Here's some of the stuff I'm thinking of to keep Rise 2 a smaller project, but still make it involving and interesting:
- Obviously, a whole lot more heroes. If I can get 200 in there, so much the better! But the goal is a minimum of 100. They're fairly easy to make, but I want them to be unique too, which complicates it. It'd be boring if 10 of them were Archie at 10 levels of power.
- The original vision of the game doesn't involve all this wacky cloning. Rather, you can have one of every hero. Once you've bought one, he won't show up in the inn anymore. After all, these people are unique individuals! That of course is what necessitates such a huge number of heroes.
- On the other hand, I also want to include a second game mode, Clone Mode or something. In this mode, you hand-pick 8 heroes from the entire collection, and your inn is permanently stocked with those 8 heroes all the time. You can of course buy more than one of the same in this mode! So this mode is like a collectible card game - build a deck and see how well it works.
- Haven't decided exactly how this should be, but I originally wanted a skill tree of sorts. So you might lay down lots of archers, planning to invest points into skills that improve arrows. That sort of thing. The skills would be general upgrades to all your units, or certain types of units. Something that would be fun, but probably wouldn't make it in, would be to add special powers in there. So for example once every 60 seconds you could click on an icon to make it snow, keeping all enemies frozen for 10 seconds.
- Lots of little achievements to complete, to give you more of a goal than just finishing the game.
As for game modes, I thought there'd be a few different 'quests', which would be sets of levels. Some real easy short ones, some long and crazy ones, and then of course, you can't leave out Survival mode that never ends.
Here's a really fun idea I had that definitely isn't going in, but would be an awesome sequel (Rise 3: The Leavening). You pick 3 heroes, and they go on an adventure. They function exactly as they do in the game normally (same ranges and all that), except that they move to wherever you click, in a sidescrolling world. They kind of run in a line, one following the other. That just sounds pretty awesome to me. You'd have to decide if you want a Jessie in the middle to make your other guys powerful, or if you are better off with a 3rd person dishing out damage. Oh, and of course, you just start with Archie, and you get money by killing monsters which you use to buy better heroes and add to your party until it's 3 people, then swap guys out until it's the mighty force you've always dreamed of.
So, guess I better learn actionscript!
