Temple of The Roguelike Forums
Announcements => Other Announcements => Topic started by: BtS on February 03, 2014, 09:58:53 AM
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Hi!
I am a roguelike developer and I have been working on a game for a number of years now. It is called "The Ground Gives Way", It is currently fully playable and I plan to release it this year (for Windows).
Some of the features:
- Improvisation-based progress (i.e., your progress depends entirely of what you find in the game).
- Highly varying game play.
- No experience points or character levels, no automatic health regeneration.
- Hundreds of interesting items, and a lot of content.
- Very simple and intuitive interface.
- Small levels, short game time and rapidly increasing difficulty
You can read more about the design and development of the game on my new website/blog, www.thegroundgivesway.com. I hope you find it interesting!
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Ah, the mystery is revealed! 8)
Sounds quite promising indeed.
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Looks like one of those short games with infinite variety? The 'new model' roguelike Andrew Doull was speaking on?
I'll be playing this for sure.
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I don't think I am familiar with that concept, do you have a link to where he talks about this? It would be interesting!
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It is here BTS. Just a quick note. My memory made it a bigger deal than it was.
http://roguelikedeveloper.blogspot.com/2013/09/post-modern.html
I'm going to agree though, procedural generation plus permadeath is great for a shorter length game with tons of variety each play through.
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Thank you Jo! Interesting read, and also interesting thread on Reddit. I had not seen it so thank you! Yes, it really seems Andrews description fits my game pretty well. I have a new post describing this concept further: http://www.thegroundgivesway.com/design-goal-variation/
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Yes it's an excellent design principal that goes with permadeath and procedural generation very well. I call it 'short/wide' but the term 'variation' is great.
I'll be playing when you release.
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Sounds like a great game!
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If you're prepared to say, I'd like to know when you're planning to release (something more precise than early '14).
Looking awesome, by the way.
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I don't dare to say anything more than "within a few months", but I'll let you know when I set a specific date. I would like to polish it and get it tested a bit before I release. Thank you very much for your interest, I will post any updates on my blog.
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The game is now approaching release, I have set up a form so you can be notified when it is available: http://www.thegroundgivesway.com/download/.
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Looks pretty cool. Fullscreen?!
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Looks pretty cool. Fullscreen?!
Thank you! It runs in a normal console window so it depends on your Windows version I guess (in Windows 8 it doesn't seem to work).
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Thank you Jo! Interesting read, and also interesting thread on Reddit. I had not seen it so thank you! Yes, it really seems Andrews description fits my game pretty well. I have a new post describing this concept further: http://www.thegroundgivesway.com/design-goal-variation/
That makes so much more sense than what e.g. ToMe is trying to be imho, best of luck to you.
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This short/wide concept sounds good on paper, but the game is only as wide as the field of optimal play -- which is usually quite narrow and difficult to control -- unless there's so much slack that the game is too easy. When people figure out your short/wide game, you're going to realize what you have is just a short game.
(To clarify, I'm referring here to the blog post referenced by Jo, not this particular project.)
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This short/wide concept sounds good on paper, but the game is only as wide as the field of optimal play -- which is usually quite narrow and difficult to control -- unless there's so much slack that the game is too easy. When people figure out your short/wide game, you're going to realize what you have is just a short game.
(To clarify, I'm referring here to the blog post referenced by Jo, not this particular project.)
With a lot of randomized content I'd expect the greater danger would be the game becoming too luck-based.
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In the case of The Ground Gives Way, my own biased opinion is that it is definitely not too easy and I am not sure there is an optimal play strategy that will work for all possible games. However, as awake says, the game is definitely very luck based. I think that is fine considering the short length.
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Not to be argumentative, but there are always optimal play strategies. While they may not be unique, they tend to be relatively few, unless the player wins more or less no matter what they do.
It sounds like you're saying that the player has to be so responsive to chance item acquisitions that there can be no one size fits all strategy. It's an interesting goal, but I wonder how you can be sure the player can win with what he gets in that case without essentially requiring certain "kits" to appear in each game, if indeed the items are really different/not interchangeable. (Again, I'm sort of responding to the notion from the blog post...) In other words, can you really generate items with nontrivial interactions and non-interchangeable functions randomly and independently (in other words, without biases toward certain combinations, "kits," appearing together in a given play) in such a way that each play is almost surely winnable, not frequently too easy (e.g. you can often find broken combinations of items), and there does not exist a small set of strategies that are consistently optimal or at least game winning regardless of items (in other words, a number of more or less interchangeable combinations of items exist that collectively occur with high probability and lend themselves to a small number of winning strategies)?
My feeling is that this is too much to ask. If you have so many items that you don't even see all of them in a given play (even if short), all of which are useful and have some kind of synergy with other items (this usefulness and synergy being critical to a winning play), it sounds like it's a hell of a balancing act making these things work together properly. Has anyone really done something like this?
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Yes I agree with everything you say. If the game is consistent and fair and more or less guarantees that it is possible to win every time (as a long game should), then this would be an impossible design goal and would probably in the end lead to a game which is too easy.
In my case I have solved it like this: there are absolutely no guarantees that a given game is possible to win. Again, I justify this by the short length of the game. Think of it a bit like solitaire (where some games are impossible to win right from the start due to the order of cards). However, since you don't invest hours or days in a single game (in the case for TGGW, the typical playtime is 5-45 minutes), I think this is a reasonable trade-off for making a game interesting.
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Ah, fair enough.
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Interesting. How early in advance can you tell it's unwinnable? Or can you?
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Well, it's not really binary. Sometimes it just that the odds are stacked against you. It is possible (but not likely), for instance, to descend the first five levels (or more) without even finding a weapon. Or find a very unusual and out of depth monster without any means of escape. That kind of thing. No way to tell in advance...
I have posted a new blog post: http://www.thegroundgivesway.com/post-mortem-character/, where I met a nearly inescapable situation.
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Just upload it for testing and then you can talk about actual specifics. Rather than based on imagination feedback based on play-testing and bug reports can only save you time.
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I have now set a release date for the game, on 20th of June. That is, in less then one week! :)
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So yes, just in case someone has missed it: The game is out now and can be downloaded at www.thegroundgivesway.com. I'd appreciate any comments or feedback so I can make updates to the game as soon as possible. Thanks!
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What sort of general roadmap to you have in mind from here aside from fixing up anything that slipped through the cracks and/or tweaking this or that?
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What sort of general roadmap to you have in mind from here aside from fixing up anything that slipped through the cracks and/or tweaking this or that?
Well, mostly that, to make the game play experience as good as possible. But I might very well add new features and content in the future, so basically I'm interested in what players would like to see in the game.