Dragon Quest

Dragon Quest 1 is sort of neat. I like how it's 1 on 1's and no classes, and how you're mainly resticted by level, not keys and stuff. I dislike how you can't control leveling and how the enemy taxonomy/phenology doesn't make sense.

Art-wise, I'm aiming for a Toriyama feeling (fixed line width, strange anatomy, playful design). I'm thinking of doing the cute/light, medium/general-purpose-soldier, boss/elite approach for most designs, then group creatures into categories and place them in a geographical region that makes sense.

Here be dragons! The Red dragon is mine, the others are 75% from the games.

Enemies & characters. Some are from DQ, some are extrapolations, some are completely new.

Quick thumbnails from a 'brainstorming session' (god I hate that term) where I was trying to fill out the areas that had too few enemy variants. It's more mental notes than drawings though.

Map & Enemy Encounters

I figured out how to use the map data to both draw it and make encounters. I'll make 3 dimensions, 2 visible, Topography (Plains, Hills, forest, Swamp, Mountains) and Temperature (Snow, Temperate, Jungle, Desert), then on top of that I'll have a difficulty map. Now I can make an array (list) with say 4 different monster encounters from common to rare, then the 3 map dimensions, and use this array with the map data to figure out which monster goes where. For example: MonsterFauna(Common, Plains, Temperate, Easy)=Blue Slime
Then I'd also have a majib in the encounter function that can pull monsters from the wrong areas sometimes, so a desert scorpion can wander into the plains or wrong difficulty area, etc. This way there'll be some variation and grainy/seamless mixing of the monster encounters.

I'd like to use something akin to fog-of-war in RTS games for the map. This technique for maps will be more interesting than fully revealed maps because of several reasons; It's fun to reveal/clean up/bubblewrap pop, You can't see caves/shrines/tombs/secrets etc in the brown unexplored but charted areas so it'll be exciting to explore and reveal, and you can tell where you have been and not. The black areas are for uncharted territory.

Player Character

I'd like to do a game mode where the player can be a normal person, not a DBZ mountain shattering superhero. This would give the player a sense of how dangerous a 4m high stone golem is. A normal knight with a sword just won't stand a chance against such a thing.

There'd be no classes, but the player could set initial starting properties by checking:
Previous occupation radiobuttons: (nada, royality, merchant, monk, mage apprentice, squire, dancer, farmer, adventurer) which decides stats, gold and gear. A royality would naturally have tons on gold.
Then 2 checkboxes (Chosen one powers, Acknowledged saviour) where a chosen one levels much better, and an acknowledged saviour will rarely get charged for anything, being on a mission to save the world and all. It always got to me how merchants dare to charge me for that flaming sword when I'm obviously saving their asses. Anyways, this way the player can set the difficulty, although there'd be default/recommended settings (Adventurer, Chosen one).

Idea doodles

Here's a Leveling curves example for normal and 'chosen one' characters (50-100 stat-raise-stars on one stat might be common). I'm going to use a system where each levelup gives 3 stars to spend on 5 stats (It's fun to click out stuff). The stars decrease in value by a % for each use on a stat. Also, a monster type will give less and less XP each time it's defeated, so the player will have to find new monsters to level up effectively. I'm even thinking of giving all monster types the same initial XP amount, or base it on damage inflicted. I don't really need to have the common exponential leveling since the decreasing XP value will prevent level grinding on the same enemy. In real life you learn from being divese, not making 10 million Mona Lisa studies, and studying Mona Lisa one time as a noob artist won't immidiately gain you 10 levels cuz the XP is good.

Stats are: Strength, Agility, Stamina, WillPower and Energy

And these are calculated something like this:
HitPoints = Stamina + Strength/2 + Willpower/4
Initiative = Agility + Willpower/2

The combat will be like DQ1, one on one, no classes, just a diverse hero. Initiative determines who gets to do stuff... I'll just use my Nethack (Whack) combat system, ie. weapons can be swung different ways (forehand/backhand/stab) and do damage (pierce/slash/crush ) depending on how the weapon looks. Stabbing a skeleton? Good luck! Slashing a turtle thing? Not the best approach either. Trying to crush a slime? You lose!

Story

The intro story will be about 3 kings with their armies fighting an enemy force, and eventually losing, a bit like a more epic version of the DQ2 intro. Then there's the usual chosen warrior crap and bad guy, yadda yadda yadda.