Messages

1

Design / Re: Corridors considered harmful

« on: August 16, 2016, 10:10:35 PM »

Why the fuck would you remove corridors, it's just stupid.

That about covers it. Maybe take this one to the DCSS forums?

2

Player's Plaza / Re: How you guys feel about the new wave of rougelike games?

« on: January 04, 2016, 10:34:06 PM »

I can still play Nethack, because 5% of it is still playable in my mind. Most games are 0%, that's why I don't usually play games. It's similar to what I experienced with books.

I am consistently impressed by how much people on this forum hate roguelikes.

3

Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: Brut@l ASCII roguelike for PS4

« on: December 08, 2015, 03:50:32 PM »

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIs72kNF0-w - the trailer, which is about as corny & cringesome as their "Brut@l - let`s kick some ASCII" motto.

That slow motion jumping archery bit... it's like one of those bits in a Peter Jackson movie that's just like a video game that's just like a lame action movie sequence.

I'll approach this with cautious preemptive hatred.

4

Traditional Roguelikes (Turn-based) / Re: Moria for DOS v4.87 - Going Way Back

« on: January 30, 2015, 01:54:12 AM »

Well, NPPMoria exists now, if that's of interest.

http://www.roguebasin.com/index.php?title=NPPMoria

5

Design / Re: Going beyond hack and slash

« on: January 30, 2015, 01:50:48 AM »

Yeah, I think it's pretty telling that all the examples used have been from Nethack.

It's the go-to example, but even Angband isn't nearly as kill-happy as some more modern games.

Traps, secret doors, item identification, hunger, I believe even varied lighting levels? have been with us since Rogue. Monsters are the real threat in a dungeon crawler, but even then, one might sneak around them, trap them, frighten them away, befriend them, whatever.

Level-by-level FPS-style extermination has been done -- by DoomRL -- and it's not the typical roguelike experience.

6

Design / Re: randomness as a replacement for identification

« on: June 30, 2014, 09:38:35 PM »

I'm not familiar enough with Rogue to comment on how its ID system worked. Speaking generally, using an un-IDed item in a bad situation and praying that it does something good is not the most interesting aspect of ID systems. In a roguelike, if an action has a 10% of completely screwing you over, you probably never ever want to do that thing, so more often you either wait for a reliable source of IDs (Scroll of Identify) or you wait until you have two of something and then use one in an empty room, neither of those making for particularly fascinating gameplay.

There are already lots of things in roguelikes that have a perpetual chance of backfiring against the user (like miscast spells) and they mainly seem to piss players off.

Brogue does the ID game well, and it stays relevant well into the game. The game has a fairly small set of possible items and provides a helpful list which one's you've identified, and it's possible to identify an item as Good or Bad without using it,
so process of elimination is more meaningful, and you can make intelligent gambles or judgments about resource management. Interestingly, it's the only roguelike I can think of where Scrolls of Identify are relatively rare (or even not the most common object in the game).

Nethack has a very involved system -- maybe too involved -- but they sure did something with it.

7

Classic Roguelikes / Re: Atheism in Crawl

« on: May 23, 2014, 07:26:04 PM »

The demigod race is restricted from religion, if you didnt know that. But having a god makes you way more powerful.

Just going back to the temple seems like the wisest choice for sure. What's so dangerous about backtracking?

8

Design / Re: Good way to do 8-directional movement with WASD

« on: May 22, 2014, 08:46:26 PM »

Thanks guys, some good comments from all of you. I'm working on adding a WASD option right now which works by visually starting the move but not committing it until the key is released or another key is added to create a diagonal move, in which case it veers off. Unfortunately it requires a complete rework of my renderer and means I need to implement animations and key repeat sooner rather than later, so it's going to be a ton of work. :/

I might also look into adding the shift modifier as an option, and mouse movement will definitely be a thing too. Unfortunately, mouse movement is also tricky. If anyone can point me to a roguelike that does mouse movement well, I'd be grateful.

Your solution sounds perfect if it "feels right", but it's tough to judge without trying.

I picture this happening tho:

1) push direction key
2) realize that's a bad idea
3) stuck with my finger on key, trying to decide if I'm better off just picking my finger up or going diagonal

What I'm sayin is that it might be nice br able to "cancel out" of a move before you have fully comitted

9

Temple of the Roguelike / Re: The Codex of The Temple - Rules of Behaviour

« on: May 21, 2014, 07:06:38 PM »

Is it too much to ask to ban sexism from the forums?

I sure as hell hope so.

10

Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: Infra Arcana, a horror/Lovecraft roguelike (now at v16.0).

« on: May 16, 2014, 04:16:17 AM »

Can't get the make file to build it either, somesuch thing about not finding some SDL file that appears to actually be there.

You need SDL, SDL_mixer, SDL_image libraries. Best way to get them on Mac OSX is via Homebrew or Macports. People reported that other than that it compiles out-of-box on Mac OSX. You can find more details here (use "Show more replies" link to see whole thread) : http://infraarcana.wikispaces.com/share/view/65547238

Installed the SDL libraries through Homebrew yet "include/Engine.h:7:10: fatal error: 'SDL.h' file not found", meh. Trying to get it to work as an XCode project now, it's... spitting up fewer errors than when I started, I feel confident.

Does IA log errors anywhere useful? Was having a perfectly nice time shooting a tesla cannon at deep ones when suddenly FATAL ERROR, and in such a nice run too. Probably will put me off the game for a bit.

11

Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: Infra Arcana, a horror/Lovecraft roguelike (now at v16.0).

« on: May 09, 2014, 04:50:36 PM »

I have a Mac partition and a Windows partition. I encountered the issue using wine to play the copy of the game that I had in the Windows partition. I downloaded a second copy to the Mac partition and I don't encounter the same issue using it.

Can't get the make file to build it either, somesuch thing about not finding some SDL file that appears to actually be there.

How far deep does the dungeon go, anyhow? I hit level 19 (with tremendous luck), it was looking pretty end game-y before I died horribly. If that's only the halfway mark I should probably abandon hope.

12

Traditional Roguelikes (Turn-based) / Re: Sil players?

« on: May 05, 2014, 06:08:00 PM »

The manual is good about explaining the rules but doesn't do anything to clarify the UI. All that data about combat rolls that gets tossed up in the screen might be useful but it's Greek to me.

13

Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: Infra Arcana, a horror/Lovecraft roguelike (now at v16.0).

« on: May 05, 2014, 05:53:21 PM »

Is there a technical reason that there's no Mac build, or is it just something you can't be bothered with?

It works pretty well in WINE.

Playing in WINE, I have found that the "Ressurect" menu option works pretty literally: it lets me continue with my last dead character. I guess something is not being deleted properly? If I forget that I died last session I save scum on accident.

14

Design / Re: Permanent consequences for failure that aren't death

« on: May 02, 2014, 11:14:08 PM »

I'm down with extra lives, but what I'd really like to see is something akin to shmup bombs - an finite consumable that can absolutely save you from any situation, but only if you're attentive enough to recognize the threat before it spirals out of control.  Like, you start the game with three potions of life saving, which fully heal you and stop time for three turns, but you can never obtain more of them.

That makes sense although

1) Very frequently you die in a RL with something in your inventory that would have saved you, there's still that frustration

2) If you start off with three and you lose one on the first floor (for example), most people will restart rather than have to play the rest of the game with only two left.

I actually bumped into the original Felid proposal (don't have a link handy...) and that second point is why you have to earn your lives instead of starting with nine like you would expect a cat to.

I feel - probably unjustifiably - proud of the negative experience idea.

Felids lose a level upon reviving, so I guess they beat you to it, if I understand you correctly. Or we could say that great minds think alike!

15

Design / Re: Permanent consequences for failure that aren't death

« on: May 02, 2014, 04:28:19 PM »

Oh oh... Someone has disturbed the dark waters...

"I have bad feeling about this! - Lydia in Skyrim

Yeah let's not lock the thread, it's a legit discussion. Anyone who doesn't like long angry rants should just not read or write them.

There seem to be a lot of commercial Japanese roguelikes although they don't get much discussion in these parts. I get the impression that they tend to be relatively shallow if not really bad at all. I think as a general rule they kick you out of the dungeon and tax you some/all of your stuff when you lose, but you accumulate XP and loot over time so there's also progress beyond the player simply getting better.

I think amulets of life saving and Felids in DCSS (who can earn multiple lives and teleport away on respawn) point the way to a potential solution. I think some of the ill will toward permadeath isn't so much the permanence but the fact that you're punished so harshly for minor mistakes. You could argue that "that's just part of the game" but I don't think it's good when too much of the difficulty comes from "death by boredom", underestimating rare difficulty spikes, misunderstanding something etc as opposed to overall quality of play.

Basically I think that earning extra chances makes more sense, at least as a "beginner mode" option, than most other options. Save points undermine the sense of permanence and encourage abuse, infinite lives w/score penalty has too much of a "everyone's a winner!" taste and relegates permadeath to a seldom-observed challenge setting, and nobody wants to play Wizard mode.