DevLog: Pokemon Shale - Mystery Dungeon meets Tower Defense
Writing up some background for a coming TTRPG zine, and centering it around joy.
Background
A friend of mine says he only gets his best ideas in the shower, and not just any shower, but a chaotic one. Music blasting, maybe flashing lights, maybe someone cackling behind the curtain. For me, though, showers work because they cut off outside stimuli and leave some safe room to think.
Lately I have been bouncing between teaching and planning a wedding. Neither has been overwhelming, and it’s all coming together quite nicely, but it helps to have a creative outlet on the side. Going back to layout design, something I loved messing with in past games, has been a steady outlet.
I have a central productive focus in my life, and one silly one. The idea arrived at the right inlet of a very busy time, and so I took that time to put it on paper.
The Game
Pokémon Shale places you in a dungeon just on the outskirts of Pinwheel Forest, after some unknown disaster. The caves are left scattered with Pokémon that have “come here to endure, nothing more”.
Your role as a Pokémon yourself, is to explore and map the rooms you uncover, build defenses, and recruit Pokémon to help grow a small community within the dungeon. Along the way, you can take on tasks from the floor’s pseudo-legendary Pokémon and uncover hidden secrets tied to the ruins and their formation.
Mechanically, every room you enter generates either a resource opportunity or a challenge, determined by pulling cards. Whatever you reveal gets physically drawn into your map, building the dungeon as you explore it.
You then use your stationed units to defend against invading Pokémon and, if you weaken them carefully enough, attempt to recruit them instead of defeating them outright.
The core structure is inspired by the tower defense system DELVE, but the mechanics have been heavily reworked. Pokémon units are more complex, with distinct abilities and scaling. The system is balanced around a central tension: lowering an enemy’s health enough to capture it without accidentally knocking it out, versus spending resources to recruit or purchase reliable combatants outright.
All while making it pretty.
Growth
My goals with this project are as followed:
Improve my layout design.
I want to apply feedback my fiancée has given me on past projects, advice I have enjoyed revisiting and thinking through. I need to get better at using line guides in Photopea and keeping layouts consistent across pages.
Making the pages look good while I continue developing the mechanics helps keep my drive going.
Experiment with a zine format.
I want to try something more eye catching and printable, using this project to explore what the zine format can do. I am proud of how polished my other games look, but this is a new printing medium for me and I want to learn how to present it well.
On that note, I will be applying to the UnPub mentorship program. Through TTRPG panels & various discords I have met several people involved with it, and I want to grow in how I approach presenting and marketing games. A friend had a great experience with his mentor, and while I am not trying to mass market this particular tabletop game, I do want to practice that side of design as I develop it.
Build meaningful mechanical stakes.
I want the game to rely not only on imagination like TCITC (An artifact worldbuilding system), but also on real tension through resource allocation. Balancing enemies, buildings, allies, and floor randomness is a design challenge for me.
My earlier project, BeHoRo, used a similar base system, but that project was more about creating a complete game within a month with minimal visuals.
…
Create strong replay value.
By drawing rooms and giving Pokémon meaningful mechanical differences, I want each run to feel distinct. I am especially interested in the appeal of roguelikes and Pokémon games, where abilities stack and builds evolve over the course of a run.
My life has come in waves of Pokémon obsession because of those addictive systems. As a kid, I would hand my Game Boy to my mom and ask her to help level my team. In high school I made homemade notebooks from loose paper and Pokémon cards, staying up too late organizing them and sometimes even sleepwalking or sleeptalking about them.
Later it meant running into friends around town when Pokémon Go first came out, that shared, vivid excitement of suddenly seeing everyone outside in the center of town. In college we were walking everywhere anyway, and the game returned again.
Now it has resurfaced in a different form through building this game.
Friends from high school and college, Connor Wiklund and Bartholomew Considine, have been my Pokémon experts and have helped a lot with the development of this project while challenging my mechanical choices.
Make original pixel art.
I am not primarily a visual artist, but I would like to create small pieces of pixel art along the way instead of relying entirely on public domain assets like I have in the past. I enjoyed integrating custom goblin art in The Goblin Thought, and I would like to build on that here.
I am also trying to write the buildings in a way that balances structure with creative freedom, so the drawings feel fun to make and have some diversity player-to-player.
Conclusion
While my more serious games get featured in Roman Classics archaeology classes, I still enjoy the odd Oddish.
Questions for the crowd:
Do you have any tips for mechanical balancing? Right now I am using a mix of Google Sheets averaging, Monte Carlo style simulations, and playtesting with iteration. I am also (over-)reminding myself of a line from the DELVE SRD:
However, as the focus is on creating an emergent narrative rather than a linear progression so don’t worry too much about getting values perfectly balanced.
What small details or larger arcs would bring you the most joy in a game like this?
Are there any games you think I should check out for inspiration?
Thank you for taking a look at the project. If you have thoughts on mechanics, balance, or games that might inspire it, I would really appreciate hearing them. We’re looking at another month or two of production, depending on outside plans, and possibly some expansions with more floors and story-lines later on.
Various artists from the PMD Sprite Collab will be credited in the final product.
It is so incredibly exciting to see something this cool come out of DELVE. I love the layout snippets you've shared and can't wait to see more :)
Best of luck with it and with the mentorship!