Mighty Quest for Epic Loot: how to design your dungeon in Ubi Montreal's first F2P game

Where do dungeons come from? There is no daddy dungeon or mummy dungeon, there is no dungeon adoption agency, and there's certainly no dungeon planning agency. But for every hero there are tens of dozens of trap-filled basements. Who's doing the dungeon nasty? The answer, according to Ubisoft Montreal's first free-to-play game, the excellently monikered Mighty Quest for Epic Loot, is you lot. You filthy things.

The self-consciously ridiculous Mighty Quest for Epic Loot is a reverse dungeon-crawler: it gives you the toys and tools to build the most challenging oubliette for dungeon crawlers to upturn. The basics are as you'd imagine: a level editor enables you to fiddle with the layout of the castle, because the most basic layout of door, a hallway and a treasure room would deliver a less-than cunning castles. You click and drag, creating corridors, rustling up rooms, carving out chokepoints, until you're happy with the frightening floorplan of fear. But wending routes mean nothing without obstacles.

Placing problems is all about retaining balance. You're only able to prime your traps across a limited space and up to a certain value: the zoned defence area keeps you from spilling bads across the whole map. You're given leverage over what you select, at least: you could spend your points on a high-powered crab thing with enough hit-points to scare Superman, or you could fill the space with numerous lower-level creatures to harry and harass the approaching adventurer. Traps can be added, like spinning fire-hydrants that blast out real fire, or crushing hamster powered wheels, to add to the deadly architecture. You collect the XP you're spending from your castles creatures, which means you need to return to the castle to syphon it off. Surprisingly, the XP is added over time and not according to how many heroes the creatures have crushed. In a neat little addition, your final room, the one with the treasure, will have the most points, giving you a mightily finale. With your castle complete, it's shared with everyone. Then the fun begins.

You'll want players to stay in your castle for as long as possible. The more the more chance they have is to be exposed to traps and creatures, the better you built it. Players will vote on your contribution, to allow the fun ones to rise. You're can hop into someone's castle and fight through it on a Mighty Quest for Epic Loot, probably making notes as you chop through their obviously deficient placements and mockingly score it at the end while counting your loot. Again, this action is as you'd expect: you create a hero and customise his powers with upgrades, as well as the additional Epic Loot.

Bu that's not all: you can neatly create custom challenges for friends, sending them mocking mails where you define a reward and a time for them to beat, as well as talking trash (in a box labelled 'trash talk') . A fine addition to a promisingly silly game.