Developing a variant

[Psiweapon]

 Ummm, HAI GUISE.

 For my first attempt at doing anything related to roguelikes¹, I'm going to make a ZAPM variant.

 Does anyone feel inclined to warn me of any common pitfalls of variants and developing them? Like I   shouldn't, to begin with?

 Has anyone played ZAPM and got any YANIs that they would like implemented?<sup>2



1</sup>: Besides playing them and dying like a biatch %D
²: No guarantees: my craptastic ninja skillz are on par with those of a drunken margarita-stealing beach monkey.

[Ancient]

The only thing I would surely do with ZapM is axing cortex crossover. When my dreams go wild I think about Godzilla making an appearance. Long time ago I sent Cyrus a mail with some random ideas. Perhaps he kept it or wrote some of them down. My memory fails me here. Dunno what other nifty ideas were.

[Psiweapon]

You mean removing it?

You're the user that complained the cortex crossover gave you a totally grieving (sp?) experience?

About re-learning controls *twice* ?

[Krice]

Like I   shouldn't, to begin with?

Don't make a bad variant. I think the best ones are those which simply continue the development of the original game (Stone Soup), improving it somehow. Pure variants are often poor, because the main game is bad or the developer is not very good as game designer.

[Ancient]

You mean removing it?

Yes.

You're the user that complained the cortex crossover gave you a totally grieving (sp?) experience?

Grieving? No, thats failing to read my post. The experience was quite funny for first time. Then it was just annoying. The feature just damages changes interface. The same goes with a certain permanent ADOM room effect. Newbies in game design rarely understand this issue. Game authors often dislike removing perfectly good code and thus such misfeatures stay. Good designers like those of DCSS were not afraid to trash forgetfulness/amnesia.

About re-learning controls *twice* ?

I am Widmo on ZapM bulletin board. Btw. I simply reconfigure keys nowadays. Thats a few seconds and I am immune.

[Psiweapon]

@ Ancient:

Do you have any idea for a possible substitute? I mean, there are a couple of bad implants, I feel kind of bad about just commenting out or deleting the cortex crossover although yeah, it's annoying and often results in not using implants until you can be sure they're safe - which usually means reaching Robot Town, or executing floppies blindly until you find one of identify (which is just the same thing: trying unidentified objects with the risk that carries, although floppies are less dangerous)

Don't you think that adding a couple of informal identification systems would help?

@ Krice:

¿What do you mean with a pure variant? 

[Psiweapon]

So far:

Added Two professions: Ninja and Astronaut.

Added Some equipment: (a couple of CC weapons, helmet and armor which are kind of easy)

Changed inventory of some monsters (mainly to make them have the aforementioned items)

currently trying: to add a new effect for plasma weapons (and then implement plasma weapons)

next: moar itemz and seeing if I can add more monsters.

[Psiweapon]

Plasma rifle and plasma pistol added. (I used an already existing effect)

I noticed I hadn't really implemented changes in drop rates, I merely believed I did, fixing.

[Psiweapon]

Monster equipment corrected

[Krice]

What do you mean with a pure variant?

The game engine is used to create a game with different types of monsters, items, etc. In other words there are no improvements to the engine or game system.

[kipar]

Original ZAPM is too short. I'll be happy to see a variant with 50 or even 100 levels with increasing number of monsters (and increasing power of monsters). This can be hard to balance though.

[Psiweapon]

What do you mean with a pure variant?

The game engine is used to create a game with different types of monsters, items, etc. In other words there are no improvements to the engine or game system.

well I don't have any real plan XD I just edit where I understand things and don't break the game
*hatchet in hand* %D edit: if you're talking about the theme it's staying the same, and I'd better not get into deep mechanics yet, because, you know, I'd go in stomping like an elephant in a lamp store...

Original ZAPM is too short. I'll be happy to see a variant with 50 or even 100 levels with increasing number of monsters (and increasing power of monsters). This can be hard to balance though.

As soon as I figure out how to multiply the number of levels the game chucks out, I will. Not that much, because there isn't enough content to fill that much game, but I'll definitely make the branches longer (if and when I find out how to)

[Z]

Variants can be a good thing or a bad thing. About the bad things, I don't like how the development is branched. If there are e.g. 5 variants and each of them has 4 good new features, they are better than the official version with none of these features, but worse if there was a version with all 20 of these features. One great game is better than five good, but very similar ones.

Dungeon Crawl is lucky to have the Stone Soup team, who combines the good features of previously created Crawl variants (tile version, travel patch, and vampire patch, AFAIK) and also introduces new improvements. We can treat these variants as testing grounds for new features; these tests turned successful and that's why they are added to Stone Soup (which is as official as it can get). (I would be happy if DCSS allowed playing the Zot Defense variant too.) IVAN is not as lucky, there are many variants, but it seems none of them is strong enough to become an IVAN version of Stone Soup.

Thus... I hope the ZapM variant somehow gets melded with the original.

[Psiweapon]

I think that's a good approach, too. But who knows what holds the future in reserve for zapm and its variant(s?) 

[Psiweapon]

FFFUUUUUUU I BROKE TEH GAME!!!!

I had to replace most of the files with the original ones, cause I breaked stuffs but didn't know which.