Hero collectors! The app store is chock full of free-to-play hero collectors with all kinds of star ranked heroes. Within a few sessions, you’re overrun by all these 1 and 2 star heroes that are basically useless compared to those shiny paid 5 star heroes. Our game sets out to do something about that.
At first, it's a hero collector game like most others where you're randomly getting heroes to join your squad. You can send them out on quests and they return with money and items based on their type/level/power.
The main gameplay is that you're not using/controlling the heroes, you’re the quest master sending the heroes off on missions and into dungeons and they return on their own. But you’re not just the quest master, you’re actually the used car salesman of the quest guild. Your goal is to pawn your unwanted heroes off to other players by selling the heroes’ contracts. You're Monkey Island's Stan but for heroes.
WARNING: You are buying CONTRACTS, not actual people. Do NOT make this seem like slavery.
Heroes are expensive to house, feed, and gear up so you only want a crew of the best heroes. The upkeep on a 1 star hero isn’t worth it compared to how little they bring back from adventuring. But heck, even a 5 star hero wears down over time and just isn’t bringing home the gems like they used to.
I think it would be really fun to have there be a completely separate second app that is the run of the mill hero collector RPG and the people playing that have no idea they’re buying heroes from you playing the guild master app. But we can get enough gameplay loops around the contract trade to keep it within one app.
Because even the sleaziest of salesmen has to stay within the law. Heroes come with a Lemon Law so you can’t misrepresent them and if they die off in their first dungeon, the team hiring them gets compensation and your reputation as a seller gets a penalty. The Lemon Law only applies to hero contract trades, not new heroes from paid loot boxes though. This can become a gameplay loop on its own so we still let players TRY to get by on selling Lemon contracts. Can you spot heroes that are Lemons, pick them up, and use this to take down other salesmen to tank their ratings?
And to really sweeten the deal, traded heroes start with a boost to fame so they’re extra useful for their first few quests. Like a 1 star hero might return with goods worthy of a 3 star hero while they’re still the hot new thing in the tavern. They have to be special to have somebody buy their contract.
Game flow:
Get a hero from a loot box.
If they're worse than what you have- Sell the new one’s contract right away. Get them on the market while they’re still in peak form.
If they're better than what you have- Sell off your old hero contracts while using your new hero until they get worn out and start to weaken, and then start using the money from contract sales and adventuring to buy more loot boxes.
Use your adventuring gains to upgrade your shop, get better heroes possible heroes from loot boxes, upgrade your hero facilities so they stay in good condition for longer, and upgrade the guild so you can send heroes on bigger adventures.
Moving to a new map with better payouts requires you complete enough big quests to get notoriety and spend a ton of money to travel and set up a new shop. You’ll also need to be in good standing. Nobody wants a guild with penalties and bad vibes in their town.
So that game is pretty great on its own and actually does something interesting with the hero collector genre, but then I had a note for myself on the pitch. What if players do want to go on quests themselves and do the adventuring? How can we keep the core of the idea but change it to something where you’re more directly involved. How? The answer: Cannibalism.
Your character is no longer just the used car salesman, you’re the sinister demon lord disguised as the helpful guild master.
Instead of selling hero contracts, you're deciding when to eat them to make yourself stronger. Eating the adventurer is how you power yourself up, but you still want a team of heroes to send out on quests because they’re stronger than you and you want to put them in harm’s way and not yourself. Wait too long and they're not worth as much lifeforce when you eat them because they’re worn out. Try to eat heroes that are too high ranked right away and you’ll find they put up a fight and have a chance to hurt you and set you back on your quest to upgrade, so even if you don’t need that 4 star hero, you may need to rough them up a bit on a quest they can just barely survive so they’re tired when you decide it’s dinner time.