Incremental games are about a lot of things, but the genre name itself implies upgrades. And Dungeoning has a ridiculous, dumb amount of it baked in.

One of the things we fooled around with a ton at the beginning of design is what feels satisfying about the upgrading of loot. I love loot– I love finding it, I love seeing what it can do for my characters and I love upgrading it.

Since Dungeoning is an idle game love letter to all things RPG, we knew it needed a Forge. But it’s an idle game… so we threw out recipes, super-complicated combinations and a bunch of mechanics requiring tons of thinking (but don’t worry, there’s a decent amount of thinking in the game still).

We happened upon our version of a Forge while trying to figure out how to inject loot rarities into the game. They drop as drops (of course they do), but obtaining the right combinations of loot to upgrade your gear was becoming slow. So we tried this:

You put whatever gear you want to up-rarify (is that a word?) onto the anvil. And no, this isn’t the art for the game– this is a Humble Bundle asset pack we bought to prototype– so don’t make fun of the anvil. Drop 4 more of anything that has the same Rarity and BOOM– you upgraded your rarity from:

Common (gray) to

Uncommon (green) to

Rare (blue) to

Epic (purple) to

Legendary (gold) to

INCONCEIVABLE (red).

These Rarities have a simple increase in effectiveness (stats) until Epic, which adds a new stat. Legendary does as well, and then you’ve got RED. We’ll get into what to expect from red later…

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Secret Passage: 91b