Topics

1

Design / Professions, choosing them or not?

« on: June 30, 2014, 08:29:53 AM »

I was injecting yesterday a fine chunk of professions into the game's editor when I pondered if the player should in fact be forced choosing a profession during his character's creation phase. The real reason behind it is giving the player total freedom during his training process because choosing a profession means raising a certain group of skills where some of these skills could not be part of the player's interest in developing as priority or at all.

So what options I thought of? I thought of having the player choosing his character's age, if the character is too young he will not be able to choose a profession during the character's creation phase and the player itself would be the one to manually train his desirable set of skills in-game. (Please understand, training a skill in my game means spending weeks, months or even years of his life-spawn to effectively increase them, depending on the skill level and how much he wishes to advance.) If the player decides to start with an older character he can choose one or more professions right from the start, depending of how old the character is set to be.

So what do you think of this? Should this be an interesting starting decision or should the player simply choose what skills to start with right from the beginning, maybe discarding the professions option as a whole?

2

Design / Major moral controversial features in a game.

« on: June 26, 2014, 09:01:41 AM »

I once posted this following subject in some other forum and the reaction to it wasn't that great, and I post it in a forum filled with grownup people. Not that their reaction wasn't that bad but they simply started to view me as someone... crazy. Not to mention the thread was later removed from the forum. It seems it is fine to make movies and write books about these things but as soon as they go inside a game, the whole world collapses. I thought that PEGI 18+ ratings existed for a reason.

I enjoy a lot playing games with endless possibilities, I think that most of you feel the same way, especially if you are a rogue like fan. But Before I get into details, I just want to make sure you know that I take no part in real life of the following features that I'm about mention, in fact I despise every human being who exercise them; I just want to make sure of this, one should always apply extra caution when dealing with possible retards, whose disposition to see the difference between reality and computer games is practically non-existent.

It seems that killing, for the most of us, is just something completely ordinary; I mean taking the life of an in-game character, including animals and children. But the minute you add rapping and torture, it seems you might just be crossing the line. How would you feel about having a game where the option to molest and torturing someone was there? I mean, you, having the possibility to play as the ultimate bad guy. It is not like the game urges you to use those actions upon NPCs, they would simply be there in case you felt like using them and to handle their consequences. These actions would also be viewed as something really bad within the game. Take Fallout as example, if you murdered a child you would be flagged as 'child murderer' making many NPCs to permanently cease interaction with your char: "Stay the fuck away from me you child murdurer!"

What are your thoughts on this subject? I'm extremely curious to see how this forum will handle this topic.

[EDIT]
Before you post please make sure you read my post at page 4 starting with: *** Explanation ***

3

Design / Classes vs professions

« on: June 23, 2014, 01:04:51 PM »

I was building my professions' form when it started to collide with my classes' form. What exactly is a class? Isn't being a warrior, a mage or a hunter also a profession? Maybe I should simply remove classes and stick with professions. Do you have any other ideas or uses for classes?

4

Off-topic (Locked) / Games that you are anxious for playing

« on: May 27, 2014, 08:45:59 AM »

Currently there are 3 games I'm really looking forward to play: Elite Dangeours, Mount & Blade Bannerlord and Ultima Ratio Regum.

What games are you really excited about?

5

Design / Showing interest in my anatomy system.

« on: May 16, 2014, 03:21:09 PM »

As some of you may know, I'm designing this complex anatomy system to track damage realistically or at least closer to reality. I'm creating this thread so I can understand if this interests any of you because it will take me a good deal of time to add screenshots with multiples instances of my anatomy templates accompanied with loads of text to explain it all. I really don't want to waste time doing all that if in the end this is just something you really don't care about.

Let me just give you a quick info on what I'm trying achieving with this system so you can decide if this interests you.

Features:
- Allows characters to track damage to specific body parts from torso to finger.
- Body parts can have 3 levels of complexity like Chest -> Thorax -> Ribbs.
- Each body part level can have layers like Skin, Fat, Muscle and Bone followed by internal organs.
- Each layer has a certain amount of HP to understand how deep a wound can be.
- This system allows an accurate tracking of internal bleedings.
- Each body part or even specific internal organs can be set to control a specific body functionality. A crippled leg can penalize movement cost where a lung can affect the character's endurance.
- This system allows a detailed description of what happens for each hit.
- Each weapon will cause different types of wounds. A blade will mostly be about cutting flesh and piercing where a hammer won't cut limbs but crush them.
- Major wounds will leave scars.

6

Design / Knowing NPCs

« on: May 08, 2014, 03:13:00 PM »

I was just finishing assembling 3 more computers here at my job when my mind started floating (again) towards my project - yeah, one thread in my brain was taking care of the computers while another one was brainstorming game design, if you guys enjoy creating stuff you know how this usually goes.

Anyway, I've been figuring out for some time now some aspects on how the player could handle NPCs in a large city using my game's interface. But first let me describe how my game behaves while in cities so you can have a general view of the whole thing and to better understand my questions. You need also to understand that I don't classify this game of mine as a roguelike, though it is strongly inspired in the genre sharing some of its features, being procedural generated content the main one.

Instead of having your character travelling by turns in a tiled grid to interact with the city, the player is presented with a "fine" interface (operated with mouse + keyboard naturally) from where he can browse the city's contents. I haven’t yet idealized the whole set of options available for this interface but it will be something like having the 'Explore', 'Houses', 'Services' and "People" buttons.

The 'Explore' is the first thing the player will have to do to. This will simulate the character walking around the whole city memorizing its buildings and the persons who are currently in it. This is basically collecting data from the city to the interface with time elapsing realistically during this process having into account the city's size. For very large cities the exploration task can last more than 1 day. This action is only necessary doing once for each new city entered. When the player revisits cities everything in them is automatically updated in the city's interface.

After the above step is done, all houses, services and NPC will be available in the interface in their corresponding sections.

Houses - Shows a full list of houses the city has. They will be marked as unknown until the player enters them or knows more about them - the player can actually break inside houses to rob them.

Services - Shows what kind of services the city provides, like repairing equipment, joining guilds, tournaments, shops, healing temples, bounty hunts, resting, trading etc.

People - Shows a full list of people (NPC) currently existing in the city. They will be marked as unknown until the player talks to them or until he gets information about them through other sources. The ‘People’ section will have a powerful data grid containing all the uncovered information regarding NPCs including their names, gender, age, family name, wealth level, profession, faction, relationship status, friendly status, trust level, the number of times the player has talking to them and even their attractiveness level. The interface also lets the player perform searches and filter persons by any of the mentioned descriptions. If you have played EVE Online you know exactly what I mean.

I'm not doing this post to understand how do you feel about this city operating system but very interested in knowing how would you like to interact with NPC and how would like to handle their information. Your feedback in this matter is very important to me.

1 – Do you like the idea of talking with each NPC individually to know who they are?
2 – Do you like the idea of the NPC's information starting hidden or not, or maybe just partially?
3 – Would you prefer having the ‘Explore’ option also uncovering all the NPC's information automatically with increased time elapsed, simulating a quick chat with everyone in town?
4 – Would you prefer having their information hidden with the exception of those who are quest givers? Or just having quest givers being highlighted?
5 – How many NPC you think that is reasonable to have in a large city taking into consideration that each one of them can be interacted with?
6 – How much do you actually enjoy speaking with NPC and listening to their stories?

Please note, the player is not forced to talk with everyone but he can do it if he wants to. This is just something that the game lets you do, just another game play option. Quests that are NPC related have NPC's names in them so you don't need to talk with everyone in town to search for them.

Thanks a ton!

7

Design / High fantasy word for currency

« on: March 31, 2014, 12:33:42 PM »

I'm not sure what kind of word to use for currency in my medieval fantasy game.

Gold - I plan to have copper, silver and gold and it will take some time before the player actually achieves 1 gold coin or equivalent so calling "gold" to silver and copper doesn't feel right.

Money - Did such word actually exist in medieval era?

Coin - Well, this is the one I enjoy most and probably the one I will use if nothing better comes up. But "coin" seems so vague and yet so primitive.

Any ideas?

8

Temple of the Roguelike / Adding an avatar to my profile.

« on: March 21, 2014, 11:59:57 AM »

Ok, this might sound stupid but I simply can find a way of adding an avatar pic in my profile.
When I select: "Choose avatar from gallery" a text box appears with no action whatsoever, in fact it is a strange looking one, about 20 pixels width and 150 pixels in height.

Am I doing something wrong?

9

Design / My two cents about Permadeath

« on: March 19, 2014, 05:39:45 PM »

I’ve been reading a lot throughout websites scattered all over the web about how people view permadeath. Some really enjoy it while others really hate it and then you have those in between. But it seems that those who enjoy permadeath usually think of themselves as the ultimate appreciators of challenge while at the same time reducing those who dislike it to be mare casual players who seek a smooth experience instead of challenge.

Before this gets personal, I just want to make it clear that this is my personal opinion on how I view the permadeath feature, in other words, is not something open to debate but merely to demonstrate that those voting for permadeath shouldn’t automatically believe that those who deny it do not seek challenge. From what I’ve read around the web, I actually got the impression that mostly of those in favor of permadeath, somehow think of themselves as better players, in a sense of possessing better playing capabilities or in deeper sense of viewing themselves as smarter. I really don't agree with this.

As we all know, permadeath states for: ‘1 try per game’ because when you die, you will have to start all over since there is no progression resuming points whatsoever. Permadeath injects something incredible during play time that I really love: ‘tension / excitement’, because one wrong move can end your character’s life. This feature unconsciously forces players to linger about with extra caution and often forcing them to rethink their situation, unlike other games that are easily exploited through the abuse of the game’s save and load features.

However, permadeath as also one particular negative side effect from my own perspective, which is mainly: no sense of accomplishment. Don’t freak out just yet. I’ll get into details soon enough. From all the roguelike games I’ve played (tried), ADOM is the only roguelike that I can say to have actually played as I endured through it every day for a period of for nearly 6 months. This only happened because I did farm its save points, otherwise I wouldn’t have felt compelled to played it at all because of the reason I described at the beginning of this very paragraph. The problem with ADOM is that its random events generation would 20% of the time (while in the wilderness) feel unfair, like it could force you into a fight with loads of jackals with the misfortunate of your character having the wrong class or simply for being a noob. But at least its world map was fixed and each time I played it I could actually feel a sense of progression and view new parts of the game that I believe to be impossible without farming Saving-Games.

Okay, but why do I say that there is no sense of accomplishment with permadeath? The real problem lies with having permadeath combined with pretty much everything in the game being procedural generated and its harsh difficulty level. Why? Because when I start a new unexplored generated world all previous achievements I did undergo previously no longer apply and the chance of encountering similar events are scarce and I’m not talking about getting to know better how the game’s features works, like skills usage, the item’s functionality and what strategies to adopt with each type of monster or simply what action to perform in every situation, no, this is called getting to know game’s game play mechanics better. I’m talking about removing the sense of progression as everything is now different. Remember Golden Axe or Double Dragon slide scroll classic games? Yeah, they also featured permadeath because when you died you had to start all over again, regardless of the size of the life energy bar or lives amount. But whenever I replayed these games, I did feel a sense of progression as each time I tried them I would go farther and farther, leading me to eventually ending them and that felt very rewarding.

In a procedural generated game, when you start in a new world you can either die quickly or not, depending of many factors of course, namely how the game is coded and how fair randomization is and yeah, player skill / experience with the game itself. But roguelikes are usually hard by nature and this itself feels quite incompatible with permadeath. For a game to have permadeath it’s difficult level should be more forgiving as you only have one try to finish it (if it has an end at all). Of course this is RELATIVE to each game but if you want challenge you really don’t need a roguelike with permadeath, you just need basically a challenging game play like an Asteroids game, having each level getting progressively harder and harder until it gets insanely difficult. But we prefer roguelikes right? They are complex and detailed with unique and superb features and this is why I love the roguelike genre. It’s not because we are smarter but because we enjoy the complexity and tons of choices at our disposable.

So where do I stand in the permadeath ability? Right in the middle. I prefer a system where you have controlled save-games for two main reasons. The first one is that with controlled saving you will still feel the tension and excitement during the choices you take and secondly it let the players feel a sense of progression. Why having no saving points when the game has the ability to generate full worlds from scratch dynamically, therefore offering so much replay value? I can say that ADOM with occasionally saving was the best experience I had with a roguelike.

Nonetheless, there are no wrong opinions in this matter, just different preferences and this is my personal preference.

10

Programming / Has anyone attempted to use actions points instead turns for combat?

« on: August 22, 2013, 05:29:18 PM »

Has anyone attempted to use actions points instead turns for combat as in Fallout I or 2?

[EDIT]
For rogue like games!

11

Programming / "Realistic" magic casting criteria

« on: August 16, 2013, 11:51:05 AM »

I'm over the game's magic system and I was really thinking of making it different from traditional fantasy games, where in traditional games, players are able to cast magic just like that, with no restrictions whatever except for the character's mana availability. So, how different could I do it? I want it to be plausibly "realistic" with a "fairly" criteria demand.

My game has 9 magic schools, each one focusing in a particular area.
They are the following:

* Sun (Collects its power from heat sources like the Sun and fire)
* Stone (Collects the energy from big chucks of solid rock.)
* Lotus (Collects the energy from plants, from grass to trees)
* Eclipse (Collects the energy from the planet's negative discharges of energy that happen at night)
* Moon (Collects the energy at night from the light's moon)
* Comet (Collects the energy from the cosmos)
* Storm (Collects the energy from the planet's atmosphere and water)
* Leech (Collects the energy from all the living creatures, plants and animals)
* Feral (Collects the energy exclusively from large wild animals)

Ok, so what I'm attempting to do is restricting the way each magic school works to cast magic. This is what I have so far:

Sun - It needs at least one of the following conditions:
* Day time with with about 60% of the sky without clouds.
* Any character in the party actively hold a torch or any other fire source.

Stone
* A land type rich in rocks like mountains and rocky deserts.
* It can work quite well inside constructions like castles and dungeons.
* Unable to function if rocks are covered with ice or snow.

Lotus
* It requires biomes rich in plants, like forests and grasslands.

Eclipse - It needs all of the following conditions:
* It requires night time.
* Air humidity above 60%

Moon - It needs all of the following conditions:
* It requires night time.
* At least a quarter of moon's light visibility.

Comet - It needs all of the following conditions:
* It requires night time.
* They sky should be at least 60% clear of clouds.

Storm - It needs all of the following conditions:
* Environmental humidity of 70%
* They sky should be at least 60% filled with clouds.

Leech
* It requires land types filled with life, plants or animals.

Feral
* It requires land types with abundant large, wild animals.

These restrictions may look more than fairly, nonetheless, those who exercise magic will be able to store their spells into runes, allowing them to cast spells without needing to match that particular magic school's criteria. However, runes will have a limited amount of spell storing capacity and will break to dust after some usages. Wizards will also need to recharge these runes under normal casting criteria before they can used them at will. I think this will provide the right flexibility for casting magic under various scenarios, without making a wizard feeling too week or incredibly too powerful. Though I strongly believe that with the right strategy they will still present themselves a very dangerous character to have as both an opponent and ally.

I know its difficult for you to fully understand the implications of having such design implemented when not even remotely aware of how everything will work in the end. But still, I would be interested in listening to your point of views.

12

Player's Plaza / Features you love and features you hate to have in Roguelike games.

« on: August 14, 2013, 08:37:53 AM »

Features I love in Roguelikes:

- Exploration
- Survival
- Large world map
- Total Freedom (be good or evil)
- Character development
- Experience meter
- Deadly combat
- Realistic damage system (body parts controlling functionality)
- Interactivity with objects
- detailed physics (corpse decomposition, chars reacting to environment, items rusting or breaking etc...
- Providing more than just combat, with crafting and professions.

Features that usually keep me away from some roguelikes.
(usually, it takes more than one of the following features to keep me away from roguelikes, depending on the number of features that I love that the game nay have included).

- Permadeath (for it begs for repetitiveness if not properly balanced).
- Lack of information about pretty much everything (consulting the manual over and over is not comfortable, specially when using the keyboard).
- Keyboard input only (I just think that being in 2013 there should be also mouse control).
- Having the player's success based on luck and level generation weighting more than 10%.
- Being hack & slash.
- Needing to die over and over and then some, just to get better at it (usually bound to permadeath).
- Repetitive level design and missing a world map, as in Crawl and Brogue (though I find Brogue enjoyable although repetitive).
- Bad ASCII implementation. Some ASCII implementations feel really good while others really confusing.
- Cartoonish graphics (Zelda style).

Tell me about yours

Please, I would like to keep this thread about feature numerating and not discussion other persons' personal preferences.

13

Programming / Persistent world? Yes or no?

« on: July 28, 2013, 02:12:02 PM »

I have mixed feelings regarding having a persistent worlds in roguelike games. What I like about it is that you can actually bind yourself to that world, meaning that you can continuously explore it by each time you are born in it, allowing yourself to memorize and feel familiar with it. I also like to witness your last actions from previous characters unfold, to build consequences at the world's present time.

This is all nice but also feels like exploiting. When you die exploring a certain area you will unconsciously carry this knowledge to your next character, i. e. this will let the player prepare his next character accordingly to that specific area containing a specific type of danger that could only be dealt in a specific way.

This could be solved by terraforming a new world each time the player creates a character so that the player feels the world as new as we once felt Earth in our real lives but I really don't know how people would think about this. Maybe I should let the player choose if he wants to reincarnate in the same planet?

What do you think of this?

14

Programming / Races and roles

« on: July 20, 2013, 12:08:27 PM »

Ahhh... Elves, trolls, dwarves, halflings, orcs, trolls, humans,... Whenever I'm about to choose my main charater's race from the extensive list of races available, I know I will end up being either a human or an Elf. For some reason I simply can't stand the idea of having my character reincarnate as a dwarf, halfling or a dumb troll. Unless there are other new races worth exploring like an Elemental, Beastlord or Drake, this is how it usually ends, me being an Elf or a Human.

I fully understand that having such "common" races in a game might be a good thing because people are already familiar with them and may be specially attached to some. These common races usually share the same strengths and weaknesses allowing players to quickly foreseen the expected game play. A dwarf usually excels in fortitude and stamina while an elf will mostly certainly have magic bonuses making it a strong candidate to become a great wizard.

Then you have roles. Certain roles will be only available to certain races, which I guess it makes sense. Having "The Great Troll wizard" or  the "Champion Halfling Gladiator" would sound an utter non-sense. But this however does restricts possibilities, which is something I'm usually not fond of. Having to choose roles itself at the beginning of the game feels already castrating, not to mention you will have to try each race with each role until its outcome will be something you might appreciate or that may suit your gaming style.

Races and roles can also be a decisive factor to enjoy or letting someone getting into the game. I hated when I first played ADOM because I choose a race and role with a poor outcome. That combination didn't let me to perceive ADOM's game play as expect.

The Elder's Scrolls have the concept I like most for character generation. You do choose a race and possibly a role or you can create a role of your own and even if you create your own role, the character won't be limited to those skills you have chosen, you will still be able to train whatever you want throughout the whole playing without restriction whatsoever, though you won't become good at every field of course. But there is something I really hate even in skyrim. Something that affects a huge stack of games, which is failing miserably on not telling the player what exactly will be those bonuses / penalties they mention regarding that particular race the player is viewing information about. Lets have a look at this example in Skyrim:

The High Elves, also commonly known as Altmer, are a race of Elves which reside in the region of Tamriel. The High Elves, or Altmer try their utmost to follow their ancestors which are the Aldmer in as many ways as possible, namely though, through traditions involving Marriage and Reproduction. (...)

Altmer/High Elves are, on average smaller than humans in body size, which means that in general they are not as strong. Being very tall creatures, this makes them less Agile than the Bosmer, and therefore more vulnerable. Altmer are among the most intelligent and magically skilled races within Nirn, which surpass even the Bretons in magical ability. (...)

Ok, so we can conclude the High Elves are good with magic but what is good with magic? What exactly are their bonuses? I need numbers and I need to see what is considered average so that even if they show those numbers players can understand what the magnitude of the bonuses they refer about.

Anyway...
What do you prefer? Races with or without established roles?

Having or not common races? Do you prefer to have races you never heard before or keep playing with traditional ones?

15

Programming / Screenies of my cave generating algorythm

« on: July 17, 2013, 01:51:00 PM »

Bellow are some screenies of the algorithm I started to developed yesterday. The algorithm seems quite flexible and capable of producing narrow and claustrophobic cave systems as well as huge open space cavern systems. I just thought of sharing these alpha pictures with you because you tend to add those extra ingredients I might not be aware of.

Note: The color seen in the caves tells the floor depth, being darker areas deeper floors. I've already changed the floor so they don't go generally too deep (at least visually). I hope to upload some more screenies as I finish to implement the water in the algorithm.

Each cave seen is an independent render; each image shows multiple examples.

[Alpha version]
http://i.imgur.com/TNHqnKC.png
http://i.imgur.com/ZXebdii.png

[Beta version]
A new screenie. This one has water samples
http://i.imgur.com/dUD130u.png

These pictures are not what the player will see. These are just for you to have an idea of what the algorithm is capable of producing.