Whoa, I had no idea about that with WoW. Thanks for the context. And what do you mean about its downfall? I was under the impression it was still having tons of players. I must be out of the loop. Although I would not be surprised if the numbers were not near their peak -- how could anything stay like that so very long.
So upgrades come from your base that you upgrade after your run? What is the base piece? A space station? An armada? A star system? A planet?
Do you have to be destroyed for the next cycle, or can you retreat/withdraw?
Bear in mind that these particular aspects, some of them still need to survive the prototype gauntlet of the next week or so. But:
1. Your upgrades come from what you do during a run (this is certain).
2. SOME upgrades you will start with from your base based on successes in past runs (this is almost certain).
3. Your base is your mothership/starship/not-sure-the-name-yet larger vessel that you were traveling in, but which is now damaged. It's your Star Destroyer that you're trying to repair while you fly around in your Tie Fighter, to use an analogy. I'm not sure on our terminology yet, it wasn't important to me before now. This is certain.
4. The "dungeons" you go into are asteroids or other large ships involved in a war that doesn't concern you, but that is in the area. This is certain.
5. You'll probably have multiple dungeons to choose from in your home base area, with different rewards and difficulties associated with them. This is not certain, but extremely likely. So the difficulty of your run gets determined partly from this.
6. You almost certainly will not be able to exit a run once you start it. That would remove all tension in my opinion. What exactly you lose when you lose a run is not yet something I've decided. Most likely it will be "you don't progress, and you lose that particular run's seed."
7. If you complete a run, then that helps to repair your broken mothership-thing, which gets you closer to victory. This is certain, although it won't apply to all runs. Some runs will be easier ones that you take, knowing full well that you won't get a mothership piece out of it, but you need an easier run for some personal buffs to your tie fighter or whatever. This is highly likely, but not certain.
8. When you complete a run, some or all of your passive buffs will probably stay with you. Orbitals, consumables, special weapons, and upgraded weapons probably will not stay with you. The exact nature of all this is kind of fuzzy to me right now. I know how the upgrade system will work, but I'm unsure how much I want to let the player carry over between runs. Too much and the power creep starts to get crazy. And I want the runs to be sufficiently varied. Rogue Legacy had a pretty good system for this I thought, where you were making progress in your personal stats between runs but not in great bounding leaps. Something with that feel is probably what I'll go for, but the specifics there are not nailed down yet. I know how I want it to feel during a run, and how the mechanics work during a run, but I have not fully reconciled that yet with exactly what can carry over to outside of runs. At any rate, most likely whatever it is would either only carry over if you win the run, or only the best stuff would if you win the run, or something along those lines.
9. If you don't get destroyed, why don't you get to keep everything from your prior run? Good question, me. I'm not sure. Possibly we will let you keep everything, and the next run becomes kind of a continuation run -- a streak, so to speak. And then when you die you revert to the starting state, but plus some stats. We'd then have to creep the run difficulty for each streak you get through, but that might be fun in that it's like "going deeper" in a traditional roguelike sense, but instead you're going into progressively more challenging runs of roughly equal length. That might be exploitable, though. At any rate, this sort of question is tangential to the main gameplay and goals, which makes me oh so happy.
We can experiment with that some without having to go back to the drawing board on the prototype or something. I know how the in-run stuff works pretty completely, and that makes me happy.
