Author Topic: Dev blog for my my little roguelike  (Read 8608 times)

neiled

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Dev blog for my my little roguelike
« on: February 18, 2014, 11:11:37 PM »
Hey, I started writing a little roguelike as a first step into game programming... For anyone who is interested in stuff like this the code is here and the blog is here.
I've covered a few basic topics and my thoughts on them, planning on getting more detailed as the game progresses.
Hope some of you find it interesting!

Vanguard

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Re: Dev blog for my my little roguelike
« Reply #1 on: February 19, 2014, 12:37:35 AM »
Welcome to the forums!

What type of game are you planning to make?  Just a generic roguelike for programming practice, or do you have any interesting ideas you want to try out?

neiled

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Re: Dev blog for my my little roguelike
« Reply #2 on: February 19, 2014, 12:44:26 AM »
Thanks very much.

That's a good question! :)

I'm still in the stages of building the foundations but I'm also trying to keep it as generic as possible at the moment without making too many decisions on the final game just yet.
However, I really like the idea of crafting/alchemy etc. in the game and I've made a few notes on things I'd like to look at. I also want to make the scoring in the game important, something you can keep trying to beat. To do that though is going to take some thinking because I don't want you to be able to 'farm' points etc.
I have a few more things to do on the foundations (currently getting game messages to display) but then I'm going to have a serious think about the theme and 'special' features I'd like to put in the game.

I'm about to head off on a business trip for a couple of weeks and plan on doing a lot of 'research' ;)

Pickledtezcat

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Re: Dev blog for my my little roguelike
« Reply #3 on: February 19, 2014, 01:34:59 AM »
If you want to avoid farming you could give points for tiles uncovered (add a point via the los manager every time a tile that hasn't been viewed before is visible) or for the number of unique treasure items you manage to find and bring out of the dungeon. The treasure items wouldn't have any usage but would take up weight or space in the inventory making it difficult to carry a lot of them out.. the player could put them in a chest I guess and come back for them latter, but maybe they would get stolen by wandering monsters.
A blog about my 3d Roguelike: http://pickleddevblog.blogspot.kr/

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Re: Dev blog for my my little roguelike
« Reply #4 on: February 19, 2014, 02:09:52 AM »
If you want to avoid farming you could give points for tiles uncovered

imo this is almost as bad as farming for items.  It rewards slowly exploring every tile on every floor even when there's no danger or any practical reason to be so thorough.

A good scoring system should be about displaying skill in excess of what survival play demands.  Good ways to do this are risk/reward systems like Brogue's lumenstones.  Let the player opt in to something dangerous and reward them with a nice score if they pull it off.  Optional dungeon levels, Nethack-style conducts, actions that deliberately weaken the player or strengthen their enemies.  Those kinds of things make good scoring systems.  Shmups are the genre with the most diverse and best-developed scoring systems, so they're a great place to look for inspiration.

You could also just base score on how quickly people complete the game or how far they got if they died.  That always works.

Pickledtezcat

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Re: Dev blog for my my little roguelike
« Reply #5 on: February 19, 2014, 06:49:29 AM »
If you want to avoid farming you could give points for tiles uncovered

imo this is almost as bad as farming for items.  It rewards slowly exploring every tile on every floor even when there's no danger or any practical reason to be so thorough.

A good scoring system should be about displaying skill in excess of what survival play demands.  Good ways to do this are risk/reward systems like Brogue's lumenstones.  Let the player opt in to something dangerous and reward them with a nice score if they pull it off.  Optional dungeon levels, Nethack-style conducts, actions that deliberately weaken the player or strengthen their enemies.  Those kinds of things make good scoring systems.  Shmups are the genre with the most diverse and best-developed scoring systems, so they're a great place to look for inspiration.

You could also just base score on how quickly people complete the game or how far they got if they died.  That always works.

Watching the video it looks like the levels are pretty packed with lots of areas to explore, some of which would be hard to spot because of the way the rooms are constructed. If you've also got secret doors, tiles uncovered would seem like a good indication of how well you explored the game. You could give points for each tile depending on depth, such as one point per tile on level 1 and 1.5 points for level 2, 2 points for level 3 etc... If you didn't complete the game that would give you a pretty good indication of how well you've done. You could also give points for monster kills or item pickups, but less than tiles explored, such as 0.1 point per XP cost of monster or 0.1 per GP cost of item.

It's up to you what kind of behavior you want to reward, exploration, looting, combat? Tactics? You could multiply points gained by the difference between player XP and monster XP.
Just ideas.

EDIT:
Forgot to say how great the game looks already :) I watched the video and had a look through the blog and I'll be watching eagerly as it develops.
« Last Edit: February 19, 2014, 03:08:27 PM by Pickledtezcat »
A blog about my 3d Roguelike: http://pickleddevblog.blogspot.kr/