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Messages - Darren Grey

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46
7DRLs / Re: The Trapped Heart
« on: March 17, 2016, 01:59:59 PM »
I've decided I really need to do an update to made the mechanics of the game clearer. Any suggestions of how to do this are very welcome :-/

47
7DRLs / Re: The Trapped Heart
« on: March 14, 2016, 11:57:43 PM »
Darren, did you wait for topic 4999 to appear before you pressed the Post button? ;)

Hah! Clearly fate favours me today :)

48
7DRLs / The Trapped Heart
« on: March 14, 2016, 01:19:18 PM »
The Guardian of Earth is trapped, imprisoned by their own strength in an attempt to seal the Heart of Chaos. Now the Guardian of Air, wielding a Shard of Chaos, seeks to rescue their kindred spirit. But will either of them have to power to overcome prophesy? Chaos can only be overcome by great power or great sacrifice...

The Trapped Heart is my 7DRL with a luvvy-duvvy theme about two nature spirits fighting a lot of ectoplasm. It's hex-based, 1hp, where the player is killed by being surrounded and the enemies have directional shields protecting them. You can download it for Win/Mac/Linux here (ignore the payment request):

https://darrengrey.itch.io/the-trapped-heart

The big gameplay innovation is the directional shields, which means enemies only die if you can hit them from the right direction. Direct damage can be made through lightning bolts or enemies can be indirectly damaged through earth spells pushing them against walls or other enemies. This leads to very tactical gameplay and some interesting and fun bosses.

There's also a little more going on with the story and how to win, though unfortunately what's implemented is a lot lighter than I had planned. The game saves meta-content between runs, so play on one game can affect the next. Breaking out of this "cycle" to get a true victory requires the player to follow special conducts. I had hoped to enlargen this with further details and story and dialogue options, but I was far too constrained for time.

Overall it was a fairly difficult week. I started a new job recently and on weekday nights I was just far too burned out to write useful code (what code I did write was buggy as hell). Some of the technical challenges turned out to be way harder to implement that I expected.

Oh, and I had an artist on board that produced some lovely terrain sprites and player icons early on, but then failed to produce any monster sprites by the end of the week. So I had to ship with my own badly drawn artwork for the enemies :-/

49
7DRLs / Re: Hello all!
« on: March 04, 2016, 10:23:08 PM »
Knowing how many failed is interesting to see.

50
Off-topic (Locked) / Re: 7drl.org still down?
« on: March 04, 2016, 02:01:21 AM »
I'm an admin on the site but I don't know how to change posting permissions :-/ I can post to the site just fine.

51
Other Announcements / Re: Roguelike Radio podcast
« on: September 17, 2015, 12:01:58 PM »
It's even harder to write the summary when unable to listen to the episode and on a mobile in an airport ;)

52
Not to hijack the thread, but some context and hard numbers regarding getter77's claim:

On KS video games from 2009~2013: "In total, 37% of successfully funded projects have fully delivered a finished product to backers. A further 8% have delivered a partial product (i.e. part 1 of a promised full game, or a mobile tie-in app). 3% of successful projects have been formally cancelled, while a further 2% have been formally placed in hiatus. A total value of $21,641,800 has so far been sunk into successful Kickstarter projects that have failed to deliver, while the total value of projects that have delivered is less than $17,000,000."

A 37% success rate in seed-funding projects is really good! And if you're not an idiot about throwing money at things, and you pick and choose projects that have good demos and reliable managers then you'll see a much higher success rate. My own success rate of backed projects is over 80%.

People seem to be very depressed in this thread. I don't see why. We have an amazing wealth of history we're sitting on, and many of the classics are receiving new leases of life thanks to crowdfunding or active fanbases. Meanwhile we have lots of excellent experimental 7DRLs each year that push the boundaries and innovate mechanics, and some of them get turned into full-fledged games in their own right. And on top of that full-fledged games like CataclysmDDA, Caves of Qud, Sproggiwood, Dungeonmans, ToME4, Cogmind, The Great Expedition, Ultima Ratio Regum, and whatever else is being worked on in the shadows.

Ten years ago things looked fairly dark for the genre, but things have picked up massively of late. I'd say that the release rate of new traditional roguelikes is higher than its ever been, and the design quality is far better. The community is growing, partly driven by those introduced through roguelites. The ability to make a living on roguelike games is a really big deal, and in spite of that we still have Angband and DCSS under active and sustainable development. The newly released Angband 4.0 may also start a new wave of variants with its better structured code.

The whole "new wave" of roguelikelikes I don't care much for myself, beyond what design lessons they can teach us and what players they drive our way. Much more important is that the genre has been resilient and is finding new strengths. This is a very good time to be a roguelike fan!

53
Off-topic (Locked) / Re: Desura`s dead
« on: June 07, 2015, 04:22:41 PM »
itch.io is really great is anyone is looking for a successor.

54
Other Announcements / Re: Roguelike Radio podcast
« on: June 04, 2015, 11:59:04 AM »
We've now reached the milestone of 100 episodes! And what better way to celebrate it than to talk about many deaths:

http://www.roguelikeradio.com/2015/06/episode-100-yasds.html

The episode includes YASDs from many devs and communities members, with Andrew and I making general fun of them :)

55
Off-topic (Locked) / Re: My new homepage
« on: May 05, 2015, 05:47:34 PM »
Very 90s looking ;) Though personally I prefer such clean sites to the mess you get on modern sites.

56
7DRLs / Re: Golden Krone Hotel
« on: April 22, 2015, 08:59:10 AM »
You should probably start a new thread under 'Other Roguelikes' or 'Early Dev'. GKK is no longer a 7DRL!

57
7DRLs / Re: Into the Darkness (7DRL 2015) SUCCESS!
« on: April 13, 2015, 08:56:11 PM »
Actually this was my original design. Unfortunately I realised that if you have non-optimal cards you can just use them up and wait for the good ones with no penalty. Also it removes the incentive to be economical with the cards which adds another layer of strategy. I realise the current system isn't perfect though so I'll have a think about how to improve it.

You could try to enforce efficiency through a score system instead. Or perhaps have X number of recycles you're allowed, and killing enemies or progressing through the game or finding certain items gives you extra recycles. Would essentially be a hunger clock.

58
7DRLs / Re: Into the Darkness (7DRL 2015) SUCCESS!
« on: April 13, 2015, 11:27:19 AM »
By gruelling I mean it felt like a chore at times. Not hard, just time-consuming. It would have been nice to have some much more simple enemies just to change the pace.

In general I think the hand mechanic could be designed differently to make it maybe more balanced and manageable. Have less cards for the player to choose from, but more balance in their consistency and more ways to interact with them. For instance you could categorise cards into attack/defence/healing/utility and have a hand size of 6 but make sure each turn there is at least one of each type. Amongst the utility cards you could have one that powers up the next card played (in effect playing that card twice in a row).

There should also be a sense of progression, with more card types discovered as you explore or kill enemies. There could even be a bit of deck-building to this, as you avoid picking up cards you don't like the look of. Bosses should also drop some really powerful cards that are exciting to get in your hand.

One other idea is to have the number of cards you can play in a turn dependant on the number of surrounding enemies - it could give a reason to deliberately get numerous enemies together.

As for running out of cards entirely, why not just disallow it? When the deck runs dry it just reshuffles. The challenge is still in making the most of your hand and trying not to die.

59
7DRLs / Re: Into the Darkness (7DRL 2015) SUCCESS!
« on: April 10, 2015, 05:52:16 PM »
A very interesting game! I beat it on my first playthrough, but that took about 2 hours...

A big problem is that every single fight is gruelling as you struggle to find an efficient way to beat the enemy. On top of that the game is actually pretty easy I find, as you have unlimited healing from card discards and no shortage of cards if you play efficiently. What the game could really do with is having some really basic monsters (attack 2, defence 0) that act as windshields, provide no new cards on death, and are fairly common. Also make the bosses always have a few of these around, to give more use to the multi-tile attack cards.

You might also want to get rid of healing through discards to force the player to use the healing cards more - I was always discarding them as they were useless.

Have you played the board game Mage Knight? This game reminded me of it a bit, which is one of the most positive things I can say about any game ;)

60
7DRLs / Re: FireTail
« on: March 31, 2015, 04:07:59 PM »
I'm against continuous work in principal ;) In practise I can't help myself! Though I am a bit disappointed that the game didn't end up as complete as I wanted within the 7 days. I blame post-operation lack of energy and my computer blowing up one of the days :-/

I've been thinking of different terrain types, yes, as well as different structures for levels and a few more enemy types. I might also remove the ordered nature of the zones, letting the player choose which order to complete them in. I've no idea how balanced that would be though ;)

For melting ice there is Blaze, which does a rather terrific job when combined with Explode or Breath. I might have toned down its power too much in the last update though.

I take absolutely no offence at the "patience comment - indeed, I am rather proud of it. Damn right my games require patience! This ain't no simplistic shooter. I could do with making the game less grindy though, especially early on.

I'm pretty sure the Titan King is quite beatable at present, mind. Try Bombard 2 and Dazzle level 3.

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