What if Orpheus' descent to the Underworld was done by redditors?
The Game
Down We Go is a cooperative dungeon exploration game specifically created with Reddit in mind. Each run exposes parts of the map, every death creates a post, and every post becomes a starting point for new runs.
The Lore
The game is set in my own reimagining of Filipino folklore. Everyone is playing as the same character seeking an audience with the goddess of death, Sidapa. Time behaves differently in her domain and, despite being the goddess of death, she merely oversees it and does not kill. Together, these rules trap the main character in a seemingly inescapable loop.
As a community, everyone is working towards a shared goal and every run contributes to that goal, no matter how small. Each contribution builds towards community-wide buffs which, in turn, make future runs last longer leading to a snowball effect that everyone helped build and everyone benefits from.
Narrative players come back to find new things the community has found while they were gone. Competitive players come back to protect their place in the leaderboard and name more things after themselves. Community cooperation is an emergent result that also propels everyone forward. The hook is all three sets of features working together.
- A single run takes about a minute.
- Each run results in a new post and each post allows players to start where the previous run ended.
- Each post also gives valuable information: which areas were already explored, where traps are, and where buffs can be found.
- As players explore, the whole community gains rewards:
- Temporary HP per floor for everyone after reaching floor exploration thresholds.
- Permanent max HP for everyone after floor completion and exploration.
- Aside from posts, there are in-game user-attributed or user-generated content:
- Finding the stairs to the next floor gives naming rights to that player.
- Interacting with certain game features first marks them as "discovered" by that player.
- A trap warning system that shows players where the previous run's traps were.
- A note system that allows players to leave messages or warnings for other players.
- While cooperation is the main focus, competitive aspects are also available:
- Floor leaderboards ranking each player's contribution to exploration.
- In-game per-floor and global run leaderboards.
Phaser
Phaser is used to bring the idea of Sidapa's realm to life.
- Each floor is a procedurally generated ASCII-style map. Phaser handles the rendering of the tile-based map the game actually shows the player.
- The initial floors are small but as players go deeper, floors grow in size.
- Dynamic fog-of-war covers the whole map. It retreats as players explore the dungeon.
Phaser also powers each Reddit post to show an animated preview of the run. Each post contains a full Phaser scene and uses the same assets used in-game. This enables the core idea of each post giving valuable information to players before even starting the game.
Another key feature Phaser enables is the firefly warning system. Those are the circling particles that show traps triggered by the previous run. It is a cooperative and narrative feature core to the game.
Future
"Down We Go" is made exclusively for the hackathon but its lore is part of a larger, on-going project about promoting Filipino folklore. The current version is a very focused slice of the planned game to both showcase the main idea and fit with the hackathon's schedule.
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