Magic touch: Dream Quest’s next update features input from Richard Garfield

Ever notice that the Air Elemental looks like Mr Glitch from Math Man?

Veteran readers will recall this site’s torrid affair with Dream Quest, a goofily psychedelic and artistically unambitious iOS morsel that just happens to offer some of freshest and most interesting gameplay in memory. I don’t mean to suggest that this affair is over. Oh no.

Months after release Dream Quest still occupies an exalted place on my devices (protected from The Great iOS 8 Update Memory Clear-out of ’14) and is regularly fired up for another couple of runs. The unique combination of deck-building and roguelike is exquisite, and there’s so many cards, enemies, and character classes to learn. It’s a game you could spend months… years mastering.

We’re not the only ones enraptured by Peter Whalen’s gem: Dream Quest’s fans include Richard Garfield, the creator of Magic: The Gathering, Android Netrunner and a giant catalog of other great games.

“He actually sent me a very nice e-mail,” Whalen told me this morning. “Apparently he’s been really enjoying the game and even mentions it on his Facebook page. We’ve talked a bit and he had a lot of valuable feedback. Getting a chance to meet him and talk about design has definitely been one of the high points of my (fledgling) career in games.”

So what’s in this update, and what did one of the most legendary living game designers contribute to it?

Whalen has incorporated a lot of that feedback into an update that’s just been submitted to Apple for approval. The patch includes bug fixes and balance tweaks, but also two big new features.

The first new feature is selectable difficulty levels. “There are now three difficulties available, ” Whalen tells us, “kitten, grizzly bear, and velociraptor. Velociraptor is the difficulty we all know and love. Grizzly bear is slightly easier; you start with some small bonuses and the world is a little more forgiving, but you don’t have access to the final boss. Kitten runs don’t earn achievements but are much easier in pretty much every way — the levels are more generous, your starting deck is better, and you have some other little bonuses.”

The other feature is even more exciting for DQ obsessives: seeded play. This bit is where Richard Garfield comes in. “[Garfield] wanted to try runs in which he’d failed over again to get them right and then share them with his friends,” says Whalen.

“Whenever you play a game, a 20 character code is generated that records basically everything about the run (difficulty, the monsters, the layout, the class you played, the cards you had unlocked, the level-up bonuses you were offered, and so on). You can look at your old runs in your history tab on the main menu, replay them by tapping on them, or enter a code either from one of your runs, from a friend, or from the internet to play a particularly cool one. DREAMQUESTHASGOODART, for example, is a sweet Dragon run. These runs don’t earn achievements, but the only other restriction on them is that you need to have unlocked the class — you don’t have to have unlocked all the same cards.”

And so, Peter Whalen has just guaranteed that I will still be playing Dream Quest when the Earth falls into the Sun, and probably still playing while everything burns.

The full list of changes in the new update (going live in the next week or so) is below — read Kelsey’s review from May or Peter Whalen’s strategy guide for more about Dream Quest, and you can follow Whalen on Twitter.

 A number of small card changes – wording in a couple of places and a couple of changes to priest cards that had been intended for the previous patch but didn’t happen.  Other little bug fixes; mostly wording, but some other esoteric corner cases – for example if you teleported a boss onto a shop and then beat it, the stairs would be inaccessible.  That’s hopefully fixed now.

Changed the way that piercing damage interacts with things that care about damage type.  An example of this is weakness (so sundering strike) as a monk.  In the past, because you dealt piercing damage, the sundering strike bonus wouldn’t work.  Now it does.  Similarly, the hydra should be much more beatable now as a monk.

Small nerfs to the professor and the dragon (by, surprisingly, popular demand).  The professor can now research less frequently and the dragon’s hoard is slightly less beneficial.

Balance change to the wisp; it’s now possible to defeat a wisp even if you only have physical damage in your deck (though very difficult).

Fixed an exploit involving quitting the game after you died.

The two big additions are difficulty levels and seeded play.

Difficulty levels: There are now three difficulties available: kitten, grizzly bear, and velociraptor.

Seeded play.