The Mad Rat’s Lab

It’s the next day’s morning, Sunday morning. It’s a nice day, sunny and without clouds. It's a perfect day… to spend locked in my room playing DMA!

I log into the game one more time. “Today I’m doing the first dungeon delving!” I say after finding myself in front of the game’s main menu. Here, I can choose what I want to do. “But I first need to get ready for it.”

I select my one and only dungeon from ‘My dungeons’ list, The Mad Rat’s Lab, and enter it again. It is possible to create extra dungeons after the first one and cp is shared between dungeons. But the game gives you no more free cp. This means you must first save some cp to be able to create more dungeons. I’m not going to create any new dungeons, though. I’m going to stay with a single one. Forever. Until death do us part!

There are two modes to play Dungeon Masters Arena. The first one is called Dungeon Invasions, the PvE version of the game. It is called dungeon delving by us players. It is also the basic mode and what most people like to play. In this game mode, the players build their dungeons, and other players can ‘Invade’ them. By delving other’s dungeons, you obtain resources and cp, which you can use to upgrade your dungeon. The dungeons can be any size, and have as many units as you want. The same goes for the other side, the Champions can be as strong as the player has spent resources to upgrade them. Dungeons are instanced and every player enters an identical separated dungeon instance. “This is what I’m going to do today!”

The second mode is called Dungeon Battles. This is the PvP mode, and as such, has special rules to make the matches as balanced as possible. The match starts by both players invading the other’s dungeon at the same time and the first who destroys the other’s core wins the match. In this mode, every unit has a ‘cp value’, the total cp cost of creating and upgrading the unit, and players strategically use a ‘cp budget’ to deploy their Champion and units in the best way to simultaneously defend and invade the dungeons.

Both modes have single and multiplayer modes, but I’m too low level and don’t have the option to play multiplayer yet. Oh, I forgot! There is a player level! The player level is common for all the dungeons of that player, and leveled by playing any of the two game modes. A small amount of xp is also earned when other players invade your dungeon in PvE.

“My player level is 1. When I start a Dungeon Invasion, I can bring up to a total of 100 cp value of units with me.” These units are for supplementing the Champion’s lacking parts. For example, I currently lack a way to kill units with spells, so without this, I couldn’t do the invasion.

I’m already inside my dungeon and open the templates screen. I add a new stitched subtemplate, called ‘Brainded Follower’. Because, they will follow me all the time. “But I don’t want to repeat the same as yesterday and end up squished in the middle of a mass of flesh and limbs. So I’m first going to make them a little smarter.”

I go to the skill selection and look for the passive skill that increases Intelligence. After finding the skill, I immediately add it to the Follower.

In the AI screen, I clean the AI state and add the ‘follow x unit’ and the ‘stay away from x unit’, add the proper values and reconnect the AI nodes. “Now they will stay within 2 meters of me.”

I can bring up to five stitched with me, so I change one Leader and four Mob into the Follower subtemplate. This leaves the cave zone with only two squads, and one of the tunnel squads is missing one unit. “Sorry guy, you are now down one unit to fill your squad. But life doesn't always go the way we want!”

“Now that I have the invasion force ready, It’s time to take a look at the dungeon list and decide on which one I want to invade!” I’m itching already. It’s du~ngeon time!

Since this is my first dungeon invasion, I filter the dungeons by player level and set it to 1. I also set the faction to be human (Iron Shield). Because… I want the most vanilla experience. And I want some… normal-looking bodies to… um… experiment with?

“This one will do.” I select a dungeon called ‘The outskirts of Grasmere’. It asks for what units I’m bringing with me, I select the five Braindead Followers and start the invasion.

“The game already said that the Champions were powerful… but a 100% bonus? Isn’t it too much? Well.. maybe not, if you consider you are, quite literally, alone vs all the monsters inside of the dungeon.”

I look at my stats and “Holly shit! I am powerful! I feel the power course through my veins as if it were electricity!” I make a few poses while saying this. “Nah, I feel the same as before. But compared to the stats of the stitched, I have… about eight times their stats? Hahaha, pathetic worms!”

I look around. All I can see in the dungeon is a wide grassland. It has a few slopes here and there, and also some trees. In the distance, I can see a few buildings, not sure what they are. From here I can’t see them properly. There is a path that starts at the dungeon entrance and flows through the grassland and towards the buildings. I decide to follow the path.

“Nice, nice! You are behaving properly, children! But can’t you move a li~ttle bit faster?” The stitched follow behind me as I walk. They move slowly. Very slowly. Ideally, I wanted to have them move in front of me as a meatshield, but… You can’t have everything. I’m happy as long as they follow and don’t start bumping into me.

“I can see something brown near the path. What is it?” I say while walking. As I get close, it runs away. “A rabbit! It was a rabbit! But… there’s no way I’m going to catch it with the speed of the slowpokes behind me.” So I continue walking.

There are farm fields around the path. I can also see some Farm buildings and even a barn with animals. But I stay in the path. Following the path is a good idea when you have bad orientation and the game doesn’t have a minimap. This is a feature they intentionally didn’t add. This way the game is more realistic and the immersion is heightened. Also, players can’t easily discover secret paths and rooms, not without actually looking for them. Which makes everything more realistic and rewarding.

Then, I find a Farmer in the middle of the path. It is pointing a pitchfork towards us, but does nothing other than staring. I take this chance to inspect it. Usually, you can’t properly inspect in the middle of combat, but the farmer is only staring, so…

“I was expecting a five in each stat! But it has a 0 in COM... You got me there, game!” I exclaim. “It must be because the farmers aren’t trained for organized warfare, so they can’t properly follow orders nor give them. Still... they are five times more intelligent than the Stitched!” 

“Sooo… Are you going to attack or run away?” I stare at the farmer. The farmer stares back. I wave at the farmer. The farmer continues to stare. “Ok, so doing nothing? Fine by me.”

For the stitched to attack, I need to get closer to the farmer. They have an engagement range and the farmer is outside of this range. The ideal should be me shouting: ‘Attack’, and the stitched going for the kill. But they are too stupid for this. So I move forward trying to get them into engagement range.

The farmer moves backwards, staying out of range. It keeps staring at us. I advance some more, and the farmer moves away the same amount.

“Am I missing something? What the hell is happening?” I decide to sprint towards the farmer. The farmer tries to run away, but I am faster and hit it with the staff. “A simple melee attack. It cost 10 EP. Plus 20 for the sprint.” I say while looking at my stats. While I’m distracted, the farmer keeps moving backwards, away from me. The farmer has taken about 1/3 of his health as damage from my hit. “Sorry not sorry, I’m too strong!”

The farmer is waiting again, staring at me in the distance. “Why aren’t you attacking, you damned Braindead!? Do I have to do everything!?” I look behind me and see… that the stitched still haven’t reached my position. They move so slow, that the short sprint left them waaay behind.

“This is getting ridiculous.” There’s no way for the stitched to reach the farmer if it keeps running away, because they are too slow. Wait! Is the farmer bugged? “Do you have something wrong with your head!?” I say while looking at the farmer. It looks at me. “I’m going to assume you do, ok? Take no offense!” The AI must be bugged.

“Do I have to keep running and hit it with basic attacks until I kill it? Because with spells I can’t. No way I'm going to waste my time like this for a farmer, I’m just going to keep moving and ignore it.” I say as I start to move again. Following the path, of course.

Only a minute later I feel a little, how to say it… a little intimidated. Currently, there are a dozen farmers staring at us while moving backwards as I walk towards them. “Too many eyes! Stop looking at me!” Every single farmer I have encountered has done the same as the first.

“Is this some kind of psychological warfare?” I ponder. “I don’t really understand the point of it. Maybe they are waiting for some kind of signal to jump at us?” I decide to ignore the farmers for now. A few meters away I can see a wooden palisade and buildings on the other side of it. It’s a small town. At least the dungeon exploration is progressing properly.

In front of the gate there’s two farmers. They behave like guards protecting the entrance, except that they have pitchforks instead of actual weapons and wear no armor.

“Hello! Can you let me in?” As soon as I get too close, the two farmers come attacking. I stop, and when the farmers get into range, the stitched also switch to combat mode. I wait in the back and look for a few seconds. The stitched and the farmers have the same Strength, but the stitched have slightly higher HP and Constitution, so the farmers are losing. It is also 2vs5.

“Chain Lightning!” I say. There’s no need to say the name of the skill, only think about it and the skill is activated. But I do it anyway. The lightning reaches the first farmer and then jumps to the second and dissipates. Both farmers are left stunned at the ground with 1 HP. The stitched that are surrounding them quickly finish the two farmers. “That was an overkill, a one hit kill! Well, I have 100% increased stats, plus two passive skills that increase the damage by 10% and 30%. I’m too OP.”

The ‘epic battle vs two farmers’ has finished, but there are still a lot of them watching us from afar. “Ok, now I’m sure about it. There’s something wrong going on with the farmer’s AI. The player that controls this dungeon must have tried to modify the AI and failed. An epic fail at it. “*Pft* Haha, noob! I did it at the first try! And the Farmers should be five times smarter than the Stitched! We aren’t so smart now, aren’t we!?”

“Then I will stop thinking about it. Let’s finish this dungeon without wasting more time!” I proceed to move inside the town. There are rustic buildings with a mix of wood and stone everywhere I look. There are a lot of farmers inside. And I mean A LOT. Over 50 of them.

“Make way for me! Make way for your king, you puny and stupid humans! If you dare cross my path, I’ll have your head on a stake and feed your body to the pigs!” After my warning, the farmers start moving backwards while staring in my direction. It is still weird, but it feels better if I make myself believe it's because of my incredible persona, and not because of an AI problem. A large space opens in front of me, and we freely walk towards the town’s center. There, we find a fountain with the dungeon core on top. There is one Soldier and two Farmers guarding the crystal.

This time I start the combat by casting Chain Lightning. The lightning hits the soldier, then jumps to one farmer and finishes by electrocuting the second farmer. The soldier survives with very low health, but the two farmers are instantly reduced to ashes… I mean, left with 1 HP and stunned. The stitched quickly join the fray and finish the soldier and the stunned farmers. “The Stitched might be slow, and stupid, but sure know how to punch and slam their limbs into whatever is in front. I don't want to test it on my own body. Not for how much damage I’d take, but for how disgusting it would be.”

After the fight, I grab the dungeon core and crush it. “This wasn’t what I was expecting. If I hadn’t seen a lot of videos before playing, I would be considering quitting this game… A first good experience is very important after all!”

“So I won very little cp for killing enemies, because most of them simply ran away… Well, there is nothing I can do!” In exchange, I obtained more XP for all my stitched being alive at the end of the dungeon so it isn’t that bad. “I would love to do another Dungeon Invasion but I don’t have the time. It’s a shame because this dungeon was bo~ring!”

“I also obtained 20 food, nice!” If the dungeon has a building that produces a resource, players that invade obtain a small amount of that resource, proportional to the number of buildings. “It is a way to attract invaders into the dungeon. Some players create massive amounts of those buildings to make other players more interested in invading.”

Now the game asks if I want to rate the dungeon. I won’t, because there is a problem with the unit’s AI, and it won’t be fair to give it a bad grade only for this. I am going to write a message to the player to explain the problem so they can fix it. “See how good I am, mommy? I behave the best I can, but the other kids don’t want to play with me because I’m a Flesh Monstrosity!”

I start planning the next dungeon dive. “Tomorrow is Monday so I have classes. I will only have time to play during the afternoon… Let’s try to make another Dungeon Invasion then! Hopefully next time the dungeon is going to be normal!” I say while closing DMA.

“Hmm… I think I’m forgetting something… What is it…?” I take out the VR casc from my head as I say so. “Hmm… It was something important, but what was it?”

“Shit! Fuck! I forgot the most important thing!” I pull my hair while shouting.” I forgot to try capturing at least one enemy unit!”

“Leave the AI of the units as it comes by default. That is, if you don’t know how to modify it properly. Otherwise, you will end with very stupid units that don’t do what you expected them to do, nor are capable of doing the things they could do before.”

- First point from ‘10 things to do to improve your dungeon’.