Idle Misadventures
Idle Misadventures from Jason Woerner
Idle Misadventures

This is the largest of my personal projects, an idle/management game with an RPG theme.

In this game, the player manages a small group of heroes who are sent out to different areas to fight monsters.
The battles are reminiscent of turn-based RPGs, but combat actions are controlled by an AI priority system. When the heroes are defeated or their bags are full of loot, they will return to town to sell and heal up before returning to the killing fields. This constitutes the core idle loop.

Heroes cannot be sent blindly into higher level areas, however. As they advance, the player must observe combats against the new creatures to determine how best to set their abilities and equipment to defeat the new foes.

The game has been through 2 external alpha tests, and is currently in beta testing.

The current title screen, complete with masterful hand-drawn stick figure silhouettes!
The core scene through which the player manages their party of heroes. Please note that my art lags well behind my design and programming skills, so you’ll see several conflicting styles and poorly drawn stick figures throughout this project.
Players are able to purchase weapon and armor upgrades here, and equip anything their heroes may have found in the field. While UI programming is not my main focus, I’ve done my best to give ample feedback to players in these busy scenes. Dragging equipment over eligible slots will highlight them, selling items produces small floating texts denoting the sales value, and additional information on items is available in tooltips as you hover the mouse on them.
In conjunction with choosing equipment with specific stats, the player can customize their heroes through a series of active and passive abilities. The abilities are earned at different levels, expanding player choice as the game progresses. Enemy areas are designed in such a way as to emphasize the need for different abilities in different areas. This allows the player to strategize, and keeps them engaged in the ever-changing game.
Please excuse the busy layout - there’s a lot going on here, and the setup is mostly unchanged from its prototype layout. That said, I’ve been very careful to keep the data and graphical layers decoupled, so as art elements change it does not break the gameplay. This particular scene is not interactive, as an AI controls the combat. The player can mouse over characters, abilities, and effects to get more information on them, to determine how best to set up their party when they return to town.
The prestige mechanic involves sacrificing your max level heroes to the volcano to gain a ‘souls’ currency. This restarts the game, but allows the player to purchase powerful upgrades that will speed up additional runs. Souls may also be used to unlock new areas and hero classes, further expanding the gameplay.

I was especially pleased with the effects I was able to add to this scene (camera shake and soul-sucking particle effect as the hero gems are dragged near the sacrifice slots), hence the video instead of a screen cap.
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Idle Misadventures

This is the largest of my personal projects, an idle/management game with an RPG theme.

In this game, the player manages a small group of heroes who are sent out to different areas to fight monsters.
The battles are reminiscent of turn-based RPGs, but combat actions are controlled by an AI priority system. When the heroes are defeated or their bags are full of loot, they will return to town to sell and heal up before returning to the killing fields. This constitutes the core idle loop.

Heroes cannot be sent blindly into higher level areas, however. As they advance, the player must observe combats against the new creatures to determine how best to set their abilities and equipment to defeat the new foes.

The game has been through 2 external alpha tests, and is currently in beta testing.

Available
Full-time
Jason Woerner
Senior Systems Designer San Diego, CA