Getting better

My kobold may not be perfect, but as you can see in this picture, it's getting steadily better. I'm noticing now that the head shape really doesn't match up with what Tom drew yet, and of course the kobold's body and parts are all just flat colours, without any of the fur or other interesting textural details that'll make them really pop. And the feet are still just blocks, and the pot belly still just ain't right. But aside from all that, I think I'm doing pretty darn well so far. I'll probably just make the feet look like real feet and then stop with the model for now and go back to real gameplay stuff.

Thinking of gameplay, I remembered that in my last post about mechanics, I left out an important resource: prestige! (Or notoriety, I haven't quite made up my mind about which name is better.) The idea of prestige is that it represents how well known you are and, more importantly, how respected you are. Greater respect = more powerful monsters coming to work for you, and also more powerful heroes invading your dungeon...

There are a few ways to gain prestige. The simplest, though least effective, is to make your dungeon bigger. Having a dungeon with multiple floors grants you an additional bonus, because the deeper the dungeon, the more powerful the monsters you must have (or at least that's what everyone thinks). Killing heroes grants you prestige, but having heroes escape with lots of loot can increase your prestige even faster. On the other hand, having your monsters killed (albeit temporarily) earns you a bit of a reputation for being a poor leader, decreasing your prestige.

I'm also now trying to decide if I should gear the game towards infinite play (think SimCity) or limit it in some way where there are definite victory conditions (Civ). If I go with victory conditions of some sort, achieving a sufficiently astronomical prestige rating would be a pretty obvious victory condition, representing your influence becoming so great that even your enemies are forced to concede that you're unstoppable. I'd also need some other victory conditions... I think I'd prefer to stay away from the "highest score after X turns" that's the default of Civ, because that's kinda boring to me, but I'm not sure right now what else to use. Anyone have any ideas?