Messages

1

Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Rogue Fable III

« on: November 26, 2018, 11:18:16 PM »

Hello everyone! I've been working on Rogue Fable III for about 4 months now, preparing to bring it onto Steam through early access where development will then continue. Since I'm very nearly ready to make the transition I've released the game in its current form to the web which you can check out at the link below. Its doing pretty well with the general audience on Kong but I'm always curious what more experienced rogue-like players think. All feedback, suggestions, complaints etc is welcome and appreciated.

Justin

https://www.kongregate.com/games/Justin_wang123/rogue-fable-iii

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Early Dev / Re: Rogue Fable II (Browser Based Rogue-Like)

« on: March 07, 2017, 05:16:59 PM »

Great, thanks for your help! Looks like its fixed up (for now). One good trick for those ballistas is to rush them and then dodge around them as they take a turn trying to face you. You can actually dance around and kill a ballista without taking any damage. Of course this assumes you have some way of quickly closing distance. Thanks again for giving it a run through.

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Early Dev / Re: Rogue Fable II (Browser Based Rogue-Like)

« on: March 04, 2017, 12:42:46 AM »

Thanks for the info, I may have fixed it, so let me know if your still experiencing crashes with the new version.

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Early Dev / Re: Rogue Fable II (Browser Based Rogue-Like)

« on: March 03, 2017, 05:42:35 PM »

Are you using firefox by any chance?

This bug is driving me crazy, I can't seem to replicate it on either my desktop or laptop either with chrome or firefox. I have 4 friends who never get the bug and they've won the game several times each but then one friend (who uses firefox) seems to get this crash constantly. So I'm trying to narrow down whats going on here. The fact that its happening on upstairs is helpful at least.

Thanks for playing!

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Early Dev / Rogue Fable II (Browser Based Rogue-Like)

« on: February 28, 2017, 02:26:31 AM »

Hi Everyone!

This is my third iteration on a browser based rogue-like. Its getting pretty close to completion and I'm looking for some feedback.

https://justin-wang123.itch.io/rogue-fable-ii

The main objective for this project was to create a game that is playable in a single hour while containing enough content and variety to make repeated playthroughs novel and enjoyable. I'm pretty heavily inspired by Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup and I consider this an attempt to capture the spirit of that game for times when I don't have 8+ hours to do a full DCSS run.

Features, design decisions and some rambling:

Themed Zones:
The game contains a total of 7 different themed zones each with its own unique monsters, traps, environmental hazards and level generators. For each playthrough the first few dungeon levels are always the same basic zone but then in later levels 3 of these themed zones are chosen randomly. The idea here is to give the player different combinations of themed zones with each playthrough. I think that just random placement of rooms, corridors and monsters is not enough to really make each run feel different so this is my attempted solution to that problem.

Character Classes:
There are 6 classes which I've tried to differentiate as much as possible. With rogue-likes, classes are kind of a tricky problem in my opinion. With random loot, its possible that many of the items that you find may be useless if your abilities are really solidly defined by your class. So to try to overcome this I've borrowed some ideas from DCSS and given each class a starting book from which they learn their class specific abilities. Later in the dungeon you will find the books of other classes allowing you to multiclass to some extent if you choose. There are some inherent statistical differences between the classes but most of it is defined by their starting equipment and their starting book. In this way I'm trying to have the classes be most differentiated at the start of the game but then the way in which you develop your character is dependent on what you find later in the dungeon.

Damage Model:
I've continued with a fairly deterministic damage model though with the addition of random critical hits and misses thrown in a very small percent of the time. I find that random damage is just sort of noise when I play games and just makes it difficult to judge tactics while not really adding that much unpredictability. I cant really call the difference between 5,6 and 7 damage 'random'. So my solution to this was some small percent of the time there's a critical hit (x2 damage) and some small percent of the time there's a miss (0 damage). My thinking here is that this reduces noise, increases the players ability to play tactically and when the dice do fall a certain way a big effect is produced.

I've thought a lot during this project about this sort of 'meaningful randomness'. The themed zones could be seen as a form of tackling this issue. I've also generally moved away from say generating 3-6 gold per level and instead just made it a constant 4 but with a 10% chance to spawn a treasure room on a level full of piles of gold. I feel like players are unlikely to notice these small fluctuations in gold per level but a room full of treasure is sure to get their attention. This sort of design is carried through a lot of the project and is something I'll likely continue thinking about in the future.

Feedback:
All feedback is greatly appreciated. The game is pretty close to what I'd consider 'complete' there's just some graphics missing in a few places and maybe a few balance issues here and there. I haven't really gotten to adding a lot of help text yet so one thing I'm particularly interested in is any confusion that crops up during play, anything that doesn't make sense. Obviously balance and challenge is a pretty big deal as well. I'd like at least with the easier classes for players not to just get slaughtered in the first few minutes, so I'd appreciated your experience in this. Last but not least, crashes, bugs, weird behavior, all that stuff that I'm sure keeps us all up at night. A copy paste of the browser console after a crash would be extremely helpful.

6

Early Dev / Re: Post-Apocalyptic Rogue-Like Game

« on: June 13, 2016, 09:33:14 PM »

There are about 100 items in total, though consumables might be a little bit to common at the moment. There was a point where I was getting tons of equipment drops and just selling half of them in the shop so I might have gone overboard with the drop rates on potions and food and such.

The more ambitious future project will indeed be post-apocalyptic and is forking off of this project as we speak. I consider the game as it currently stands, (haven't actually uploaded the most current version yet) as basically complete for a sort of phase 1 iteration. I've posted it to a number of forums and got some good feedback, including your own most of which has been incorporated into the current build and I'm happy to call it a complete version 0.1 or whatever. Always a nice feeling

So in answer to your question, feedback to this game will definitely be taken into consideration for the future of the project. They really are one continuous project, I just like to keep in the habit of actually producing playable versions, even if it means I might have to throw out a little bit of the polish moving forward. I'll be trying to keep getting releases out every few months that are reasonably self contained and playable sort of bordering the lines between stand alone games, and subsequent versions of the main project.

There is going to be a pretty giant item list eventually as I want to include hunting, harvesting, and scavenging ruins on the surface as well as crafting and rudimentary construction mechanics. So there will need to be a big item list to support all of this along with all the artifacts found in the actual dungeons.

Currently I'm working on taking the world map I currently have and generating a continuous scrolling over-world from it at the same scale as the dungeons. I then want to place all of the cities, ruins, dungeon entrances etc. onto this over-world. The goal is to have the player spawn into the world and actually able to wander around it and explore without the two different scales I currently have. Each tile of the world map will be converted to something like a 32x32 tile chunk which will then have its tile generated according to the type of tile it is, what features it has, what region its in etc.

Eventually I want to support different themed biomes each with its associated dungeon. So the player may start in the wasteland dealing with raiders leading to a climax where he storms the raider vault and kills their leader and then may travel to a jungle area with some sort of botanical testing lab in the center spewing forth mutants that have to be dealt with.

As I mentioned in the first post, each new region will have new stuff to harvest, new stuff to kill and basically open up more crafting, construction and equipment options which the player will mess around with, building up their supplies before tackling the regional dungeon.

I definitely want a strong survival vibe going as well with food, water, medicine and shelter and such things being a major concern. I'm not particularly interested in any sort of super complicated simulation approach but I do want to create that feel of wandering and surviving in this strange hostile world.

I'm sort of just rambling ideas at this point so in closing, thanks a lot for your feedback so far and I'd appreciate anything you'd like to add in the future. I'll try to have the current (so called finished) build uploaded some time soon.

7

Early Dev / Re: Post-Apocalyptic Rogue-Like Game

« on: June 12, 2016, 01:43:14 AM »

Thanks for playing.

By variety do you just mean more item drops in general? The items are not restricted by level so the full variety can potentially drop in the first levels. There is currently a victory condition in the last dungeon (finding the codex) though there are some crashes that may prevent getting it in the version currently uploaded. I'm working on putting up an update that fixes some of these issues.

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Early Dev / Post-Apocalyptic Rogue-Like Game

« on: June 03, 2016, 07:07:31 PM »

Hi everyone!

I'm looking for some feedback on my current (unnamed) project which is nearing completion. This is my 3rd iteration on a rogue-like and as with the previous projects, I want this game to be able to stand on its own while also acting as the base of the next project.

Link:
http://game-test-page.comoj.com/Wasteland/

Screen Shots:






Overview:
- Static overworld with towns, npcs and quests.
- 6 Randomly generated dungeons and a couple of surface locations.
- Skill based character development allowing characters to specialize or generalize in melee, stealth, ranged and psionic combat.
- Approximately 100 items, 50 monsters, and 20 spells.
- Primary focus is on careful resource management and combat tactics.

Controls:
I hope the game is mostly self explanatory (please let me know of any confusion). Most of the controls have yet to be explained in game so I'll list them here:
- Clicking with the mouse moves or interacts (including attacking)
- Clicking any item in the inventory will use it (equip, cast spell, consume potion etc.
- Clicking player (numpad 5) will wait a turn (this is important in combat for positioning)
- There is partial keyboard support with the numpad providing movement and bump to attack (it works the same as clicking adjacent tiles).
- E key will auto explore
- R key will (r)ecast the last spell
- W key will (w)ield the previously wielded weapon
- A key will allow you to target distant enemies using numpad to move the cursor and 5 to click (this works the same as clicking a distant tile).

Feedback
Any feedback is greatly appreciated with the following topics of particular interest to me:

Difficulty
I've been playing this game for so long I no longer have even the slightest clue as to what the difficulty is for other players. Obviously as a rogue-like its intended to be difficult, something that you need to play repeatedly and learn all the little tricks in order to win. With that said, I'm curious as to how the challenge level is for everyone.

Pacing and Length
Similar to the above point, I can rush through the game at a pretty rapid pace but I also find that it gets repetitive at points though this is largely due to having played it hundreds of times. How is the overall length of the game? Are the dungeons to long, to short, or just right? Is new content introduced at the right pace?

Usability
This is a big one. Is it obvious how to play the game. Does the UI give enough information or is there anything missing? How do the controls feel. Does the game give you enough direction that you can figure out where to go next.

Bugs
Obviously I'm anxious to hear about any crashes or lag spikes or unexpected behavior.

Features
Any general suggestions for new features or improvements.

Future Plans:
I'd like to wrap this project up in the next few weeks and then as previously mentioned use it as the base of a larger, more ambitious project. Roughly speaking the direction I want to go in is to create a continuously scrolling over world (getting rid of the world map) dotted with different environment biomes, ruins, highways etc. I want to add crafting, harvesting any all the standard features of a survival sand-box game.

The idea is that the player gathers up resources, equipment, and other consumables on the surface and then tackles one of the large, extremely difficult dungeons. In tackling the dungeon the player uses up most of his supplies, damages his equipment sustains lots of injuries but gains some powerful artifacts, crafting recipes or something which allow him to push out further on the surface.

Generally speaking I want a sort of two-mode game in which gameplay on the surface is survival sandbox in which you prepare to tackle the next dungeon (which roughly increase in difficulty). Upon completing the dungeon you gain something which lets you explore further, craft more, generally experience more of the game. I plan to have an actual end game and victory condition. I'm hoping to overcome the main thing I dislike about sand-boxy games such as mine craft or dwarf fortress which is that generally there is little feeling of progression after the early game has been overcome and I always end up getting board without obvious goals.

9

Early Dev / Re: The Rogues Tale

« on: January 16, 2016, 08:51:56 PM »

January 16 Update:
First, thanks everyone for your feedback! It's been extremely helpful. Lachnadder, enemies should stop chasing you if you break LoS and get far enough away, I'll test it to make sure its actually working. Congrats on reach level 8

- Auto path around traps
- Fixed map boarders not generating.
- Click minimap to auto travel.
- Spells can destroy fire mushrooms and bear traps
- Darts can destroy fire mushrooms and bear traps.
- Reduce food tick slightly.
- Make effects of dart recovery more noticeable.

Still got lots of stuff on my todo list, should have more updates in the coming days.

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Early Dev / Re: The Rogues Tale

« on: January 15, 2016, 06:52:07 AM »

Hey Lachnadder, thanks for the feedback!

- The minimap navigation is a great idea, I always find myself descending to lower levels with half hp because I can't be bother to manually click my way back to some distant healing mushrooms.

- I think you may have just been very unlucky on food drops, when my friends and I have tested the game we've never had a problem with food unless we ate most of it to heal. There is actually a guaranteed food drop every couple of levels, and of course food can spawn on the floor or in chests.

- The number of items that drop is pretty carefully balanced right now to guarantee that the player doesn't wander around with a full inventory. What I'm thinking of doing for throwing items is slightly reducing their damage but increasing the chance for the throwing skill to 'recover' a thrown weapon. Right now its 5% per level of throwing, I'm going to try reducing the damage of darts by 1 point and increasing this to something like 8% so that characters who have specialized in throwing have less trouble with finding ammunition. I want people to still conserve ammo, treating it as a limited resource, so this will have to be something carefully balanced.

- Another possibility is forcing the shops to always stock at least 1 throwing item, 1 potion, 1 food etc. just in case the RNG isn't playing nicely.

- Yeah selling items is definitely something I'll add. At first I was influenced by the crawl philosophy of not having players vacuum the entire dungeon for items to sell, but I don't think that applies here since items are relatively rare. This will also contribute to the idea of every item having a use to every player even if its just to sell it for a bit of gold. I'll probably have to increase item prices a little bit to compensate so that plate armor may continue to 'look at you' hehe.

- I'm pretty late in development now so I'm not sure if I want to go through the trouble of adding an item to disarm traps, since this item would not be guaranteed to drop every time. In future games I'd like to have a more complex trap system with more types of traps, the ability to disarm them and the ability to place them, but that will have to wait for the next iteration.

- Thanks for the bug report, I think I've fixed it now.

Thanks again for the feedback, glad you enjoyed the game.

11

Early Dev / Re: The Rogues Tale

« on: January 14, 2016, 10:33:25 AM »

Thanks for the feedback, good thing we haven't drawn up a title screen yet. Will need to think up a new title now.

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Early Dev / The Rogues Fable [Released]

« on: January 14, 2016, 08:38:24 AM »

Web Link: http://www.kongregate.com/games/Justin_wang123/the-rogue-fable

Hi everyone, I'm getting pretty close to finishing my second attempt at a rogue-like and I'm looking for some feedback from fellow developers. There are no in game instructions yet but I hope its intuitive enough that experienced rogue-like players like yourself can figure most of it out. The game is entirely mouse driven. Clicking your character will wait a turn. Clicking any item in your inventory will either use it (potions, food, scrolls etc.) or equip it. Spell casting is a little different in that each scroll has a mana cost, if you have sufficient mana, the scroll is not consumed. Clicking the character portrait in the bottom right of the screen lets you select skills each time you level up.

Features:

• 16 main dungeon levels.
• 2 themed branches with 4 levels each (not required to win game).
• Melee weapons, ranged weapons, armor, amulets, potions and scrolls.
• Spell casting system based on scrolls.
• Classless, skill based advancement.
• Shops to spend gold.

Some of my thoughts that went into designing this:

Deterministic
The game is almost completely deterministic. Weapons always hit, all damage is constant (though mitigated by armor and resistances), healing recovers a set amount of hit points etc. I placed both the remaining hit points and damage directly on enemy sprites as I want players to know exactly what will happen in the next turn. In general I've tried to make the game as tactical as possible with the player given perfect information regarding the state of the game and the results of his actions.

No Health or Mana Regeneration
The player either needs to consume items in his inventory or consume resources in the level to regenerate mana and health.

Character Development
I've tried to strike a balance between allowing the player to define his character build and allowing the RNG to define it for him. The items in you find are the major way in which your character build is defined with skills playing a lesser role. Furthermore I included shops so that the player has some control over which items he carries. I intentionally made the inventory small in order to force players to drop items.

No Useless Items
Even though players will generally be specializing in some variation of melee, ranged, caster or stealth build, I wanted all items to always be useful. For example when a scroll is used, if the player has sufficient mana, then only mana is consumed, otherwise the scroll is consumed. In this way I hope that non caster characters will still feel it useful to carry around scrolls for emergencies.

Multiple Effects
I tried to make most items and spells have multiple effects. Healing potions can be drunk at full hp to increase maximum hit points, food also restores health, fire spells can ignite vines, ice spells also freeze enemies in place. There is generally no best weapon type: swords hit multiple enemies, pole arms have increased range, daggers can back stab unaware enemies. Heavier armor reduces maximum mana.

Feedback
Any feedback is greatly appreciated. I'm particularly interested in the difficulty level as I'm afraid to admit I haven't beaten the game yet (my friend has though so its definitely possible).

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Early Dev / Re: JRogue - my first roguelike

« on: August 09, 2015, 08:27:49 PM »

Thanks for feedback Tzan.

I'll add a drop button in the next version. I thought it wouldn't be possible to get enough items to actually fill the inventory but apparently I was wrong. I was hoping to find a way to encourage the player to swap amulets depending on the situation but I don't think there's much of a point right now. Maybe in the future if I add different types of magic resistance this will work as intended.

That's a great idea for the death screen, I'll look into adding that.

I've updated the game to guarantee food drops on some of the levels since a lot of people seem to be struggling with not finding enough food. Reduced the actual random drop rate of food at same time so hopefully the actual amount of food in game should be the same, just better distributed.

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Early Dev / Re: JRogue - my first roguelike

« on: August 08, 2015, 08:54:51 PM »

Thanks for the feedback dscreamer.

I'm gonna look into implementing keyboard controls for the next version, just need to figure out a good way to do long range targeting.

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Early Dev / Re: JRogue - my first roguelike

« on: August 07, 2015, 11:10:45 PM »

Thanks for the feedback.

The generic aspect is basically intentional as I wanted to assure myself that I could actually finish this project before moving onto anything more innovative. I'm really interested in the future in exploring sci-fi or post-apocalyptic settings as these are my favorite genres and I feel they are under represented in roguelike games. I'm also interested in developing some kind of party based roguelike with AI controlled allies who's behavior you can tweak in game.

The level generation is still a bit of a mess, I think I spent more time on this then the rest of the game and will probably spend a ton of time in the future to get rid of all those oddities.

As for the difficulty, roughly how many times did you die? Or did you die at all before winning. I'm trying to err more on the easy side as I want to the game to be approachable by non hardcore roguelike players (thus the simplified interface), but obviously my conception of my own games difficulty is biased.

I made the graphics myself so 'not bad' is the highest praise I could possibly expect with my limited programmer art skills .

Thanks again for your feedback and encouragement.