Project Overview

In the original pitch, the objective was to take the stresses, afflictions, and overall mental systems of Darkest Dungeon and incorporate it into a real-time tactics game, such as Commandos, to showcase the stresses and horrors of war. This would be accomplished by having 4 mental stats (fear, delusion, despair, & stress) that would apply temporary negative effects, permanent debuffs, and permanent buffs to the player when a unit became overwhelmed by that emotion. The final key to the mental system at this point was how it played into the moment-to-moment combat. In this iteration, each mental stat had a unique trigger that would cause a unit's mental state to devolve.

 

All of this was intended to reward players for strategically placing their units and managing resources well & to give a clear indicator to the player on what areas of play they need to focus on. For example, units gained fear as they got closer to an enemy and gained despair as their squad's health decreased.

 

In this version of the game, the player would control 5 units that each had their own mental strengths and weaknesses but other than these mental resistances, each unit was functionally the same as the others. This meant that the player was able to focus more on the mental system and decide which unit was best suited for the given situation. 

Once the pitch was approved and the teams were established, our first priority was to get together as a team and give our inputs on the original pitch to determine what mechanics and features we intended to move forward with. We ended up deciding to remove one of the mental effects (stress) and reduce the unit count to 4, and removing the emphasis on each unit's mental resistances in the name of simplifying the number of decisions that the player would need to make at any given moment.

 

We also each unit should have a unique skill that had clear applicable use cases to give the player reasons to prioritize units and give more importance to the mental system as a whole.

At this stage of development, we were ready to start playtesting and getting feedback from our peers on the design. One of the very first things we noticed in both internal and external playtests was the amount of difficulty in both explaining and managing the mental system. Players were often confused on what each of the bars above a unit meant as well as why units would randomly gain buffs, debuffs, or in the worst-case scenario run away. At this point, we realized that one of the inherent disadvantages of converting a turn-based mechanic such as the mental system of Darkest dungeon to a real-time game was that players had less time to think about each individual action and the consequences that their decisions had on their playthrough. Once we acknowledged that tracking so many variables at once was proving to be a significant challenge to the majority of players, we decided that it would be best to simplify the system instead of revising the entire gameplay structure to accommodate the current system. 

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The very first thing that we changed when redesigning the mental system was to reduce the number of variables that players would need to track at any given moment. Instead of having 3 mental stats that the player would need to manage and maneuver around, we reduced all of the stats into a single mental stat called Courage. Courage was a mental stat that was primarily increased once enemies got too close to a unit but were also affected to a lesser degree by other factors such as the death of a comrade. A unit's courage also decreased at a significantly slower rate than the previous mental stats so that the player would be punished less for making mistakes.

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The next change that we made was to simplify the effects that the mental system had. At this point, we felt that there was too much randomness in the system and that was causing significant trouble for the playtesters and hindering the experience. First, we decided that although the idea of overcoming your flaws to become stronger was a narrative that we wanted to continue with, we realized that from a gameplay experience it was contradicting what we were trying to accomplish with the mental system. Since the core purpose of the system was to alert the player to areas where they were struggling and punish them for poor play, we decided that buffing the player did not fit the vision. 

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Once we made these changes we

Finally, after evaluating the game and the revised systems, we felt that the game did very little to offer a bombastic experience that would blow players away. To combat this, we decided to focus on revamping the combat and adding more diversity to the units. We decided on this approach because we wanted to give more importance to each of the units and restore some of the meaningful decisions that the players were making moment-to-moment. In the earliest iterations, the majority of the decision-making came from the player's interactions with the mental system, however, due to the changes made to the system, we felt that the player was not able to make as many strategic decisions as originally intended. By revising each unit and the roles that they played, we were able to solve this issue and other balance-related issues as well. 

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The primary change that we made at this stage was to give each unit their own unique weapon that was tailored to the different enemy types that we had in the game. For example, the orange unit had a gun that would deal low amounts of damage but would push the enemy back. This not only prevented melee enemies from reaching the player and damaging important units but would also force enemies to keep their distance which helped the team maintain their courage. We believe that by making each unit serve a significant yet unique role in combat, players would play more strategically and cautiously as losing a unit would cause their strategy to change drastically.