Hoplite
This is a great mobile game (iOS, Android) made by Douglas Cowley, his website is called Magma Fortress.
It's a hex based roguelike where you have to defeat demons in various levels of tartarus until you reach the 16th depth, where the golden fleece is waiting to be swiped and taken home via a handy portal. The core gameplay is very similar to chess - the movements and attacks of the demons are preictable but complex, and you have a variety of abilities to call upon to fight your way through, each with very precise results when used.
Like all games made for the creator (as Douglas states in his AppStore blurb) the quality of execution is very high, including all those additional small but great features that are usually left out of most games.
It's $4.49 USD on iOS (not sure on Android) and if you like roguelikes, strategy or well made games then I highly recommend it.
The Depths
As you play, you can pray at altars to earn augments like extra health, slightly better attacks and so on. And once you master the basic gameplay you soon realise there are a lot of hidden abilities to be unlocked by completing achievements.
These are skill type achievements, like completing the main quest without killing any wizards or without taking a single hit. The new abilities unlocked give you even more ways to play the game, my favourite being a wizard beam that allows you to throw a stream of fireballs instead of your trusty spear.
More Quests?
The basic format is a hexgrid with an exit, populated by a variety of 4 different types of demons. Each depth has more demons than the last and (in the first few floors) greater variety.
On floor 16 you grab the fleece. You can then either keep going deeper (earning an achievement for reaching depth 31) or just go through the portal and win the game.
I kept on thinking of the old classic animatronic films like Jason and the Argonauts and how they provided great inspiration for using the main quest's template to think up some new quests.
So as a games design exercise I decided to do just that, the greek myths I'd loved as a kid providing the inspiration.
Player
Level
Demons
The Rules
These are the rules I applied to myself for inventing additional quests. This is necessary for me to get the old creative juices flowing - its much easier for me to invent solutions for problems than just think of random stuff that could be cool in a vacuum.
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4 completely new demons
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Each with a unique ability
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Not to share anything from other demons
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A new treasure to find
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With a new magic ability (not regeneration)
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A new player type
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Can share some but not all core abilities with the Hoplite player (leap, sword, spear, lunge)
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Additional abilities from altars aren't limited, as long as they fit the character
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A new type of 'special' tile to act as the randomly placed terrain
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Original quest uses lava
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Graphics?
All the images (and video) above are stolen from game screenshots and Magma Fortress. I decided to do some new ones for these extra quests - this is in no way meant to disparage the work of Douglas Cowley or ShroomArts (Gurkan Te) - I just wanted to do some pixels as a homage to the orginals and to ground the ideas I was writing down.
So I hit play on the Hotline Miami 2 OST and got cracking. The results aren't great, but then again I did them in an afternoon and I'm more of a designer than an artist. I found that I added too many graduations of shade at this resolution of pixel art as well, so it's good to learn that.
Quest for the Hydra's Head
This takes place in a tropical swamp, plagued by deadly reptiles, vicious insects and the Children of the Hydra's Teeth (skeletal warriors). At its heart lies an artefact of great power, cut from the mythical hydra itself and mummified with dark magics.
Level Elements
Manky green swamp bisected by waterways, both deep and shallow. Water here is very important, the murky nature of the environment able to inhibit the players abilities and vision. While in shallow water, the player cannot leap. Deep water cannot be moved into and anything that is shoved into it dies. Some Demons have special rules in relation to the two types of water tiles, which is covered in their descriptions below.
Binned Ideas
I was playing around with the idea of including two other types of tile to make the environment more complex to navigate.
Causeway
Shallow Water; Current
The walkway would serve as a bridge to cross water of both types, and as a way to spot those pesky Cobra Demons. The current tiles would push any Player within them in their specified direction at the end of each turn, but only 1 space (even if this was into another current tile). While I thought both of these would provide an interesting slant to the levels, they would also require a more complex procedural generation in order to be coherent.
I finally decided against including them since it's a barran swamp, not a harbour or pier. Maybe those could be included in another quest - though, something based around the Collosus and Sirens.
Ground
Bole
(to next Depth)
Altar
Portal
Shallow Water
Deep Water
Demons
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Basilisk
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Incredibly venemous lizard
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Poisons any tile it moves from
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If the player steps on a poisoned tile then they receive 1 damage and the poison is removed
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Poison tiles do not affect enemies
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Water Tiles cannot be poisoned
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Poison tiles vanish after 2 turns
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Spitting Cobra
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A hooded serpent that is undetectable in shallow waters (invisible)
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It cannot enter deep water
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If not in water, it can spit venom as a projectile at nearby targets in 6 directions, up to three tiles away
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Melissa
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Giant mutated bee able to flick stingers at the player
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Stingers can travel up to 5 tiles, but only in 6 directions
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Stinger cannot be fired at adjacent targets
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Can move over waterways unhindered
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Skeletal Warrior
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Skeletal warrior armed with a spear
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If killed, it becomes a pile of bones which ressurect after 2 turns
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Resurrection progress can be seen graphically
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The pile of bones is destroyed if anything steps on the tile it inhabits
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Crushing attacks also destroy the pile of bones before it can even form
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Player
A temple dancer on the quest to recover the diamond tooth. She is more agile than the Hoplite, but less offensive. Lacking a spear, she has two long knives and has to fall back on the acrobatic abilities of a dancer. Unlike the Hoplite, she does not have a ranged attack.
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Somersault
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Works the same as they Hoplite's leap with the difference that it can leap up to 3 tiles without praying at an altar
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Costs energy to use
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Cannot leap from shallow water tiles
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Slashing Blades
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Moving past enemies kills them (like the Hoplite's sword)
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Killing an enemy in this way grants +1 action
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Maximum 1 extra action per turn, unless enhanced by prayer
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Poised Pose
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Dancer goes into a stance
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If attacked during the Demon's turn, will dodge to a nearby empty tile
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Cannot dodge if there are no empty tiles
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Sucessfully Dodging recovers Energy
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The player cannot control the direction of the dodge, but it will always go to the least densely populated area
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Can only dodge once per turn, but this can be augmented by praying at altars
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Dazzling Dance
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The dancer performs a rapid display of moves that confuse the eye
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Stuns all adjacent Demons
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Has a cooldown before it can be used again
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Also eliminates any Poison or bone piles from these Tiles
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If enhanced with prayer, reaches further
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Treasure
The Hydra's Head has the same basic mechanics as the fleece - the player has to pick it up on depth 16 in order to continue, or escape. However, while the Fleece restores 1 health per depth passed after that, the Head is less benevolent. It has a kill counter which starts at full(3). Each turn that the player kills a Demon this increases by 1, but not past the maximum.
Each turn that the player does not kill a demon, it decreases by 1. If it is already empty then it instead does 1 damage to the player.
If the player makes a kill with the Head's kill counter completely filled then all adjacent Demons are immediately killed by fire.
Upon moving to a new depth, the player has all their lost health completely restored.
Conclusion
This would all need a lot of playtesting to make sure the feel is right and doesn't stray too far from the original's tactical elegance. While I think there is enough variety in the enemy balance to provide engaging gameplay, maybe it would prove too exotic compared to the original.
Summing Up
I can see this kind of format working as a premium DLC download to the original - a few $ and you get a new quest with all the new rules, achievements and extras within it.
The goal of not diverging too much from the core game design would be to allow the varied player characters to be unlockables within the other quests - so you could take your Hoplite rampaging through the new quests once you unlocked his use there, or any of the new player characters in the other ones.
As to 'other' quests, I have a few in mind;
The Halls of Minos
Based around the tale of the Minotaur. The enemies would be minotaurs that would charge like a living projectile and some kind of leaping spider (in a nod to Ariadne). Maybe a lower level beast man as well. Levels would have two types of obstacle - webs that make a player or demon miss a turn if entered and rock walls which would block line of sight, but be crushable by the minotaur charges.
It might be interesting to play with the idea of darkness as a mechanic here, the player character for this quest able to drop torches. Beyond their LOS / the torches, fog of war would blot out potential threats.
Call of the Siren
As hinted at above, this would be based on an extremely limited movement environment, most of it deadly. I'm thinking of a ruined temple shore with multiple ships smashed against it. Demons would be sparse, and based on limiting or affecting the player choices. Initially there would be Sirens who automatically pull the player towards them if within range and colassi who are your basic bruiser or Footman type. A type of storm or tempest demon that teleported around the water areas might be fun. The tile to get to the next Depth would be a small rowboat.
Evening Star
Unlike the other Quests, this would feature the return from a trip to Hades as the goal rather than a maguffin. The ancient Grecian idea of hell was rich with ideas not known in other concepts. The damned weren't actually punished, apart from the more famous ones condemned by the gods. Instead they were condemned to be blinded by the half-light filtering from above and locked in eternal want. This could make a very interesting mechanic whereby the principal enemy never actively attacks the player, but the player is free to attack them. This horde of the damned would just advance towards the player continually, and if they are ever completely blocked from moving then they are killed.
And others are there lurking beneath the id - Grecian mythology is perfect for games development with the stark reality of its tales.