Hunter RL.

[jasonpickering]

Hey guys,

I threw this together Sunday and Monday, after I finished a prototype for forest generation. This is a SUPER early build, but it gives you a good idea of what I wanted. Hoping for a 7DRL. I still dont have a good name so that will change, It will have something to do with winter and probably of Viking origin.

Premise:
You are part of an guard that protects small villages from the dangerous beasts that lurk in the woods. there is a new monster and you must destroy it.



Currently you can walk around and kill enemies. the enemies are all the same just with random sprites which don't really fit the snow exterior. Mushrooms heal you 5. There are 3 Weapons Axe, Sword, and Staff.

Staff - when striking will also hit one behind.
Axe - also Strikes Behind you in an attack
Sword - attacks the two diagonals also

Try it

Goals:
This idea started as an experiment in character building. using assigned skills and traits to tell a backstory. so the idea I had was 3 "Heroes" are generated with different weapons, skills, and traits. one must be selected to defeat the beast in the woods. from that I hope to do something simple. No equipment, so the player is basically taking these heroes on a quest.

A characters story will be told through their traits (these will also effect their stats)

Example Traits:

Old One      ( -2 Max Health )
Herb-wise   ( better chance of finding herbs and mushrooms )
Wolf Bane   (Does Double damage to Wolves )
Wolf Dread  ( Takes Double Damage from Wolves )
One-Eye      ( -1 Max Health )
Wood Brat   ( Gain +2 Health from mushrooms )

I am hoping to use these to define a character and I want to weight them so they go together for specific themes

So a character with Wolf Dread, One-eye, and Wood brat. probably lost that eye to a wolf, hence the fear of them. of course their will be a better explanation then I have here for each trait. hopefully fleshing that out more.

And finally I hope to actually make the enemies interesting. I think Wolves will be the basic grunts and then from there I will create enemies that each do specific things like a Ranged class, perhaps one who buffs. I want the Enemies to have very specific purposes and feel unique. We will see though.

Any and all feedback is welcome.

[Alex E]

In the last year's 7DRL, I also made a hunting game named "HunterRL". But it didn't look nearly as good 

[jasonpickering]

Yeah That name will change. It will probably be whatever I call the group of hunters like Sons of Frost, or Frost Sentinels.

[george]

As I happen to be reading Viking novels right now and thinking of making a game about hunters based loosely on 9th c. Vikings, Hyboria, Cimmeria, and the RPG Beasthunters, I highly approve of this RL .

For the traits do you mean that the choice of one will influence the choice of others in a branching fashion, or do you have some other procedure in mind that will create a coherent story from the choices?

[jasonpickering]

The player will have no choice in the matter actually. that will all be procedurally done behind the scenes. The only choice the player will have is which Hunter to take into the woods. they will be given 3 vikings all generated and then must weigh the traits to decide who might be the best choice to send into battle. do you send the old man who is the bane to wolfs, or the young kid who was raised in the forest.

[george]

I don't mean the player's choice, I mean the code that chooses which traits go together.

[jasonpickering]

Oh right, well at this point I have a Rough code written out that looks like this

1. Start Character Creation
2. MAGIC, MAGIC, MAGIC
3. perfect Character Created.

Actually I haven't had much planned, but I think I might try setting up a branching tree,  I just need to decide what traits are at the top and which ones are at the bottom.

[jasonpickering]

well still working on this. right now thinking about the main game-play if I want it to be skills based or Item based. I like the idea of Items, so I might try something similar to toby the trapper of laying down Traps. these will probably work on a cooldown for ease. although I also think that it might be nice to let the player choose all their items before they head out, so thats a possibility too.

[george]

It might be interesting to mix that up with the concept of a trap line that's procedurally set. Would give some pre-established story and an impetus to explore off the bat.

[jasonpickering]

not sure what you mean by trap line. also I probably wont do a large world for exploring just single screen levels.

Edit: So I continued work on this, but I reached a point where I need to define the combat. I have two paths I can go down, the combat focusing on Items, or the combat focusing on skills. I think I want to do skills, but I still haven't figured out how I want melee combat to work. I want all normal melee attacks to do 1 damage but I need to decide if I want it to always hit, or add a chance to miss. the always hit is nice, but it causes problems where the player can look at the screen and know they are going to lose. there is no chance to say "Hey maybe I can get through this". The always hit, puts me into a design similar to like zaga-33 are there any other games that do always hit? I cant think of any of them.

Also I am probably going to remove the different weapons. The idea was really cool, but its so rare when you can actually set it up, with the so few enemies I want on screen, that I don't think it makes sense.

the build has been updated though. so there should be a Red Dire wolf on the 5th floor, which will be the boss.

[george]

A trap line is what you call all the traps you lay out (usually in a line, hence the name). Thinking about this from a RL perspective it might be interesting to procedurally lay out the traps beforehand, and then the player can go find the traps they laid out 'before', which kind of adds to the backstory. It also gives the player a direction/motivation to explore. It doesn't really matter if this is in an overworld or not. Different heroes could have traps in locations significant to their story or whatever, or maybe finding the traps triggers some story element too from their past.

[st33d]

The always hit, puts me into a design similar to like zaga-33 are there any other games that do always hit? I cant think of any of them.

My Turnament and your MicRogue do that.

However, both Turnament and Zaga-33 have single use wait actions. In Zaga you can spend a skill to get the first hit on a monster, in Turnament you can smash a pot to do it.

If you go with single hit on cardinal directions then you need a wait-resource.

(This looks lovely by the way. Quite basic in terms of gameplay at the moment but it's early days.)

[jasonpickering]

Yeah I have been trying to think of a Wait resource. It will probably either be Items or Skills. If its Skills they will most likely be melee focused ones like charge attacks, and stuff like that. If I do Items the game will be more about laying traps to catch the Wolves in. My main worry now is about making different characters feel really different. Which is proving to be a problem. I tried the different weapons path, but with so few monsters it wasn't really working. The only real Stat I have is HP, so that means it needs to come down to the different Skills or Items the characters posses. I am still leaning towards a melee focus and there is more on that below.

I have got my "Foodclock" setup though. I wanted something to push the character forward quickly. so there will be a timer. Each step you take makes it go up one. on completion of a level the timer goes down a lot. I wanted the feeling of chasing the Boss through the Woods and taking to long in one area means its getting ahead of you. Also each level has more and more enemies on it so you want to take the smallest amount of time possible.

the rushing through of course contradicts the slower trap placing idea. so This is focusing me more on melee. The only thing is I am having trouble coming up with Melee spells. A lot of the ones I have been looking at for inspiration are all stat based. I also need to figure out how to do the Resource managment for the spells. I was going to do cooldowns for each level, but not sure if MP might be a better idea.

the one thing I am thinking about now is adding chance but only as a Risk vs Reward gamble. I have two ways I can  go

A. Melees always hit doing little damage, but skills do much better damage, but have a chance of missing that grows over time the more you use a skill the worse it gets.

B. Melee has a chance of hitting, but skills will always hit. Skills are limited by MP though, so the player wouldn't want to waste them.

I like the idea of having a guaranteed attack and a chance attack.

[st33d]

FTL's food clock is very good. You must press forward or get caught up by the rebels. I think you would have to see this boss of yours constantly escaping to the next area to achieve the same sense of urgency.

TOME has a lot of good ideas for melee spells. Whirlwind attack is one (hit all adjacent squares). You could have a spear that hits a tile ahead in the direction you move for extra range. Any form of haste is also useful. Swapping places is useful. Pushing a monster a tile away is useful. There are loads of melee spells if you think about it in terms of movement mechanics. (thought of another - chess knight jump, and another - stun locking a monster for a turn, I could go on...)

[jasonpickering]

I had forgot TOME had a lot of those Melee skills. I will see what I can come up with. Hopefully I can get very close to finishing it today. But we will see.