Show Posts

This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.


Topics - Skeletor

Pages: [1] 2 3 4
1
Design / The best innovative gameplay mechanics ever noticed in 7DRL games
« on: February 07, 2023, 06:45:00 PM »
7DRL is great also because it provides an opportunity to expertiment completely new gameplay mechanics.
What are your favourites?
Some awesome ones I remember:

- Darkness
The fact that darkness gradually turns you mad.. you start hallucinating stuff.. and mind becomes matter.. truly metaphysical, innovative, and also fun to play.

- A Quest Too Far
Instead of grinding your way to minmaxxing your character, you start already strong and well equipped, and your strenght vanishes the more time you spend in the dungeon. Innovative and fun.

- Kobolds
Fight your way through a horde of kobolds.. who keeps throwing small missiles at you, insulting, and evade you. Very fun.

2
Player's Plaza / NFT roguelike art
« on: March 16, 2021, 07:08:37 AM »
I am quite familiar with making NFT (non-fungible tokens in the ethereum network) out of jpg images and sell them on decentralized marketplaces.
Since there is a good amount of roguelikes inspired digital art around, was wondering if anyone could be interested to set up some sort of roguelike art gallery and see how we go?
Preferrably with some digital artist here who has already some twitter (and maybe even instagram) following.
Cost to mint NFTs is higher than normal because of ETH's blockchain congestion but not too high anyway. Would be nice to get Slash's endorsement in order to get part of the profits back to RogueTemple and see if we can re-energize this place as well.

3
There's two sides about Krice for which he was criticized.
1. One is him treating newbies like crap and making the forum unhospitable for them. Same treatment was given to well known devs or community members. To which I agree Krice should have been reprimanded long time ago - perhaps not exhiled, just temporary bans and reminded of basic rules to keep good vibes in the community. I also didn't like him in the beginning; had to learn to tolerate him with time - but have to admit he would make interesting interventions in the forum from time to time.
2. The other is Krice not alligning with the current politically correct globohomo trend in videogames, for which he has also received a fair degree of criticism by some. Well, that shouldn't be an issue in my book. He had his views, whatever. There's already enough politically correctness in videogames. Thing is, Krice genuinely liked roguelikes. Was just a bit autistic, there was no reason to remove the off-topic section altogether.
There were plenty of good threads on non-roguelike videogames and now they are all gone forever?

4
Programming / How to hire roguelike devs?
« on: June 06, 2020, 07:47:38 AM »
Say I was looking to hire someone to develop an android roguelike for me, what would be a good place to look and how much would I expect to pay per hour?

5
CDProjectRed becomes Poland #1 valuable listed firm.. Marcin Iwinski now a billionaire.
Bit of cherrypicking here but I'm always happy when I see these kind of news.

6
Off-topic (Locked) / Let's get rich and watch the world burn
« on: April 01, 2020, 01:55:39 AM »
As the economist JR Hicks opined, "Really catastrophic depression is most unlikely to occur as a result of the simple operation of real accelerator mechanism; it is likely to occur when there is profound monetary instability – when the rot in the monetary system goes very deep."
Coronavirus will just be the spark for the coming great depression.
Stocks might keep soaring for some days or weeks but then they'll drop even further.
Usually you get 40% drops followed by some rebound, and then other legs down.
I expect the S&P500 bottom to be in the 500 area so still long way to go. The markets will be drugged with stimulus packages of all sorts in the meanwhile, which will give temporary boosts and hope; instead of playing to pick falling knives, a way to invest into this now would be in adirectional trades through the use of options, i.e. investing in volatility with strategies such as the strangle or straddle.

Thoughts?

> inb4 Krice worrying someone hijacked my account

7
https://pastebin.com/EyG3qDaY
Just wanted to share this link, good for spreading the word about roguelikes.

8
Design / Against the concept of balance
« on: April 21, 2019, 10:11:06 AM »
Balance is overrated.
I could easily argue that  good game design shall not be afraid of unfairness and unbalance but rather deal with them dynamically and reward players who are able to find order in chaos.

Have a look at what happened to an extremely varied and fun game, when the devs decided to pursue above all balance: https://www.reddit.com/r/roguelikes/comments/axyr0l/do_you_guys_think_balancing_dcss_kind_of_ruined/
Or the various "level matching" enemies of all those mainstream games which feel really like movies rather than games (Witcher 3, Skyrim..).

As a roguelike lover, I like the deus ex machina, original crazy solutions to apparently unsolvable situations.
The scarecrow of an unbeatable tank-like PC shall be embraced and addressed with further degree of chaos, not by limiting the latter.

9
I've been hearing great things about Android Studio and looks like one can build games for Android quite easily.. was wondering if anyone tried developing a roguelite / roguelike with it.

10
Programming / PYTHON: pros and cons for rougelike development
« on: January 28, 2019, 03:39:35 AM »
I am aware some people here love Python, others such as Krice don't like it.
I just would like to form an idea about it and welcome any input. In particular, what makes you like it in the context of roguelike development.

11
Off-topic (Locked) / Android CCG (collectable card games)
« on: January 28, 2019, 01:45:22 AM »
Anyone into those?

Five I like:

Horus Legacy:
Warhammer 40K themed game.
Hearthstone-like but players are fucking brutal as they have very strong skills (stronger than in HS) and basic attack power, which means most of the basic units will be destroyed when attacking the player.
Heaps of heroes to chose, very active development, balanced gameplay.
Recommended even if you are not into Warhammer 40K.

Legends of Oblivion:
Hearthstone-like based on Morrowind/Oblivion/Skyrim/Daggerfall universe. Interesting gameplay innovations such as runes (getting beaten up grants you drawing cards upon certain thresholds are met) and lanes (two sides of the board in which to play units, with different properties). Heroes have no skills like in Magic the Gathering.
Fun Arena mode, with occasional mad variants.
Well polished and active development.

Cards and Castles:
Fun and strategic; here units are placed on a 9x5 chessboard grid, but a card game really. Active development.

Hearthstone:
This is a classic.
Obviously attracts big spenders so the normal PvP is not for everyone.. but the Arena mode (draft) is always damn fun. Tavern Brawls also great.

Polish Card Game:
Fun - hooligans and Polish criminals bashing each others. Units are placed in a hex grid.
Unfortunately the devs haven't updated it in several months.



12
Mike Nolan is a spin off of the Big Lez Show, an Australian series made entirely with microsoft paint.
Very Australian humour, it's funny because it really depicts the soul and culture of most bogan tradies in a very minimalistic yet impactful way.

FTC (my favourite episode)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6Hkc9VGiXQ

All episodes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8h7O2oP5AA

Mike Nolan for councilman (actually from Big Lez S3E2)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKCmyGg3vnM


This is an Australian adaptation of Rick and Morty:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6yg4ImnYwA

13
I don't write enough in this sub-board but it is actually my favourite one.

I'd like to hear your views about those game design sins which we find too often in games, and actually frequently oin those "top notch" ones which roll millions in costs and profits.

I'll start with two of those which I despise the most, both of which come from poor game balancing.

I. Level scaling.
Example: Wizardry 8, Witcher 3
The whole thrill of levelling up gets diluted, and monsters which are supposed to be lower threats become unrealistically tough (e.g. kicking dragons asses and then being knocked out by a city guard on witcher 3).
Some ideas on how to fix:
1. instead of making the same enemy stronger as the game progresses, it's better to increase its quantity, or to make bigger enemies appear
2. make low threat enemies still potentially annoying (e.g. paralizing/confusing/leveldecreasing/statdecreasing/itemdestroying/itemcursing attacks); this way less powerful enemies can still and always remain threats.
3. Increase the breadth of variety of possible enemies which can spawn randomly. Yes, hobgoblins still can spawn when you are high level and this is great because by them being now no-challenge you actually feel high level. But their likelyhood to appear is decreased, whereas now that you reached level 37 there is a possibility you will encounter high level bandits, or swamp dragons, etc.


II. Level restrictions on equippable items
Example: Witcher 3, Diablo.
Such restriction can come in 2 ways. Either enemies just don't drop out of depth stuff, or you do find it but it's unequippable until you reach a certain level.
Again, something like this completely removes the thrill of winning against an out of depth enemy to find out of depth loot, and makes the whole game feel like a book or a movie rather than an interactive challenge.
Possible ideas on how to fix:
1. Equipment can become cursed, corroded, or can be destroyed or stolen or lose enchantments (e.g. Nethack).
2. Make battles non trivial even with superb equipment. Make multiple aspects of the "perfect build" to be needed, and no no-brainers.

I'll come out with more, feel free to add.


14
Not sure if anyone here has ever played Ethereum smart contract based games (like the infamous horrendous cryptokitties), but they are now getting popular as most of them offer players a way to earn some money (how many players can actually make it is another matter..).

There's a team of smart contract devs called Team Justo which recently released Fomo3D, sort of a pyramid / gambling / lottery thing which attracted several million $ of capitals in a few days.

Their new project apparently is going to be a roguelike called YouDie3D, still based on ethereum and smart contracts.

Team Justo is gaining worldwide attention with their games, and thus roguelikes will also get more.. possibly.

I'll update this thread once they release the game.

15
I just finished playing one very successful non-roguelike game, Witcher 3.
Great graphics and music, thousands of conversation lines, very polished under many aspects.
I only enjoy hard games and it was satisfying to manage to win the game in the hardest mode, "death march".
And that soundtrack.. magnificient! Felt like dancing with eurofolk music while mutilating ghouls with my beautiful long silver sword, dodging attacks with extraordinary agility, feeling the adrenaline.
The ending was so so but the story overall very good with several characters with their own personalities which I felt attached to (in particular Lambert, Vesemir, Keira Metz, and also minor characters such as Thaler, Dijkstra and general Morvran Vhooris or some sadistic villains like Whoreson Junior and his gang and that Nicolas Pastodi whoremonger priest). Let alone how beautiful were some of the cinematic sequences, such as when Ciri gets inside that cave to find the three Crones drinking random body parts soup whilst in form of absolutely gorgeous naked girls, just with blood all over them from their human meat feast. It was great to have choices affecting the game plot and the final ending of the game.
And I could happily disregard minor plot holes, issues and inconsitencies such as potatoes selling for 30 golds each, the freaking horse constantly getting stuck, the whole crafting thing being completely useless for exception of witcher gear, etc.

Having said this, the good parts I have highlighted are all components which I normally could appreciate also in books and movies - it is the artistic part of the game.

However in terms of the "gaming" part of the game, I can't say it was a particularly remarkable experience.
For instance there's stuff like "level loot" which ruins everything.

It completely ruins the free roaming aspect of the game.
It is never interesting to go back to location with low level enemies because only low level enemies will spawn there, which constitute no challenge nor reward to the player.
On the other end, it would be interesting to explore areas where the player knows they are likely to find out of depth enemies, but the problem is that it ends up being unrealistically tough boars or wild dogs which are 100 times stronger than a lower level arch griffin or dragon, and on top of this the loot is capped to the level of the player. There's also minimal experience gain to slay those enemies.

This sucks.
So much effort in polishing all the smallest technical visual and audio details of the game, and such poor design.
It feels like you are locked in a story and all the rpg component is merely a facade.

It made me think that the following components need to always be present together in order to obtain an ultimate gaming experience:

- possibility to find out of depth enemies (possibly alongside free roaming)
- uncapped loot
- no level restrictions for equippable items
- no monsters levels (ok with legendary ones to be tougher but that's about it)

The question is how to then manage to keep the game interesting after an out of depth item is found and equipped.
Well we all know how cool it is to find an eternium double sword of devastation in the small cave in Adom with your level 1 character, or start a Caverns of Qud game and find out that  you have in your backpack an Electro Crossbow or some other ultra powerful technological device.
It feels freaking good!
But does it spoil the game? No way! Because there's always the possibility that either
- that item could break or be stolen or destroyed by some trap, monster, etc
- the pc could develop some sort of corruption, or illness, or anything that could then make being strong in combat go on a second scale of importance
- permadeath is worth mentioning but ok, I understand a 100 hours game such as Witcher 3 would need to find ways around that
- the pc could become cocky and then find himself surrounded by randomly spawned enemies which happen to be not particularly susceptible by that equipment

And more and more could be done! But that is the way to go. "Level loot", equipment level restriction, non randomness of spawns and all of that are very lazy way to circumvent the potential risks of giving freedom to the player, and in my opinion they make that freedom disappear when it comes to gaming experience.
This is a great game for what concerns what should be the quintessential property of it: the actual gaming experience.

Then there's other things I like about roguelikes such as the minimalistic graphic interface, turn based tactics, etc - but the random and freedom components I have discussed above are what I really love the most and unfortunately I have yet to find in a non-roguelike game as of 2017.

Any thoughts?

Pages: [1] 2 3 4