Temple of The Roguelike Forums
Development => Programming => Topic started by: Psiweapon on February 22, 2011, 10:49:16 AM
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Ummm, HAI GUISE.
For my first attempt at doing anything related to roguelikes1, I'm going to make a ZAPM variant.
Does anyone feel inclined to warn me of any common pitfalls of variants and developing them? Like I shouldn't, to begin with?
Has anyone played ZAPM and got any YANIs that they would like implemented?2
1: Besides playing them and dying like a biatch %D
2: No guarantees: my craptastic ninja skillz are on par with those of a drunken margarita-stealing beach monkey.
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The only thing I would surely do with ZapM is axing cortex crossover. When my dreams go wild I think about Godzilla making an appearance. Long time ago I sent Cyrus a mail with some random ideas. Perhaps he kept it or wrote some of them down. My memory fails me here. Dunno what other nifty ideas were.
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You mean removing it?
You're the user that complained the cortex crossover gave you a totally grieving (sp?) experience?
About re-learning controls *twice* ?
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Like I shouldn't, to begin with?
Don't make a bad variant. I think the best ones are those which simply continue the development of the original game (Stone Soup), improving it somehow. Pure variants are often poor, because the main game is bad or the developer is not very good as game designer.
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You mean removing it?
Yes.
You're the user that complained the cortex crossover gave you a totally grieving (sp?) experience?
Grieving? No, thats failing to read my post. The experience was quite funny for first time. Then it was just annoying. The feature just damages changes interface. The same goes with a certain permanent ADOM room effect. Newbies in game design rarely understand this issue. Game authors often dislike removing perfectly good code and thus such misfeatures stay. Good designers like those of DCSS were not afraid to trash forgetfulness/amnesia.
About re-learning controls *twice* ?
I am Widmo on ZapM bulletin board. Btw. I simply reconfigure keys nowadays. Thats a few seconds and I am immune.
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@ Ancient:
Do you have any idea for a possible substitute? I mean, there are a couple of bad implants, I feel kind of bad about just commenting out or deleting the cortex crossover :'( although yeah, it's annoying and often results in not using implants until you can be sure they're safe - which usually means reaching Robot Town, or executing floppies blindly until you find one of identify (which is just the same thing: trying unidentified objects with the risk that carries, although floppies are less dangerous)
Don't you think that adding a couple of informal identification systems would help?
@ Krice:
¿What do you mean with a pure variant? :-X
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So far:
Added Two professions: Ninja and Astronaut.
Added Some equipment: (a couple of CC weapons, helmet and armor which are kind of easy)
Changed inventory of some monsters (mainly to make them have the aforementioned items)
currently trying: to add a new effect for plasma weapons (and then implement plasma weapons)
next: moar itemz and seeing if I can add more monsters.
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Plasma rifle and plasma pistol added. (I used an already existing effect)
I noticed I hadn't really implemented changes in drop rates, I merely believed I did, fixing.
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Monster equipment corrected :D
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What do you mean with a pure variant?
The game engine is used to create a game with different types of monsters, items, etc. In other words there are no improvements to the engine or game system.
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Original ZAPM is too short. I'll be happy to see a variant with 50 or even 100 levels with increasing number of monsters (and increasing power of monsters). This can be hard to balance though.
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What do you mean with a pure variant?
The game engine is used to create a game with different types of monsters, items, etc. In other words there are no improvements to the engine or game system.
well I don't have any real plan XD I just edit where I understand things and don't break the game
*hatchet in hand* %D edit: if you're talking about the theme it's staying the same, and I'd better not get into deep mechanics yet, because, you know, I'd go in stomping like an elephant in a lamp store...
Original ZAPM is too short. I'll be happy to see a variant with 50 or even 100 levels with increasing number of monsters (and increasing power of monsters). This can be hard to balance though.
As soon as I figure out how to multiply the number of levels the game chucks out, I will. Not that much, because there isn't enough content to fill that much game, but I'll definitely make the branches longer (if and when I find out how to)
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Variants can be a good thing or a bad thing. About the bad things, I don't like how the development is branched. If there are e.g. 5 variants and each of them has 4 good new features, they are better than the official version with none of these features, but worse if there was a version with all 20 of these features. One great game is better than five good, but very similar ones.
Dungeon Crawl is lucky to have the Stone Soup team, who combines the good features of previously created Crawl variants (tile version, travel patch, and vampire patch, AFAIK) and also introduces new improvements. We can treat these variants as testing grounds for new features; these tests turned successful and that's why they are added to Stone Soup (which is as official as it can get). (I would be happy if DCSS allowed playing the Zot Defense variant too.) IVAN is not as lucky, there are many variants, but it seems none of them is strong enough to become an IVAN version of Stone Soup.
Thus... I hope the ZapM variant somehow gets melded with the original. :)
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I think that's a good approach, too. But who knows what holds the future in reserve for zapm and its variant(s?) ;D
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FFFUUUUUUU I BROKE TEH GAME!!!! :-X
I had to replace most of the files with the original ones, cause I breaked stuffs but didn't know which.
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Now would be a good time to get initiated in the secrets of git (http://git-scm.com/) :).
(or, whatever your preferred revision control system is - I use darcs, actually - but git seems to be the general first choice these days)
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(I would be happy if DCSS allowed playing the Zot Defense variant too.)
That is supposed to be incorporated as an option same as the little FastCrawl modes come .8 I believe.
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Now would be a good time to get initiated in the secrets of git (http://git-scm.com/) :).
(or, whatever your preferred revision control system is - I use darcs, actually - but git seems to be the general first choice these days)
Umm this is almost ancient greek to me but sounds cool o.o
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I really recommend you learn to use a version control system. You could have rolled back changes by one and seen what thing exactly broke "teh game" and learned something useful about the code.
Good luck developing your variant. You seem to have much energy. When you feel there is something worthy to try do not hesitate to notify us. :)
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thanks ancient :_D
I'm downloading a git tutorial rite nao, the problem is that it's a linux system, and while I do have a linux computer, I'm stuck with windoes for now when screwing around with ZAPM because I only got it to compile using visual c++... (although I'm sure there must be a way to overcome that, but I don't know how yet)
I'll see if I can grab a curses tutorial too.
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Unless I misunderstand, Git isn't only for Linux.
http://code.google.com/p/msysgit/downloads/list?can=3
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Oh, that's great! A pity that I've spent all the afternoon typing monster drops, I'll check it as soon as I get again to pour some time into this project.
Btw, I'm going to release the first version of the variant soon, because I've added:
7 new weapons
5 new pieces of armor
2 professions
and changed monster equipments so they have the new stuffs.
I know it's still a minimal departure from the original game, but my l33t ninja skills are quite lacking (as in moar liek loser sumo skills) and I can't just keep talking.
I have yet to tackle other more complicated equipment like implants, and canisters (I'd love to add some new canisters!), and I ought to make the game chuck out more levels but as of now I have NFI how to do that...
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Yay! I managed to give canisters randomized colors, along with their randomized descriptions! There were already set colors for the descriptions, but they weren't used. Now they aren't all magenta!
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The game's longer now. It was damn easy once I stumbled upon the values that set the depth of the different branches. They couldn't be more straightforward:
#define TOWNLEVEL 12 //PRIME ed: originally 8
#define BUNKERLEVELS 16 //PRIME ed: originally 12
#define CAVELEVELS 9 //PRIME ed: originally 6
#define SEWERLEVELS 7 //PRIME ed: originally 5
#define CAVEBRANCH 15 //PRIME ed: originally 10
#define MAINFRAMELEVELS 6 //PRIME ed: originally 4
So I multiplied them all by 1.5. The original game has 39 different levels, the branches listed above plus two unique levels. Now it has 55. I'll leave it at that for now because I don't have the knowledge to make new branches or unique levels (yet!). Another factor to take into account is if putting the town at level 12 makes it harder or something. The town isn't much help in a lot of games, but if strapped for radiation or restoration treatment, it'll be farther away now...
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Be careful extending the game length. In roguelikes, more stuff rarely equals more goodness. Stone Soup's actually been cutting branch lengths recently because, really, if you could deal with the first four levels of the Elven Halls, you don't really need to show you can deal with two more before you get try your hand at the end. Hope the stuff you've been adding to the game is awesome :)
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Be careful extending the game length. In roguelikes, more stuff rarely equals more goodness. Stone Soup's actually been cutting branch lengths recently because, really, if you could deal with the first four levels of the Elven Halls, you don't really need to show you can deal with two more before you get try your hand at the end. Hope the stuff you've been adding to the game is awesome :)
Yeah, I can see what you mean, but I felt the game was actually a bit short, and there's another user here who felt the same, so I thought it was needed. In any case, if it proves boring/not challenging enough, it's equally easy to make it chuck out some levels less.
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Has anyone *any* feelings about "unarmed" weapons? ;)
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I don't like them. They are either overpowered (if Monk without weapon and armor has same damage and protection as a gunner with very costly equipment and limited ammo) or useless (if monk has lower damage and has no chance of increasing it using high-end equipment).
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Release! http://roguetemple.com/forums/index.php?topic=1504.msg10968#new (http://roguetemple.com/forums/index.php?topic=1504.msg10968#new)
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Implementing informal identification for implants.
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Gee, making them not go to waste in the process is being such a bitch!
edit: So much that I haven't managed to, yet T_T wtf!
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Armor can boost your speed now, not only slow you down =)