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Topics - Game Hunter

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7DRLs / 7DRL 2014 Massive Videos Thread
« on: March 18, 2014, 04:09:32 AM »
I was advised to post all the videos here at the Temple, so I'll do just that. I'll even do one better: along with links to each video, I'll write up a small, additional review of the game. (EDIT: not doing a "official" judging, at least not with the posts.) Feel free to either comment in this thread, or head on over to YouTube and comment there: I'll be reading both as I go.

I've decided to go in the opposite direction of "sometimes videos won't be available here" and instead make it so that the videos are unlisted until their standard viewing time on YouTube. In other words, you'll have a small period of exclusive access by checking here first! It's not really my intention to add traffic in that manner, this just happens to make things less time-demanding for me while I'm at work.

To 7DRL Developers:
If you want me to do some extra reviewing for your game, let me know and I'll strive for more than one paragraph: if you want me to target a specific part (like the graphics, controls, gameplay, mechanics, etc) specify that as well. You can even ask this after the post goes up, it's just a quick edit! (Of course if you wait too long, like a month or more, I might not remember enough of the game to be confident in a review, so please keep this in mind.)

Anyway, without further ado, I present to you the massive link list! (This will be updated over the course of the next couple months as videos are completed.) Listing is alphabetical by game name.

7DArrrL, by Paul Jeffries
Beware of Strange Warp Points, by Ed Kolis
Fida'i, by Pat Wilson
Hellspace, by Numeron
Impera, by kniiight
Northbound, by skeeto and netguy204
Rogue Station, by Pål Trefall & Kenneth Gangstø
SoulsRL, by pangaea
The Littlest Princess, by Joseph Bradshaw
VARIABLO, by Rat King

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Traditional Roguelikes (Turn-based) / 7DRL 2012 game talk
« on: March 30, 2012, 07:44:21 PM »
Just some references that should go in the OP (lemme know if there should be others!):

RogueBasin entry for 7DRL Challenge 2012
Temple of the Roguelike 2012 7DRL Challenge Evaluation
Game Hunter's 7DRL 2012 Challenge YouTube Playlist

It would probably be too much to make a bunch of different topics for each game that comes to mind, so I will simply create a thread where we can talk about all of them! Here's what comes to mind for me:

Infiniverse: has anyone found naturally-occurring antimatter? It doesn't seem like you could win the game in a reasonable amount of time (especially given no saving at all) without collecting some Antimatter to either sell or help for the journey towards the mysterious X at the center of the galaxy. It's possible to buy some but, frankly, it seems more cost-effective to use radioactives as fuel, and everything common is pretty darn cheap to sell.

Sword in Hand: In case some people beat it without realizing this, it's possible to play four scenarios in a single game. Whether or not the fourth shows up WILL depend on your combination of war/peace choices. To be honest, however, I found the fourth dungeon to be easier than even the second.

Drakefire Chasm: Has anyone else passed the eight dungeon level? (It's the second "boss arena".) I managed to lava-scum it but those enemies are really, really hard: it would be really nice to have a damage indicator when you examine things (even as vague as their current state that you tend to see after melee attacks would be sufficient). The twelfth level totally destroyed me, though, and it only took the enemies three turns to do it. I also have no idea how stat-gains work: part of me wants to believe it depends on your actions on the previous floor, but it doesn't seem to track like that at all.

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I finished play-recording this game a little while ago (you can find the YT playlist here) and I thought it was pretty fun. Lots of different things to get and do, enemies change enough during a single game and between games to keep you on your toes, and the boss fight is definitely something to prepare for. Combined with the varying length and monster difficulty, it's lot a good amount of replayability and variety for newcomers and veterans alike. (Might I even suggest a 5 and 10-floor choice? In those cases the game would have to be rescaled to accomodate, but I think it'd attract a good number of people looking for a quick game.)

There are, however, a number of overlooked details that could be improved, in some cases quite easily. Here are but a few:
  • A very obvious feature that stuck out like a sore thumb was the usage of wands. Their ability to deplete charges rather than your mind/soul reserves has great potential, don't get me wrong: the execution (that is, automatically whenever you use a spell of that element) makes it nearly impossible to use them appropriately.
    • A simple fix to this is to allow the player to "use" wands in order to turn them on or off: in this way they can be saved for the right occasion (i.e., tons of enemies all at once or the rare-but-powerful types).
    • You may also want to consider changing their name, as a "wand" usually implies that the item itself contains spells rather than reserves. Not really sure of a good name, but something along the lines of "battery" or "focus" is more intuitive.
    • Finally, allowing players to move the charge from one wand to another would be convenient: I'd probably still only allow this to be done for wands of the same element (so that it can be automatic), but it would save on inventory space, of which there is surprisingly little once you get going.
  • The spells are a lot of fun, especially because there's so much to do with them. At the same time, however, I find there to be a few general problems with them:
    • Some spells are very nearly redundant. Take, for instance, Ice Shield and Fortification: both provide defense to the player and, if you calculate the armor gained per mind power used, they are worth exactly the same (save time cost). Usually in these cases, you'll try to differentiate them more, such as giving Ice Shield more defense per mind power (so that there's a trade-off between instant but costly defense and delayed but efficient defense), or making Ice Shield weak to fire enemies and Fortification (which is Earth element) weak to ice enemies. Ideally they will be very different spells, so you still have a use for both of them as you play the game. The same is true of Soul Search (which detects stairs) and Revelation (which detects stairs in addition to a bunch of other information), and likely a couple other pairs that don't immediately come to mind.
      • The Slay and Piercing spells are special offenders here, because I doubt they can be changed all that much in relation to each other. In these cases, you should probably just offer the spells as, literally, "Slay" and "Piercing", then give an additional choice of what kind of spell you want it to be. This gives you more room for other spells while maintaining the same original possibilities.
    • A lot of "lesser" offensive spells are often made obsolete by "superior" ones. Most of this is redundancy (i.e., you're always ultimately "attacking an enemy" or "attacking an area"), and so they can be fixed in the same ways as mentioned above. You could, however, give the player a few offensive spell slots, so to speak, which they can then customize by investing additional spell levels into them. For instance, at the very first level you could let "Beam" be specialized into Light, Gray, or Dark, and "Mind Sling" into Fire, Ice, or Earth. By leveling one of them again, it would add additional effects (fire = extra damage over time, ice = slow, earth = knockback, light = blind, gray = confusion, dark = fear), etc. If you inevitably have the reduce the number of choosable spells on the initial menu, I think that's perfectly fine.
    • The game becomes fairly trivial after collecting certain spells. Mana Feast makes it so that you almost never require food (you can, in fact, gain a very tiny amount of mind power by continually resting and Mana Feasting), Revelation makes exploration nearly meaningless, Rage/Fortification makes physical combat extremely easy...there's other cases but you get the idea. For such spells, it's a good idea to make them come with weaknesses: as a simple example, stat-boosters could drain your other stats, or cause extra hunger, or disable certain actions (raging could make it impossible to cast spells and read, fortification could slow you down or make you unable to move for a time). Balance is a beautiful thing once it's accomplished.
  • I think the enemies are done right, although ranged attackers should be more common: that way you have a lot more fighting you at the same time later on. One thing I would like to see, however, are some champison/boss types that drop particularly good gear. It should be an enemy that keeps to its area, so it's entirely up to you in fighting one, but having that "extra challenge" can reduce monotony.
  • Potions are usually not very good for the player: the only ones worth keeping around are healing, and a whole lot of the others are plain negative. This led me to prioritize every other item type over potions. Perhaps this is intended (that is, they're really meant to quaff in hopes that you survive a particularly dangerous combat) but I find it fairly boring to constantly come across potions only to find that I rarer ever kept one, especially because there's an early-game heal spell that greatly reduces the need for even the healing potions. Consider removing some of the negative potions and/or adding potions that do what some of the scrolls do (accompanied by removing those scrolls, of course). Throwing potions can be pretty fun, too.
  • This is just a bug: since you can't buy anything with a full inventory, you also can't buy food, even though it takes up no inventory space. The same is probably true of arrows, although I never had a need to buy them.

So yeah, there's a lot of room for improvements in the nooks and crannies. The game's plenty fun already, but I think you can make it a TON more enjoyable by tweaking things here and there. I don't believe there needs to be any fundamental mechanic redesigns, save some spell stuff, so it shouldn't be hard to at least try some balancing and pop out a new version for testing. (Also I apologize is this is too wall-of-texty: I'm hoping the list format makes it easier to keep track of ideas.)

EDIT: man, lists are so hard to get right

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Temple of the Roguelike / Announcement standard?
« on: February 17, 2012, 07:14:48 PM »
It's great to see new version as they're released, but the organization of them is a little haphazard. In and of themselves this isn't a problem (just check the topics of games you're invested/interested in) but if, for instance, we wanted to improve the frequency of the Roguelike Roundup newspost, having a standard for content in each thread would simplify and expediate collecting all of this information together. Using the roundup as an example, the following information could be included in each announcement:

Game title
Game version / Note that it is a new game
Date of release
Most relevant address (newspost for latest release, main website, etc)

The above example isn't necessarily how to do it: there's almost certainly other significant information to track. That's the main reason for the thread, so that we can actually build a good standard (if one is necessary at all). Right now getter77's the dominant source of these announcements in the first place, so in this context I'm basically asking him if this is reasonable to include. But hey, one day the forum need other people to keep things going, and at that point it would be good to have something to point to so that the announcements can be tracked easily.

But to reiterate, this is only even worth doing if it's decided that things like the roundup are important to keep maintained. There might even be a method for automatically collecting information from forum posts, simplifying the process further.

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Other Announcements / Let's Play... a Bunch of Roguelikes!
« on: February 09, 2012, 08:58:36 PM »
About eight months ago I started a little video series about playing through DoomRL "special" levels (ie, the guaranteed ones). After that I started recording entire runs of the game, at which point my scope snowballed into roguelikes in general. I invite any and all members of the roguelike community to check out my channel and let me know how I'm doing:

Channel, the Roguelike

(For those of you unfamiliar with the new YouTube layout, the Featured tab has all of the more recent updates, while the Videos tab is the best place to look through all videos and playlists; go to Feed -> Comments to leave general messages.)

This is what I've played so far, in alphabetical order:
7DRL Challenge 2012 (playlist)
7DRL Challenge 2013 (playlist)
2012 Annual Roguelike Release Party (playlist)
AliensRL
Alan's Psychedelic Journey
Ancient Domains of Mystery (ADOM)
Angband
Berserk!
Brogue
Cardinal Quest
CastlevaniaRL: Serenade of Chaos
Cataclysm
Caves of Qud
ChessRogue
Delver
Detribus
Diablo
DiabloRL
DoomRL
Dungeonmans
Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup
Dungeon Dash
Dungeon Dashers
Dungeons of Dredmor
Earl Spork
Elona
Epilogue
Frozen Depths
Hack, Slash, Loot
Get Out!!
Golden Age: Endless Dungeon
Hydra Slayer
Infra Arcana
Iter Vehemens ad Necem (IVAN)
MageGuild
Meritous
Notrium
Omega
POWDER
PrincessRL
Random Realms
Red Rogue
Rings of Valor
Rogue
Rogue Planets
Rogue Survivor
Rook
Shoot First
Spelunky
Tales of Maj'eyal
Teleglitch
The Wizard's Lair
Triangle Wizard
UnReal World
ZAPM
Check the Playlists tab for the videos!

If there are any other relevant links besides the game's "main" page (e.g., game's forum, a topic on here, its RogueBasin page, news articles), just tell me what makes sense and I'll be more than happy to include them here as well. Otherwise, if you have any ideas for games I should play (or repeat, if you want me to take another swing at something I've already done) then reply here, or on my channel, or in any of my videos, or PM me, or email me (theuberhunter@gmail.com) and I will do my best to get to it.

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