Topics

1

Design / Supported movement keys?

« on: November 01, 2016, 03:14:16 PM »

Currently my controls are set up to allow movement via the mouse, cursor keys, numpad....and QWEASDZXC square.

Imho, the numpad is ideal, but I realize people may play on a laptop without a numpad. The cursor keys are always present, but don't provide easy diagonal movement without a modifying keypress. My mouse implementation allows players to move to a designated position stepwise or continuously...but you are required to move your hand off the keyboard to the mouse.

Given the above, there really seems to be no ideal, always present option for movement. Therefore I have included the QWEASDZXC square as I mentioned, but this robs me of 9 keys (27 with modifiers) I could use for other functions.


So my question is, given this isn't a FPS, is the inclusion of the left-hand movement block a must, just a nice extra, or something no one would ever use? Would removal of this feature be enough to turn people away from playing a game?

I am considering user-defined keys, but that's a low priority...I can't see a realistic need to allow the player to remap the 'inventory' key, for example, although I do allow skills (and maybe direct access items) to user defined hotkeys.

2

Design / minimum resolution these day?

« on: August 16, 2016, 03:27:23 PM »

So I have essentially completed a new roguelike engine which has the ability to set to any resolution you want - even something really weird like 2000 tall by 800 wide or some other strange BS - and it will render and respond to mouse click correctly regardless of what you set. And while I don't want to set an upper limit on this resolution (although maybe I should?), I DO want to set a lower limit to avoid things like unreadable fonts/clipped text/etc. This is because I don't want to just stretch sprites and text - if a player has a lot of screen real estate why not let them see more of the map, as long as the game plays the same on every resolution? Higher resolution = more map seen. Offscreen enemies that are in sight range are handled a little like TOME does, with a minimap, and jumping the visiual area to the target area when using a skill.


Right now I have a lower limit of 800x600; 15 years ago people had monitors that were 640x480... but does anyone realistically play on monitors this small anymore?


I'm curious if anyone has an opinion on the minimum supported resolution a roguelike game should support? It will definitely inform some immediate design decision in my engine, and I don't want to exclude a sizable percentage of players because of an arbitrary limit that I picked out of a hat.

3

Design / Damage reduction algorithm - looking for advice

« on: October 01, 2014, 07:41:00 PM »

In a nutshell, I am looking for a way to have unbounded integer values representing armor mean something without having damage get ridiculously high for attackers simply for them to actually damage the player - any advice?


More detailed description: My game has a value representing armor as an integer. There are around 6 armor slot and a potential shield, so the absolute lowest value a player can have with a full set of the worst armor is 7. As armor quality improves, this value gets higher...and higher...and higher. I can reduce it somewhat by saying a "better" piece of armor has other positive values, such as lower weight or lower evasion penalty, but these are marginal improvements. Ultimately, unless I have just 3 classes of armor (for example), I end up with armor values 30, 40,...etc....

(Just a note: armor in my game is purely damage reduction - there is a separate evade stat that is negatively impacted by armor, but only affects a hit landing, not how much damage it does.)

Well, you say, just make higher level creatures do more damage increasing at a rate somewhat relative to the expected armor at said level. This is fine...IF you are wearing lots of armor. If I increase damage to give creatures a chance to do damage to a heavily armored character (I don't want the player to be 100% invulnerable), then this makes low-armor characters die ridiculously easy.


I have tried several approaches, but none are satisfactory:

1) Armor reduces damage by its flat value, or a percentage of its value (still results in a linear growth in damage to keep up with increasing armor).

2) Armor reduces damage by a relative percentage (damage is reduced by something like damage/armor, which obviously is a problem with damage > armor, resulting in multiple case-specific damage calculations...ugh).

3) The CURRENT choice is a hybrid - armor reduces damage on a 1 to 1 basis, up to half of the incoming damage. I have toyed with it reducing the remaining damage by a random amount up to total armor.

4) I supposed I could change armor value to a single precision number, but it's still a linear growth progression, and ugly in terms of player presentation (Of course I can present it as other than a fractional number, but the point still stands about linear growth.)

5) A poly function might work for damage reduction, but what kind? Parabolic or logarithmic seems the natural fit, as the value of armor decreases the more you have, but where to place the limits?

Playtesting has shown none of these approaches to be exactly what I want.

Does anyone have a suggestion for such a problem? I only have 2 requirements 1) I don't want an arbitrary armor limit imposed, because it limits the differentiation of armor pieces (or at least makes the differences almost superficial.) 2) I don't want to simply increase damage to create a creature capable of hitting a high armor character,  due to the existence of low armor characters, and their resulting 1 hit deaths.

Any advice from anyone who has balanced a roguelike around a similar idea?

4

Early Dev / Roguelike distribution question

« on: July 23, 2014, 01:41:47 PM »

(This is similar to a question I asked in a game specific thread, but I want to ask it to the roguelike dev community in general).


So Chrome is marking my roguelike download as malware, or at least "This program is not commonly downloaded and could be dangerous." Doing a little research, it appears Google marks ANY downloadable exe as suspicious until they verify that it isn't and flag it in their database. According to their website, their only acceptable form of remediation is to add a tag to the page's html code so their scanners can flag the page as safe...except I don't own the domain - it's a free website builder program - and I don't have access to the underlying html. (per https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35179 and a bunch of other hits that echo the same thing.)

Obviously my program is not malware (obvious to me at least - who would spend years on a project and devote this much time to detailing the world simply to act as a trojan horse for some malware?)

How have you guys distributed your programs to work around this restriction? Do you purchase your url/domain? Is it acceptable to rename the exe to something else and ask the end user to name it back to exe after downloading it? (I'm guessing that's a bit much to ask.) Personally I hate installers and I think they deter people playing your game, but maybe this is a good route?

Any suggestions?

5

Programming / Java rogues that are open source?

« on: July 17, 2011, 04:38:51 PM »

Are there any Java roguelikes out there that are open source? I've been learning Java at school, but they focus on pesky data structures and how to write white papers. I'm specifically interested in how the display elements are implemented. I downloaded Jcurses but it's hard to understand everything just reading the javadoc.

6

Early Dev / Rogue Project 2

« on: July 08, 2011, 01:11:41 AM »

http://lordsofdarkhall.weebly.com/rogue-project-2.html


Another version of my rogue project is up. Work stalled a bit, but has picked up a lot lately. Engine feels pretty solid, and now that I have the skill framework and hotkey system done (just drop the skill code in and its done) it's time to start adding the content and begin balancing.

If you're interested, you can give it a test drive at the link above. You still can't die yet, and pressing \ on the overworld unlocks a few skills to play with. Pressing \ on the submap generates a random, possibly magic item for you to futz around with.

Probably the last 'alpha' code I will generate, at least for a while. Now that the engine is 'done' (with the exception of the town/buy/sell stuff), I am going to actually start adding the 'content' and the town building code. My goal is something like a sort of roguelike Oblivion.

If you have the time, I would love some criticism/feedback, especially on performance of things like auto-explore on your system. I have manually coded the load/save dialog boxes because of the common 'comdlg32.ocx missing' people kept getting when I used what was supposed to be part of every Windows install.

Thank you for your time; hope everyone is having a nice summer (or winter for those of you down south)!

Brigand