the monsters and the monsters join them.

The gameplay will largely resemble Fallout Shelter with a few changes in specific mechanics. The player’s hideout is inside a mountain. The player can build any of the rooms from the selection provided. Different rooms serve different purposes, some generate resources, like mines , other do specific functions for the hideout. Several monsters can be placed in a room, and the room will generate resources based on combined stats of the monsters in the room.

The player will have 3 resources to manage: stone, food, and energy. Stone will be used to create new rooms or upgrade them. Food will be used to keep the monsters alive and upgrade them. Energy will be used to create new monsters. Random monsters can also stumble upon the player’s hideout and that way the player will be able to recruit monsters without using energy. The goal of the game is to use your resources as efficient as possible to build a hideout as big as possible.

BASIC VERSION:

In the basic version I want the game to work like fallout shelter but with a few major changes in game mechanics and a considerable downgrade in the way the game looks. The main mechanics that will be changed are: the expeditions (when a dweller leaves to the outside world to gather resources), the raids (when the shelter is raided from the outside) and the upgrade system.

The idea of expeditions will be expanded upon. First thing that will be different about the expeditions will be their risk and their necessity. In Fallout Shelter the expeditions are a reliable source of resources. Even though there is some randomness to it, the expedition difficulty and possible rewards are generally predictable by how long the dweller was outside.

To make expeditions more true to my setting I will make expeditions much more dangerous and a bit more random because monsters are slain all the time and you’d have to be a pretty strong monster to survive even a few encounters with heroes. This will encourage shorter expedition time or even no expeditions at all. To prevent the player from not sending out monsters at all I am planning to make the expeditions a necessity since monsters won’t be able to make food by themselves (or perhaps they won’t be able to make enough). However, I will also make expeditions a bit easier for the player by being able to send out multiple monsters in a squad to increase their survivability.

The next major game mechanic that will be changed is raids. Being raided in Fallout Shelter is the only thing that promotes expeditions as you need weapons and suits to successfully deflect an attack. As long as you do some expeditions and your shelter generates some med kits, raids are not very dangerous (and they’re not meant to be). There is only one room (right at the door) in which you can assign guards and even that is generally overkill as raids don’t happen often.

In fantasy setting if heroes decide to raid a monster hideous usually the heroes go in and only the heroes go out. The raids will be much more dangerous and will go as far as eradicating most of the shelter. They will also be very hard to stop as heroes are stronger than monsters. However, the player may not like all their hard work being destroyed by some heroes (even though, that would be true villain experience) so there will be a few game mechanics to preserve most of the progress.

The first, and most important, game mechanic would be to make it so they player can’t really lose unless they give up. Second game mechanic that I would like to introduce would be necromancy so that the player can revive a certain number of their followers after the raid. Another mechanic would be to have “hidden rooms”, which are rooms where the player can hide some number of their followers so that the heroes can’t kill them, but they also cannot help in defending the hideout. The last mechanic would be to make the recruitment of monsters to be much easier/quicker, so the player can allow themselves to lose quite a few of them.

The last mechanic that will be changed is how the upgrading system works. In Fallout Shelter each of the dwellers has their own stats that determine how good they are at a given task. Their stats can be permanently upgraded in special rooms, or they can be buffed by suits as long as they’re wearing the suit. Dwellers can also bear different weapons to increase their damage output.

Monsters are too diverse to wear suits/bear weapons so I plan to cut out that functionality. As for their stats, their basic stats would be determined by their class. For example, orks would generally have higher than average strength and endurance but lower intelligence. The only way to upgrade the stats will be to level your monsters up. One of the ways to speed up the leveling process will be to feed the monster. Each monster will have a hunger scale and they will consume food. You can manually feed any of the monsters and if they are full all of the food you give them will be converted to experience. Monsters will also get experience during arbitrary tasks like working in rooms, going on expeditions and fighting heroes (assuming they survive). The monster will stop levelling up once 3 of their stats reach maximum level (so you cannot make an academic ork).

ADVANCED FEATURES:

• Day/night cycle: expeditions are safer during night
• Fame: excessive expeditions raise fame which leads to more frequent/harder raids
• Player being able to physically walk around/fight heroes