Messages

1

Early Dev / Re: Rogue Survivor Alpha 3.21

« on: July 10, 2010, 10:34:58 PM »

I've had plenty of moments like that, too.

"Oh shit, a disciple- WAIT, OPEN THE DOOR BACK UP IT'S COM- DON'T BARRICADE IT YOU PRICK."

For the record, I think it's fabulous.

2

Early Dev / Re: Rogue Survivor Alpha 3.21

« on: July 08, 2010, 10:54:48 PM »

Tile-making progress, because I'm bored:



Edit:

And the bunch from today. I'm cribbing some sprite shapes from La Mulana since it makes for an effective paper-doll.

3

Early Dev / Re: Rogue Survivor Alpha 3.21

« on: July 07, 2010, 10:57:01 PM »

Actually, believe it or not, they're not in La Mulana's style.

Useless trivia time!

La Mulana's graphics really are something to behold, and not because they're flashy. Actually, it's because the creators of the game painstakingly imitated the graphical limitations of one of the MSX's video modes. The defining characteristic of this 'style' of graphics is that the original MSX could not support more than two colors in a single eight-by-one horizontal line of pixels. Transparent sprites could violate this rule, sort of; sprites were a single color, and were drawn over everything else. Some games demonstrated more colorful sprites, probably by overlapping one or more sprites to represent a single object on-screen. It wasn't a Famicom, but it could still produce some nice looking visuals for the time.

On the other hand, the ZX Spectrum was decidedly not graphically powerful. It was an inexpensive and capable home computer, not a dedicated gaming machine - but that didn't stop anyone. Gamers and game makers embraced the Spectrum warts and all, even though it could only draw two colors for every eight-by-eight pixel block, the size of a single typographical character on the screen. Transparent sprites and other such luxuries were not supported, resulting in fairly severe 'attribute clash', which had to be dealt with in a number of creative ways.

Not only that, the MSX and the ZX Spectrum had entirely different default palettes! While both featured the same number of colors, the colors themselves were different for each. The ZX Spectrum featured something not unlike the default palette in MS Paint, while the MSX was somewhat more varied and a bit more muted. See below:


ZX Spectrum


MSX

So, if you feel like splitting hairs...

The tiles I posted could have been displayed by an MSX - with different colors. However, they're meant to imitate the blockiness and vivid coloration of the ZX Spectrum.

Here are the same food tiles, faithfully rendered in MSX style:


So now that you've had your fill of utterly useless 80's computer trivia...

I'm a big fan of Castle of the Winds myself. It was my first rogue-like, before I even knew what rogue-likes were! The drag and drop 'paper doll' inventory system was easy to understand, even though the variety of items was somewhat... bland. I didn't care, I was like, twelve at the time. But let's take a look at the inventory system here: Three equipment slots total. One for each hand, one for the body. The only thing that making these slots 'real' would accomplish is that when you equip an item, it leaves your normal inventory. If you could carry anything in your hands, this would give the player a bonus of two extra inventory slots from the start, but unless the inventory works that way then I can't help but feel that these changes would just be mostly cosmetic.

I'm really against giving items specific weights and volumes unless the system is very, very simple to work with. Diablo-style backpacks and others like them (Resident Evil 4, I'm looking at you) are just a pain in the ass. (If I wanted to turn inventory management into a block puzzle, I'd play Tetris or Tangrams or something!) If at some point in the future roguedjack wanted to make the inventory account for small items versus large items intuitively, assigning a simple number from 1-5 representing item size, and then assigning a capacity number to the inventory (say 8 or 10 to start) would be the best way to go. No difficult decimal math on the user's end to tell if something will fit, just simple mental addition and subtraction. Equipped items could be removed from your inventory and carried or worn regardless of size.

With the added inventory space, time management in firefights or zombie raids would become a bit more paramount. Dropping a held item could be considered a free action (I think dropping is already, but you have to remove an equipped first before dropping it) while inserting or removing inventory items should not be; swapping a held item for one in your inventory would take twice as long as dropping the one you have in your hand and picking up another one. Reloading could take as long as swapping, but if ammo is smaller (which it tends to be) then it would make more sense to carry lots of ammo instead of a handful of loaded weapons. (But it wouldn't restrict the player's style; maybe you want to do things musketeer style and have a few loaded firearms ready.) It's a small difference, but with the veritable zombie armies that you run into after week two, escape simply isn't an option most of the time. Small details like this should in practice affect how players prepare for and approach their friendly neighborhood undead-mutant menace without slugging things down at all.

4

Early Dev / Re: Rogue Survivor Alpha 3.21

« on: July 06, 2010, 11:35:21 PM »

More feedback, and another suggestion:

First off, I was playing the game last night and experienced a rather satisfying defeat. I got chased back to a barricaded shop during a night-time zombie raid, and was subsequently cornered. Upon trying to escape, I found that more zombies were waiting outside. My barricade had turned against me! It didn't take long for the situation to go from bad to worse, but at no point did I find myself cursing the game for being unfair or frustrating. As far as I was concerned, this is how the game should work - one false move, in this case going out at a very wrong time, lead to a cascade of unraveling plans and an eventual outwitting by the game. (In case you didn't know, this is rather unusual for this style of game; most rogue-likes rely on quick, cheap, and unavoidable deaths to challenge the player.)

So, after being impressed by the game's ability to kill me without opening trapdoors beneath my character's feet or something comparably bullshit, I felt I should again let you know that you're on the right track. Very much so. The difficulty curve is spot-on, even though there's nothing really climactic at the end of it yet. (Unless the black-ops count.)

Anyhow, my latest suggestion deals once again with the food issues.



The above meters represent two things:

1. The light blue meter is food as we know it. It goes up when you eat, and depletes rather quickly. With the Light Eater skill maxed, you can last about two days on this before you become hungry, but without it you don't last quite as long.

2. The dark blue meter is a reserve meter. Those dark blue bars translate into a day's worth of food points, but once they're gone, they're gone. (If you were to restore them, it shouldn't be terribly efficient, nor should it be possible to restore them on an empty stomach. Once your normal food meter is full, maybe the reserve meter refills at a rate of 0.25 points for every extra food point taken in.)

This means that if this were implemented, you could survive a week (or less, that's up to you) of hunger before starvation begins to set in. The normal problems from hunger would still apply, of course. Running around fighting zombies is hard work! When the game becomes more feature-filled, players will probably be more apt to explore and take risks. Giving them some extra time to establish themselves (and the civilians too) would depress the early-game difficulty curve, but cause it to rise as 'real' hunger takes its toll. The best part is that you could still have a fairly rapid decay rate for most normal food, and then everyone has an 'oh shit' moment a little over a week in. Just in time for the supply drops to begin, but that's small relief for the survivors given the standard rate of zombie proliferation.

The other changes I'd like to suggest, building on previous replies, complete with quirky 'retro' icons:



The two items on the left, a generic 'meat' and 'vegetable' (that's a cabbage by the way) could be especially fast-decaying. Anywhere from two to five days and this stuff should be going all sorts of bad. Bread, that should hold out a little longer, but not much more than a week. Canned food and army rations should last indefinitely, but with the army rations being able to stack higher and possibly providing more nutrition per item. This reintroduces a hoarding incentive, but also allows you to carry more of your food with you (stacking food items) in case you need to move. Which, given the rather aggressive hunting habits of the zombies now, is probable.

Another added plus of the army rations could be durability in another sense. As anyone who's experienced this firsthand can attest, punctured cans of food go bad quick. Spectacularly bad. If there's a chance that the cans can be damaged when you're being attacked by a zombie or shot at, the damaged cans could be made to expire very quickly - within 36 hours or less, perhaps. This means that carrying lots of cans around might be considered unwise unless it's all you have. If that were the case, the player might want to leave those at their base or in safeguarded caches, but carry the army rations with them as they move.

Hypothetically, this would still leave the player hunting for bits of food especially after week two. Any false sense of security given by a healthy food stockpile would quickly dissolve as either the bulk of it rots, or the player's base is discovered by baddies. (And that's the food that the player finds - the rest would be picked over by the other survivors!) Scarcity of edibles would increase dramatically after week two, and the player would have to start relying on their reserve food to make it, possibly not carrying them past week three if they're unsuccessful in locating more food.

A final suggestion - hunger pangs that keep the player awake should only kick in during or near starvation. All this wouldn't make eating optional, but it would make the initial stages of food deprivation more merciful. (And create a slippery slide of confidence-to-despair as that food meter shrinks, until it simply can't be ignored anymore.)

5

Early Dev / Re: Rogue Survivor Alpha 3.21

« on: July 05, 2010, 08:20:17 AM »

Or maybe I was just absurdly lucky back in the other version! I had a hammer that lasted for-freaking-ever, seriously. Many zombies had their skulls renovated by that thing. Over the course of weeks.

6

Early Dev / Re: Rogue Survivor Alpha 3.21

« on: July 01, 2010, 09:21:19 AM »

I've been giving the new version a shot. It's a big improvement in terms of difficulty. After 15 days and 16 hours, my most successful character so far finally bit it due to collapsing from exhaustion at a bad time. The city was so thoroughly, hopelessly overrun that I couldn't make a safe-house that lasted more than a day or two in-game. I suspect that, especially due to the new food decay feature, surviving past three weeks is probably impossible, or at least extraordinarily difficult. Like in previous versions, emphasizing the Agility, Light Eater, and High Stamina skills will keep you alive much, much longer, but the constant quest for food will keep you from ever being able to hole up in a safe location for more than five days or so. Any safe location you leave can be considered lost - the zombies inevitably track you back to it thanks to the much more aggressive tracking behavior. The exceptions are offices and stores, which are secure in proportion to how much furniture they contain.

The changes to the food mechanics don't sit entirely well with me, though. Army rations no longer stacking is the biggest complaint I have. Since eventually all food you encounter will be spoiled, you'll always want to carry spoiled groceries over spoiled army rations because the groceries have more food points. I also have to wonder why canned goods don't seem to exist in this world, which could become a rare and precious commodity in the late-game once all regular food has spoiled. Overall the rate of food spoilage seems too quick... A progressive decay of food items would make more sense, where fresh groceries become stale, then spoiled, then rotten. With enough points into Light Eater you can still last a little while on spoiled food, especially if you somehow manage to stockpile it, but whereas in the previous version it was much too easy to hide in a zombie fortress and wait things out, it's almost too hard now to take shelter. At first it's exciting, but this gradually gives way to frustration.

The smarter civilians are a welcome change, though. As are the much brighter, much more effective army guys. I've noticed that even leaderless civilians will gather together in sheltered locations, close doors behind them, barricade windows, and so forth. This makes the initial onslaught much less of a massacre and also indirectly helps the player early on. (They have a tendency to barricade bedrooms for you, and will fight zombies with you if they're cornered.) Much better than the civilians of old, which were just a nuisance.

Melee weapons seem to be very fragile now. This is actually a good thing in that it keeps fights interesting, and you'll want to scavenge up backup weapons any time you're out and about. You can't just grab a huge hammer and be set for the next two months. Have you considered having chairs and tables yield weapons when broken, like a few chair legs or something? This could make the initial arming of the masses easier, but making improvised weapons like these highly fragile would mean any benefit gained from them is highly temporary.

Keep up the good work.

7

Early Dev / Re: Rogue Survivor Alpha 3.1

« on: June 25, 2010, 04:44:33 PM »

Even if you don't employ blinking for stacks of items or anything to that effect, having item icons be separate from the decorations used by actors would greatly improve item visibility. (Games like the tile version of Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup implement this, with a separate 'paper doll' for actors and decor and tile icons for items when they're on the ground. It really helps.) I'm assuming that you'll have corpses and blood spatters decay over time, which would also help to clean up the visuals quite a bit.



Here you can see what I mean. When drawing the world and the inventory side-screen, the game draws from a different stock of images than when it draws the characters.

It's a shame that having scent-tiles spread out chews up too much CPU time. Something else that might be worth considering is to have stationary actors just project a greater 'aggro-range' for zombies if they've been hanging around for too long, or something. That's up to you though, performance is top priority for now.

One other thing that you're probably already aware of: Human actors will not pick up items they're willing to trade for, and rarely seem to eat or sleep. This applies to all living actors regardless of alignment, but actors following somebody will at least sleep more often. (The constant exhaustion does make them easy zombie fodder though!) At some later future date, it would be nice to see other survivors as committed to self-preservation as I am. (By the way, Bob has survived three months into the zombie war. Hooray!)

Great work so far, bro. Keep it up.

8

Early Dev / Re: Rogue Survivor Alpha 3.1

« on: June 25, 2010, 03:50:30 AM »

Oh, by the way, something strange that just happened with my game.

I rescued a soldier from a near-fatal zombie attack who, in spite of having a loaded weapon and ammunition in his inventory, would not fight back. He was out of stamina, also.

The abundance of fully loaded army pistols and ammo, and completely empty army rifles tells me something goofy is happening here. Can NPC actors change weapons yet?

(Edit:)

Upon further inspection, it doesn't seem that soldiers know how to retreat, either. Upon becoming exhausted, they'll stand defenseless and allow themselves to be killed.

9

Early Dev / Re: Rogue Survivor Alpha 3.1

« on: June 24, 2010, 10:09:13 PM »

Hey guys, sup author-dude. Just dropping by with some remarks, critiques, and what have you.

First off, this game is fun. I really like where it's going, and I've enjoyed it for hours and hours already, but there's a problem. I'm the goddamn Juggernaut. The only thing that can kill me, it seems, is a crafty Black-Ops man with an army rifle. In my current game I've survived more than fifty days, have stockpiled an additional twenty or so days worth of food, I've raided one C.H.A.R. office already (with the help of zombies anyway) and I have army rifle ammo and medical supplies coming out of my ears. I can do this with some routine, and after you overcome the learning curve it seems pretty easy to make it this long even without followers. So, believe it or not... I think the game is actually too easy. Maybe I'm missing something. I tend to scour the districts I'm in and play cautiously, but the enemies and what have you don't seem terribly aggressive, and grizzled 57-day World-War-Z veteran Bob McGready is finally getting bored with smashing zombie skulls with a huge hammer. If you can ever become bored with such a thing.

So, I'll admit that my play hasn't been terribly exhaustive, but after looking at the game assets I can say that I've uncovered most of what the game has to offer. Some of the harder enemies have yet to appear in large numbers, but even Disciples are easy pickings. I remain enthusiastic that I'll discover and be mauled by new and terrifying foes (that don't use guns) as I continue my quest to survive for a whole year straight, but my interest is beginning to shift toward every gamer's favorite meta-game: plugging the developer with countless banal suggestions!

1. Zombies are supposed to be dumb, sure, but these guys are way dumb. Ol' Bob McGready can hide out in his boarded up apartment for weeks without a zombie incursion. I recommend using a cellular automaton to govern the presence of scents in the game. The longer you linger in one space, the further your scent spreads until it reaches equilibrium with the rate of scent decay. Here's a diagram.



If scents decay slowly, staying in one spot will quickly produce a lingering cloud of 'you' around wherever you're hiding, especially if scent decay effects from rain only affect the outdoors. Due to the small size of the grid's data (you'd probably be working with a 2-D array of lists or something containing each actor's UID and how much of their stench is present) it shouldn't bog down the game too awfully bad. If a zombie steps into a tile that has scents, they should begin their usual tracking behavior, and try and track their prey through barricades. The result is that hiding in one spot is likely to attract zombies, eventually. Staying still in a fortified location should still work (and work well if you know what you're doing) but the increased likelihood of being detected would make things much more exciting.

2. An option to build free standing barricades could be nice, but it should require more wood than barricading a door or window. (Fully barricading a door requires about three pieces of wood. A free standing barricade should take at least six to finish.) This would allow you to replace doorways in the absence of furniture or to erect choke points in the streets, but it would be an expensive process.

3. One exceptionally reliable method I have found for disposing of zombies in a risk-free manner is to wait until they come within melee range, hit them, and step backward. They can't attack me, usually. While zombies can't and shouldn't run, short lunges (if the zombie actors have a stamina meter, they could wear out within a couple turns) would make this nearly game-breaking strategy impossible. Maybe you could just reserve it for fresh zombies that are still a little limber.

4. This is a more technical complaint. The game should employ an icon for items that are in your inventory or on the ground which is separate from the decorations used by the actors. (If this is already true and I've just missed it, I'm sorry.) I was working on a sweet ZX Spectrum style graphical overhaul when I realized it might make the actors look all kinds of stupid.



I read in the development notes that more extensive modding is going to be supported in the future, so I'm not too antsy about this. It'd just be nice if it were easier to tell the difference between items laying on the ground. If piles of items either had a corner icon indicating that there's a pile there or blinked between the various items laying on the same tile, that'd be fantastic too. Right now it takes a trained (and strained) eye to make out a few of the various bits and pieces. (For blinking tiles, they could blink over pieces of furniture they're stored on as well.)

5. I haven't noticed any of the zombified soldiers wearing their old gear. That should change. Armored zombies that take more hits would be a real treat. (Of course, when they mutate they should shed their armor in the process. That could get a little ridiculous.)

6. Lastly, sneaking! Zombies supposedly don't breathe, usually don't move too fast, and what about those crafty special agents that keep blowing my brains out? (And what about those of us who would rather avoid them?) Being able to sneak around and avoid spot-checks by other actors would make surviving certain encounters which are decidedly not weighted in the player's favor (Black-Ops tend to kill me instantly upon revealing them) more possible, and also make ambushes from the undead rank and file possible, especially in the dark. (Since zombies are guided by smell, sneaking around should have no effect on them!)

I'd also like to second the suggestions of unloading guns (Doom RL does this nicely) and maybe adding a little bit more variety to the items found in-game. And I'd love to pick your brain some time, this is a delightful project that many people have clearly been waiting a long time for.

Oh and, by the way... Why don't burning cars ever go out?