BellHop StudiosReception devlog · Part 2 of 6
Becoming Reception
After a quiet August, five days turned Dungeon Runners into Reception.
A name and a place
On 30 August the game became Reception, and with the name came its central idea: you only ever see what the party can see. You aren't a god looking down at a dungeon. You work the front desk of a guild, sending heroes out and hearing what happened when they come back.
The guild got painted art, inside and out: Abel asleep at the desk, and backdrops for Drift and Duce, the receptionists you'd get to know.
The rules that stuck
- Receptionists talk back. A dialogue box with a portrait and a line, so the desk reacts to you.
- Rarity means room. A hero's ability slots match their rarity: Common 1, Rare 2, SR 3, SSR 4.
- Classes with identities. Warriors scale on ATK and shields on DEF, hunters aim at the back rank, and mages splash and chain.
- Ways out. Escape and Evacuate, retreat abilities that end a fight or walk the party out, at a cost in haul.
- Armour weights. Light, Medium and Heavy gear by class, with class-locked SSR sets.
- Fog of war. Unseen, remembered and visible tiles, from the leader's sight. You only see your own fights.
- Coming home. A welcome-back report at Abel's desk, and a red defeat screen with a loss tally and a ledger of lost treasure.
- Treasure as haul. What a party carries is capped by pack space, and full packs roll chests one rarity higher.
- Assignments. Easy, Medium and Hard goals for each run, 120 monsters per map, and every beaten group pays treasure.
Prototype to product
31 August was also the first big clean-out. Developer readouts came out of the player's view after we realised a new player would have landed on a debug console. A dungeon switcher nobody had asked for was removed. Gear stopped being locked by class except at SSR, and coin wording changed to "treasure" and "haul", because there wasn't a currency yet.
Not everything worked. We spent three days on a sprite pipeline with a Hero Sprite Standard and sheet reviews, and ended it when the sheets turned out to be unusable for animation. Heroes are portraits to this day.