Author Topic: Retinue - game design pitch  (Read 18653 times)

Paul Jeffries

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Re: Retinue - game design pitch
« Reply #15 on: September 28, 2014, 07:43:02 PM »
Because the game does not work the same way normal roguelikes do, maybe the best map is also not a dungeon with rooms and corridors, but something else?

Yes, I think it's a good point that I shouldn't try to force Roguelike traits onto it that don't fit purely because that was my initial jumping-off point.  Based on testing so far, I think it will be good to go for a variety of different kinds of spaces, some of which will favour certain types of units over others.  For example, the archer can attack a tile four tiles away in each direction, which makes them deadly in wide open spaces but useless in more cramped ones - I think that's good gameplay-wise and also thematically appropriate.  I've decided to exclude single-tile corridors from the generator, however; they are tedious to move through and too easy to defend.  I'm not sure about single-tile doorways yet.  I may do something like I did in a previous multi-character roguelike I made and make all doors and passages at least two tiles wide.

One question for the mockup, is vision intended to be pervasive, or have you just not implemented LOS yet?

LOS is implemented for light/miasma fields, but at present the player can see the whole dungeon and everything in it.  I haven't yet decided whether to have a 'fog of war' or not.  I'm erring towards it because I'd like to have exploration be a part of the gameplay but it could be a bit difficult/unfair if monsters can jump out of the darkness and potentially insta-kill one of your guys the same turn.  I'll put it in later to try it out - next I'm working on AI and enemy placement so I want to be able to see the whole map anyway for debugging purposes.

A possible solution for the tedium of having to leapfrog your units one at a time is to have a group movement mode that bunches up some number of units at the cost of being less responsive.  If you encounter an enemy you'll want to switch to moving one unit at a time, but once you clear a room you might want to select all the stragglers and tell them to move to a general area as a single command, which would still be evaluated by the game as a sequence of moves.

I'll bear this in mind, but I'm hoping it won't be necessary.  My main solution to the tedium of moving multiple units is to have small, dense levels (at present, only 12x12) so you won't need to be doing too much long-distance travelling anyway.  The 'move anywhere there's light' mechanic also means that you can theoretically get a unit from one side of the map to the other in a single move and you will only need to get the King to the exit to complete the level (at which point everybody else is assumed to make their own way to the stairs ready for the next floor).

Assuming the knight can kill each of the two nearby enemies with a single hit, can he just step forward and take them both out, or are you limited to a single attack per move?  If not, how do you decide which?

Yes, if he steps forwards he can attack both the Zombie and the Rock Monster in the same turn (although in this case he'd only actually kill the Zombie because he's not strong enough to kill the Rock Monster by himself).  This is intended; a core design goal is that a single move should be able to drastically tip the balance.