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Messages - AgingMinotaur

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31
Early Dev / Re: Nihilist -- Experimental
« on: November 28, 2018, 10:14:39 AM »
Hey, I did take a look now. It's still pretty bare bones, so the main comment at the moment is just to carry on building on what you have.

Interface-wise, it felt a bit odd to have to press enter after each single letter command. It'd be smoother if wasd-movement (and maybe arrow-keys as well) registered instantly. I was also a bit perplexed that you use "<" for stairs down and ">" for stairs up, opposite of conventional RLs, but maybe there's some hidden meaning to that?

Regarding the mini-games, I looked in the source to find out how to "solve" the encryption puzzles ;) The current implementation is obviously a placeholder, so difficult to comment before there's actual gameplay in there. Combat: Felt a bit bland at the moment, or rather, again, like a placeholder for a more fleshed out system. I like the idea of deterministic combat, but there wasn't much going on now, just trading blows until the opponent decides to flee, without much risk since hp regenerates to full between each fight. Currently, it's actually impossible to lose, I think? But I can see the basic system working as more variety comes into play, like health and other depletable resources, different actions/items interacting in a rock-paper-scissor-like way, perhaps? It felt like you're going for something influenced by Interactive Fiction. For inspiration, you might check out RL/IF hybrids like Kerkerkruip and Anamnesis, which use similar premises.

Dungeon layout: Again, there's not much practical variety between the two different room types, and it still felt unclear where you're headed with the tactical map, since there's no real interaction going on. Will there be monsters walking around that you have to avoid or bump to fight/interact with? Or other features that lend "meaning" to the map? The point of a tactical map is of course that choosing the right path should be a challenge, and I currently got the feeling that the basic game might work just as well without an actual map (ie. taking the IF inspiration even further), since the meat of the game, as it stands, is confined to the combat and crypto modes. Again, it's hard to say without knowing more about what you have planned.

In conclusion, the one thing I would like to see is key presses registered instantly, if you're going with single letter commands. Other than that, the premise seems interesting, with a lot of room for experimentation. Good luck going ahead!

As always,
Minotauros

32
Early Dev / Re: Nihilist -- Experimental
« on: November 16, 2018, 01:04:03 AM »
Please let me know if the link is broken, and I'll replace it!
Yup, seems broken. I at least get an indefinite "Loading gateway.ipfs.io" when I open the URL.

EDIT: Actually, it works (now?). Maybe my connection was just bad at the time. I'll give it a whirl and try to come back with some comments.

As always,
Minotauros

33
Linux *.deb and binary are up. Download #13 directly here:

Windows binary
Linux deb
Linux binary
Python sources

As always,
Minotauros

Changes
Grid view generated too big for screen (crashed in Windows)
Trying to give/drop props crashed in Windows
Typo in data files sometimes caused game to (region hogging ai)
Game sometimes crashed when sightblocking objects were destroyed
Plants sometimes marked as dead (when not)
Newly dead corpses no longer curse at you for killing them
Sprites in upper left corner vanished between turns
Speech bubbles flicker less in this release
Some speech bubbles were getting supressed
Drifting smoke wasn't spawning/working properly
Dilettante didn't have access to "shooting" shtick tree
Skills with direct damage (eg. Butt whipping) weren't working
Spawning corpses could cause game to crash
Shtick T.Y.T. didn't show up during character generation
Skip repeating messages in log
Removed msg "You stand in uffish thought" when passing a turn
Removed "Trick shot" shtick (not very interesting)
Sledgepick damage set to 1♥
Modified critical hit of knifes (always inflict 1☠ extra)
Nerfed shtick Feel no Pain
Removed shtick Iron Mind (obsolete)
Renamed shtick The Breathing Way to The Blood Way
Shtick Burro is back in the game :)
New critters: Traveling saleskid
Added more cash to the game world
Description of shtick Skillful -> "Gain a random skill."
Scissors now tagged as a blade
NPC AI can use distance measuring in more varied situations
NPCs now accept gifts (and are pleased at getting things they like)
Autopickup no longer works on items marked as corpses or trash
Character generation: Random choice won't pick 3 point foibles (most severe)
Crashlog now includes python traceback, when applicable

34
LAND OF STRANGERS #13
One Crawled out of the Foxhole

This is mostly a bugfix release to get a working Windows version again. I think I have covered all received bug reports, and a few more. I updated the Windows binary and sources, at the blog and at itch.io. I'll announce the release and build the Linux versions within a day or two, I guess ;) Here's hoping this build is working as expected under Windows.

Download binary: direct link

As always,
Minotauros

35
Exciting news. Good luck on the road ahead. (I'm curious, but afraid I don't have a lot of time to playtest these days.)

As always,
Minotauros

36
Tzan, yeah I think something similar was going on here. I discovered an error in the actual grid size calculation, which caused the map to become too big in certain resolutions. On my own laptop, the application would just trudge along, but in native Windows, crash. Now that I've fixed that (and cleaned up a few other bugs), things should hopefully go more smoothly. I'll sit on the fixes for a few days, to make sure everything is sound before I rush a new release.

As always,
Minotauros

37
Early Dev / Re: LandOfFlies
« on: September 10, 2018, 11:07:28 PM »
the sprays only work on different bugs, bug spray works on all bugs, fly spray will only kill flys, ant spray will only kill ants,
oh, that's cool, something that should add depth as the player learns the game. I did experience some bugs not dying when I sprayed them, and wondered if ants had more hp or something ;) I probably try it again, I enjoy the puzzle-like tactics.

As always,
Minorauros

38
Early Dev / Re: LandOfFlies
« on: September 10, 2018, 12:26:22 PM »
Hey, I gave your game a try. It worked well in Linux for me (using Wine), seemingly no hiccups. I like the theme and the visual style. I see you're starting a similarly looking project about zombies, and have to say I prefer the more original theme of Land of Flies :) The interface and gameplay seems solid enough, although I did somehow lack a feeling of urgency. Just being dropped in an infinite world and told to collect as many ?-s as possible felt slightly unfocused. If you expand the project, maybe you could give it some more direction. Like, secrets could be put in special places, and provide clues as to where further secrets can be found ("Follow the river westwards to reach the Temple of Beelzebub"), or something like that? I would also consider adding fog of war to make exploration more exciting, though the game might do fine without it, of course.

Content-wise, some stats, monsters etc. felt a bit samey. For instance, there seemed to be little practical difference between armor points and hit points. And what's with the several different kinds of spray (I get the impression they are basically the same, or is ant spray extra deadly to ants, or something along those lines)? Similarly, separate counters for food and water didn't feel like it added much.

Enemies could also do with a bit more variety, I think. Maybe spiders leave cobweb, which cost an extra turn to move across; or different vermin could have different behavior. Eg. flies could move more or less at random, whilst ants make straight for you. The current ai, with the insects mostly keeping a certain distance and trying to block your path made it more or less impossible to avoid letting them hit you first. It was also hard to predict when they would suddenly move two tiles in a turn, making it difficult to navigate around them. It would be nice if there were more viable strategies to "read ahead" and squash or avoid bugs without getting hit (maybe there are, and I just didn't notice).

Hope you can use those first impressions for something. Good luck, full speed ahead!

As always,
Minotauros

39
So, I found the bug that can cause the game to crash when offering NPCs gifts. The other one is still a bit mysterious, but my hunch is that it's related to the game trying to draw outside of its window boundary, which turned out to be an issue for certain resolutions under Windows with this release. So I guess I'll tidy up the code that causes this, and try to put out a hopefully more stable release within the week or so.

As always,
Minotauros

40
Okay, I managed to reproduce the bug and hopefully fix it. Maybe you can see if this works:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/40wkrn2k95je0k0/LoSt_12.1_win.zip?dl=1

As always,
Minotauros

41
Hmm. I got another Windows-centric bug that I managed to reproduce, so let's hope the best. That one was related to running the game fullscreen – default, I'm afraid – but really shouldn't prevent the game from starting.

The game may have left a crash log in a directory like \your_home\.LoSt\log\ If so, feel free to paste the ending here or send it to me or something (spam.minotaur.spam at googlemail) ;D

Come to think of it, if you've had LoSt installed on the same computer earlier, the problem may be related to a lingering config file. If so, it might work to delete LoSt's folder and try again. Don't forget to backup the log first, tho' ;) Thanks for the interest, it's much appreciated!

As always,
Minotauros

42
Thanks for the heads up. A pillarist is a guy who lives on a pillar (hermit), actually :)

As always,
Minotauros

43
Water is very available. Personally I wish it were a bit more rare, and that merchants carried less of it around, but oh well.
It used to be an issue that merchants sometimes didn't have enough water to pay you, but now they seem to have an infinite amount. You can basically sell your ultra-advanced artifacts to random shmucks to get hundreds of drams in pocket. It may be a development hack, and if so I can see why they put it in, and it's probably better than having to micro manage stash houses and the like, but it does take away from the feeling of a world where water is extremely scarce. I personally also find that lead slugs may be a bit too cheap (ie. easy to come by) in the new version. I liked being wary about using the carbine because I was running out of ammo, for instance.

Regarding the other massive changes the team has been making, I'm generally very pleased and impressed. For traditionalists, some takes a bit getting used to. But I think they've done well with stuff like factions and sultan cults, and even the utterly crazy stuff like extradimensional esper-hunters and weird mushrooms fits well with the game by making it even more sprawling. it seems to be the design philosophy of these people, not to balance by reining in power curves and such, but just ramping up the world in general to 11. Regarding food, I can only chime in with Skeletor's general analysis. It's reminiscent  something I've been thinking about for a long time for my own game, actually, so I've been interested in seeing how they solve it here. In a way, I still like the unambiguous kind of corpse eating you have in Nethack et al., where eating a certain corpse grants a certain intrinsic, and it's certainly not trivial to strike the balance between survivalism mechanics and grind-avoiding design, but CoQ's new system feels both more modern and more organically connected to the rest of the game world.

As always,
Minotauros

44
By some ill-boding twist of fate (yet, ill-boding still unbeknownst to whom), you'd gleaned the location of an infamous fugitive. So you found yourself down at Arken Jailhouse, at least to ogle the Wanted-poster and count your options, as well as your leads …

Hello, bois and gyrls, it's story time again. I just put up a new version of LoSt on Dropbox. Get it here:

Download Land of Strangers #12

The development blog has a post about the release. It's a pretty big one, I guess. There are a lot of changes in relation to older versions. My personal favorite is probably that you can now rest at a (currently unique) saloon to heal long-term wounds. This costs cash, and you have to make sure that the saloon keeper stays alive. (If not, who is going to put chocolate on your pillow in the morning? Later versions will include several resting hubs in each game world, so a little bar brawl won't necessarily be a biggie.) The resting system is quite basic now, but opens up for some of the feature ideas I've been having for years.

The world still feels a bit uninhabited and samey, but I put in an obvious "mission". It's included to add a sense of purpose and to prototype some of the new systems (advanced players: play as mudfaced goons with populism and try to shoot the sheriff instead). My hope now is to work on adding more missions and other points of interest that can be randomized and mashed together for every new game to create some kind of unique "world lore" for each Land.

There are some bugs sticking in the release, of course. The graphics engine has some general issues, but I decided to leave a lot of that for now. Some last minute changes did introduce even more weirdnesses, however, so I hope the rendering doesn't get too confusing to look at. I'll try to add some quick fixes to make sure all actors are always visible, and that speech scrolls display in a more proper order; and perhaps save the much-needed refactoring for later :P Be that as it may, I'll just leave the changelog below.

As always,
Minotauros

CHANGELOG #12

* SYSTEM: Started work on travelogue mode (zoomed out overworld map)
* SYSTEM: Scaled everything up a bit in size (world generation and tactics)
* SYSTEM: Added base system for boons (quests and achievements)
* SYSTEM: Added long-term resting (incomplete)
* SYSTEM: Added individual reputation stat for Critters (incomplete)
* SYSTEM: Added system for dynamic nicknames (incomplete)
* SYSTEM: Placeholder system for experience and shtick acquisition (temporary)
* SYSTEM: Disabled sprinting (temporary)
* SYSTEM: Drop/pickup now works on adjacent tiles
* SYSTEM: Give items by dropping them onto an adjacent NPC
* SYSTEM: Replaced wound system with a flat "grit" meter of bruises/injuries
* SYSTEM: Interrupted attacks not blocked, but always graze/go wild
* SYSTEM: Increased inventory space
* SYSTEM: Flumadiddling (inventory handling) now counts as a free action
* SYSTEM: Flumadiddling with cocked guns can be dangerous
* SYSTEM: Better support for instantaneous events
* SYSTEM: Perks and skills merged to one category, shticks
* SYSTEM: Character generation changed to reflect new shtick system
* SYSTEM: (testing) Set all shtick costs to 1 point in character generation
* SYSTEM: Kits for unarmed combat moddable (like prefixed guns etc.)

* CONTENT: Start game in Arken Town, a small settlement
* CONTENT: Basic bounty: Bring a wanted bandit to justice
* CONTENT: Changed intro text to reflect sample, soft "win condition"
* CONTENT: Simple rivers and mountains added as climate types
* CONTENT: Added some props: [redacted] and more
* CONTENT: New shticks: Muster, Circle blow, The breathing way, Leatherbrain
* CONTENT: Made bricks stackable and gave them stats as thrown weapons
* CONTENT: Derringers and pepperbox guns are now two separate types
* CONTENT: Changed effect of adrenaline syringe to: heal all bruises
* CONTENT: Changed effect of bleeding to: inflict all bruises as wounds
* CONTENT: Changed feel no pain to: always heal for 3 turns
* CONTENT: Changed war wound to: increase chance of wounds healing badly
* CONTENT: Changed tough as nails to: decrease chance of healing badly
* CONTENT: Removed Swordfighter career, added Barber instead

* UI: Started to implement mouse support (incomplete)
* UI: Configuration wizard for first-time players
* UI: Message log now oriented to center of the menu
* UI: Message log not flushed between turns
* UI: Added option to cancel character creation mid-process
* UI: Replaced dual-button system with main button (experimental)
* UI: Separate shortcut keys for inventory (default [F1-F10])
* UI: Shortcut [G] and [,] to get/give/drop command
* UI: Commands to zoom in/out on map
* UI: Menus reorganized to put option 0 on top
* UI: Scrolling menus are still ugly and buggy, but less buggy :P
* UI: Distinct animation for grazes and several other events/effects
* UI: Support for onomatopoeta (sound effects) on tactical map
* UI: Added colored messages (signals pleased/annoyed status)
* UI: Speech scrolls now take a few seconds to fade out when dismissed
* UI: Removed all non-free fonts from the game
* UI: Modified font (Linux Biolinum) for better unicode support
* UI: Redid the in-game character sheet a bit
* UI: Disabled player survey (at least for now)
* UI: Removed obsolete manual (temporarily)
* UI: (debug) print_me() to log/stdout when looking at beings slightly prettier
* UI: (debug) Game now makes a backup log when the game crashes

* WORLD GENERATION: Place templates can contain player's starting position
* WORLD GENERATION: Merged Region and Climate classes
* WORLD GENERATION: Added Superregion class (named region on the map)
* WORLD GENERATION: Region name generation takes climate etc. into account
* WORLD GENERATION: Lots(!) of small and big changes to how the world is built

* AI: States can be pure switches
* AI: State machine can remember several distinct targets at once
* AI: Can prompt the player to choose an alternative and react accordingly
* AI: Can test (simple) scripted conditions directly from the data files
* AI: Some tactical changes to reflect new combat systems (incomplete)

* BUG: Time system with simultaneous actions wasn't simultaneous
* BUG: Shtick descriptions weren't displayed during character generation
* BUG: Sometimes crashed when critter ai had no target
* BUG: Game crashed with manually inputed world seeds
* BUG: Trying to draw off screen crashed (hopefully fixed)
* BUG: Various other small bugs that would crash for no reason ;)
* BUG: Post mortem "screensaver mode" sometimes hung
* BUG: Impossible to demolish house walls
* BUG: Certain places didn't spawn at all
* BUG: Savescumming may have been buggy, should now be more fool proof :)
* BUG: Help screen didn't print command keys properly
* BUG: Game window sometimes started maximized when it should not
* BUG: Reset some attributes when patching beings with certain kits
* BUG: Some speech scrolls were rendered twice (fixed, but reappeared )-:
* BUG: Some speech scrolls didn't get painted to the map
* BUG: Speech scrolls flickered for a split second between turns
* BUG: Sprites disappear when several gets drawn to the same hex
* BUG: Certain "steppable" objects, like thorns, didn't work properly
* BUG: Random characters always started with "animal friend" shtick :P
* BUG: Character sheet listed inventory's kit names instead of prop titles
* BUG: Typo in /kits/desert_life/brains.yug made tool wielders unable to attack
* BUG: Dilettante sometimes got same skill twice
* BUG: Attack forms without crit effects did no damage on crit hit
* BUG: Typos: "pilarist", "omniscinet", "likelyhood", and a few more ...

45
Off-topic (Locked) / Re: Origin of the term - 'Roguelite'
« on: July 19, 2018, 06:12:40 AM »
It’s probably best to bite the bullet and acknowledge the state of affairs. One way to differentiate one self from the slew of action RLs is to specify something like «turn-based Roguelike» (Slash uses the term «classic RL»).

As always,
Minotauros

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