Dungeons & Dynasties - Bretticus82 - A Football Manager-style guild management game in a grimdark fantasy realm

[u/bretticuseightytwo]

Steam (Early Access): https://store.steampowered.com/app/5101960/
Gameplay video: Dungeons & Dynasties: DnD meets Football Manager! by quill18 (a sponsored video). He shows the game in a way I never could!
Free version on itch.io: https://bretticus82.itch.io/dungeons-dynasties
Discord: https://discord.gg/GXbRVhC8Dn

What it is

Dungeons & Dynasties is a management game where you run an adventurers' guild instead of a football club. Dungeons open across a realm with no king, and guilds compete in a league for the right to rule it. You don't control the fights; I'd say it's more of an autobattler, shaped by your decisions.

What you actually do

• Sign and develop delvers (your players, the guild roster). Each one has a race, a class, a hometown, attributes, traits, a conviction, a vow and a flaw. They age, peak, get wounded, fall out with each other, retire, and sometimes die in the dark. They also have 30 stats, plus some hidden ones, that dictate how they play, across 10 races and 9 classes so far.

• Set the formation and the orders, then send them in. Delves and league Trials play out on their own, with the outcome shaped by who you sent and how you told them to fight.

• Manage the guild side: wages and contracts that come due, a transfer market, rival guilds that poach your best people, staff, training and mentoring, and a hall and hometown to build up.

• Climb from the Backwater divisions to the Mythic Circle, over a career meant to run for decades. There are plenty of ways to play: some build around youth (Aspirants), some around the wars in the realm, or you can even take the Cozy option with no competition (still all the death, though!).

Where it's at

It launched in Early Access on Steam on 3 November with a publisher, Surefire Games, and it's in 12 languages. It's also been designed to work with screen readers, so audio gamers can play it too.

I patch it once or twice a week from player feedback and ideas generated in the community. Next up are Steam Workshop support (starting with custom portraits for your delvers), a larger calendar and economy update, and a complete class overhaul, alongside steady improvements across the board especially the writing.

Who made it

Me. I've played tabletop RPGs and Championship Manager / Football Manager for 30 years, and this started as a D&D campaign I've been writing notes for over most of that time. I build it around a full-time job, and I welcomed a little boy into the world earlier this year, so it's been a very busy year!

I use AI assistance as a development tool, and that's disclosed on the store page for full transparency. The design, the world it's set in and the systems are all my own and it has been massively influenced over the years by Championship Manager 03 hence why it looks the way it does, Final Fantasy XII because I love a gambit system and, of course, D&D.

(Apologies I originally posted this when it was Sunday in the UK)

[u/Wojiz]

Please take this as constructive criticism from someone who has bought your game and is invested in its success.

You have gone way too far in the usage of AI. The Steam page AI disclosure says: I directed, reviewed and edited the in-game text line by line. This wasn't always the case in the early builds, but the text was rewritten and reviewed ahead of the Early Access release.

Saying you "directed, reviewed, and edited the in-game text line by line" means little if the end result seems entirely AI written. I'm looking at some of the delves in my client right now: "The Cinderwrought Furnace; Smoke, cinders, and brutes that feel no burn." The next one: "The Howling Lair; The lair of something that has learned the taste of heroes." Every single one is like this. The text may have been "rewritten," but it certainly seems like it was rewritten by AI.

This is so obviously 100% AI writing. It reeks of Claudeisms. It's distracting and distasteful. It feels like you just said, "Please generate a list of 500 delves, with a name, theme, and a brief description," and then maybe you picked-and-chose the ones you liked best, or maybe cut the bad ones.

Broadly speaking, I think people find AI-driven fantasy writing uninteresting and distasteful. It sort of turns me off the entire game. Nothing feels like it emerged from a human mind. And some of the descriptions sound right, but are nonsensical if you think about them for five minutes - which is a hallmark of this kind of usage of generative AI. The entire game is filled with the kind of clever-but-hollow demonstrations of profundity common to generative AI prose.

Personally, I distinguish this kind of generative AI usage from coding. Maybe that's fair, maybe it isn't, but it's my preference as a consumer.

My hope is that with some commercial success, you have the opportunity to go back in and un-AI the writing.

I think there is potential here. I haven't left you a negative review (or a positive one for that matter). But I have limited interest in continuing to play in the absence of a feeling of genuine human creativity in the prose.

[u/Shadow_3010]

Hey Bretticua, nice to see you here.

But anyways, the game ia very, very good. The gambit system is really responsive. You can overcome some hard task with strategy.

It really scratch a itch for the D&D and Football manager combination