February Developer Report

Dear Dwelvers community,

This month I have been working on something extra. It wasn't my original plan but when it came to me I just had to pursue it.

So what is going on here? Do we have more than one Dark Mother in the picture? Yes we do :D

Computer Dark Mothers

Since the first time I started developing Dwelvers I always had the design in my mind that more than one player should be able to play the game at once, either it be in multiplayer, shared screen or just a computer player. Even if this was a long time ago and nothing I have prioritized during the 10 years of development I've always kept the original design intact. So when I tested to just add another computer player in the world another Dark Mother came forward!

Telling them apart

Before I even wanted to go into all the bugs the new Dark Mother took with her into the underground, I first needed to be able to seperate the Wardens with all their creatures apart. So now we have rooms with green or red room flags depending on which player the Dark Mother belongs to.

And the creatures needed to be color coded as well.

Together with the roads.

And a very green Dark Mother!

(Perhaps too green??)

New Gameplay

This opens up for a whole new campaign with the player fighting against, or cooperating with other Dark Mothers.

Scenarios that comes to my mind are the following:

• Player fighting against other Dark Mothers.

• Player fighting against other Dark Mothers and Humans (that are cooperating).

• Player cooperating with other Dark Mothers to fight other Dark Mothers or Humans.

• Player rescuing other Dark Mothers from humans.

• And so on..

I also have this idea that if a Dark Mother is killed she will spew out her heart and her creatures will become neutral, and whatever imp takes the heart and feed it to their Dark Mother, gets the killed Dark Mothers' creatures. This could add a lot of tactics to the game play!

If you have more game play ideas please let me know here: Multiple Dark Mother's gameplay suggestions

In the far future

This also takes the first steps towards actually being able to play the game in multiplayer! First I need to add supports for gamepads (which also increases the Steam Deck support), and once that is done we could have split screen multiplayer!

What is left to do?

It went surprisingly well adding another Dark Mother to the dungeon, there weren't many bugs and most of them are already fixed! I bugtest by switching between players and make them build bases and fight against each other. Once all the bugs are fixed I will start working on the computer players AI, and I am not sure how long this will take because there will probably be a lot of tweaking and bugtesting.

I want computer played Dark Mothers to have different "personalities", like if they prefer to defend or attack and also how efficient they are at building up dungeons.

With that said, my mind is bubbling with inspiration right now, and I can see that this is very feasible to add into the game without it taking to long time to develop!

Thank you all for your support and I will see you soon again :)

Sincerely,

Rasmus Ljunggren (The only developer of Dwelvers)