New Roguelike in development: Forge of the Elements

[justinhoffman]

Hi, I am a fan of roguelikes in general and thought I would develop one this summer.  So far progress is coming along nicely.

I am developing the game in java as an applet, which means eventually I'll have it running from a browser.  OOP is sweet and life's to short to debug segmentation faults.

My goals with the game are three fold.

1) make an ASCII look good using true colors.  (it's psuedo ascii though, using graphical interface objects and painting multiple characters to some squares).

2) fast paced, easy to learn, difficult to master, intuitive and simple UI.

3) Browser based eventually...

As the name suggests, the theme will be different elemental focuses.  Melee and spell casters can choose, but don't have to, an elemental proficiency which will add elemental damage to ranged/melee attacks in addition to granting intrinsic bonuses, while spell casters will be able to cast high lvl spells of their element depending on the schools the focus on.  I'm pretty proud of the skill system, that's the though behind the game.   The items and ac is all balanced around weight and armor skill, and there are three specialist skills fighting, focus, agility that rise when points in sub skills are spent.  Fighting increases melee damage/hp, focus increases mana, agility raises defense.  Elements will be Fire, Ice, Acid, Earth, Temporal (time and space), Mind, Life, and Death.  Let's see, oh the spell system should be a lot like City of Heroes dominators class, with high amounts of crowd control if anyone is familiar.

Anyway, my design philosophy so far has been:  1) build legos, 2) build rocket ship.  Right now I am making excellent progress on building all the building blocks.  104 spells are planed and charted, spell engine and targeting system is already implemented just working out all 18 status effects from confusion, poison, lull, sleep, disease, stat drain, stun, paralyze, immobilize, freeze, slow, stop, corrode etc.. .  22 different skills, all implemented so far save stealth/magic item.  Item generator built, it's pretty diabloish atm though.  Melee combat is in, map generator, pathing AI, LOS, targeting, inventory/spell/equip/character UI is all in place and graphical.

I hope to release an alpha version by the end of the summer.  It will be lacking many features though, but I hope to have wands, scrolls, ranged weapon ammo, potions, stealth, basic state based AI in place to test gameplay before the game itself is fleshed out.

So, anyway.  It's been a productive month.  I'm pretty confident I'll have a game even if in alpha in one more.

I'm going to post some images in a sec, I could use some feedback on the look and feel and level design.  It's simple atm, eventually I would like to add a whole host of room templates to mix it up, but right now I just want to finish something.

[justinhoffman]

ok, this is using the map view (zooms out to show whole map) of a full explored ruins level.



here is the character sheet for an example of the UI



here is an example of crystal caverns level theme



equip ui, with item details shown.



spell targeting with a type 'ray' spell.  There are PBAE,bolt, ball(AE), single target, and cone type spells.



me running around a forest

[mariodonick]

You seem to have put real effort into the development of your game and you seem to know what you're talking about. With the screenshot added, I expect an interesting game soon, although I probably won't play it often, 'cause it is browser based. Isn't it possible to supply a standard Java application, as jar?

I would like to comment on the dungeon layout but the quality of the compressed image is too bad. I can't really recognize what the characters (besides the @ and the . ) are -- walls? forest? caves? Perhaps you could post another picture, showing not the dungeon overview, but the current character's postion?

Mario

[justinhoffman]

ack give me one sec

I hope the rest show up better for you.

Yeah, I'm developing right now as an off line game and will most definitely provide jar files.  I would like to eventually run it on a browser, but that will take a bit longer and be much later.  It's just an eventual goal.   That's if I get to beta.  Right now it's like at pre-alpha =p.

[getter77]

Even if the ASCII, perhaps likely, ultimately renders this unplayable to me, I can FEEL good stuff to this and look forward to seeing it come of age and ultimately be what you are shooting for.   

[justinhoffman]

heh, I'm the exact opposite.  It would be pretty easy actually to do 16 bit tiles given that I am graphically drawing the characters , in fact I don't 'think' it would take more than a day or so.  Just have to tag every object with a tile, and figure out the right routine.  I don't think 32 bit tiles would work too well.  I'm pretty sure I have the 16 bit tiles used for ToME lying around somewhere too...

I find tiles to belie the complexity of rogue-likes.  I like the level of abstraction ascii provides, sort of like programmers art that gives you the warm feelings a unix terminal does.  I just find tiles to be much less attractive.

I do think a more modern UI would really improve roguelikes though.  I don't think making the controls unintuitive improves game play.

[Ex]

This looks awesome! I can't wait for it to be released. Even as a .jar would be nice because I'd be able to easily run it under linux. Looks great so far, keep up the good work!

[justinhoffman]

thanks for the kind words, it inspired me to add a spell with knockback    and get a few of the other status effects implemented too as well as blocking/dodging for bolt type spells/range attacks, and added ranged attack AI.

I figured why not make an effect that triggers the flee function of the monster's twice in a row with a message suggesting it had been knocked back.

The effect:  if there is any space to move, the monster is knocked away from the caster two spaces.

I've been testing combat to see what the survivability of casters/melee is with max level champs and a wide array of high lvl gear.  I put a morale check and melee/ranged combat in for the AI last night.  There are so many defensive melee abilities, a tankish char can stand toe to toe with a pretty hard hitting enemy with out too much worry.  They might block 40% of the time, with 20% dodge, and 40% armor reduction, only getting hit 70% of the time, while having 3x the hps a caster does.  Not only that, have the ability to wear more of the armor they find without penalty to fill in damage resistances.    On the otherhand, their damage is a bit more limited depending on how tankish they are and limited to melee range, and enemy spell effects will bypass all those melee skills.

A caster in melee at that level is flat out two shot.  It's going to make archers very dangerous for casters.   But nothing should really get a chance to melee a caster if the have mana, and idealy if they have mana and choose spells wisely should have limited risk.  I'll try to make enemy casters have low enough hp that spells casters are dispacthed quickly at range.

Every thing is set to scale pretty nicely, but it's going to take a lot of testing to know how frequently status immunities should be thrown around and to get the first 5 lvls very chalenging and balanced.  I think that will be my push if I can get testers.  Get the bare bones for a game together, featuring the full combat/item system and polish the mob assortment/AI until I get those levels balanced.  Additionally tweaking the mana costs will be very important.

I hope to put in place every spell by this weekend/early next week.  Then, I'll probably start working on wands/potions/spell books.  I'll think I'll put off the ID game at first though.  Then I'll probably throw something together.

I really want to put in the wands soon.  What I am thinking is this.  Say a caster trying to cast a transmutation spell that uses temporal energy and has full spell mastery.  Half of transmutation is added to the level, half of temporal is added, and spell mastery/4 is added.  Since the max skill level is 20, the max spell level is 25.  Additionally, the wisdom modifier acts as a damage mod for spells giving around 40% more damage for a high wisdom character. 

I'm thinking that a wand might have a base level of 10, making them a little strong at low level but limited by availability.  Skill in magic item/2 would be added to that.  Additionally, a magic skill check could be used to recharge an item, with a chance at failure (destroying the item).  The wand spells could be any spell a caster could cast, but would not be effected by wisdom.  So a high lvl caster might do 140-80 damage with a spell (depending on spell), where as a high lvl magic item user does maybe 70 -50 or so, but has access to anything they find.

It would be nice to add an artificer as a base class, giving him a few random wands to start.  Would be an interesting play style.  Maybe not the highest damage dealer, would be less than an archer by a fair amount.  An artificer could cary around a wide assortment of wands for people who nuerotically collect items.  Perhaps dex could determind recharge rate and reduce armor penalty to wand casting fail rate...

[Slash]

Looking nice, you may be interested on releasing it as a Java Web Start application instead of an applet, gives you more flexiblity and roughly the same availability (and you can supply it in parallel as a stand alone application easily)

[justinhoffman]

hmmm, I've never really worked with distributing .jars before but I was under the impression that I could just create an applet frame that runs the applet and easily convert the application into a stand alone program.

I'm not entirely familiar with using webstart, but I'll keep that in mind if I end up having problems.  I figure it won't be that hard and haven't really given that much thought to it.

Are there portability issues with using an appletframe?

[justinhoffman]

hmm, doesn't seem to cause any problems.  I just had to throw in a method to alter the buffering depending on whether the game was in applet or stand alone.

I guess I'll have to make a .jar executable and test it on my linux machine and in windows, just to make sure I'm not going to have any issues.

The thing I am worried about is how I will end up dealing with saving/loading/ and deleting save files on death. Stand alone will be easy I think, just use serialization though not sure about deleting the save files.  I figure I will probably require people to register to save in the online.  Haven't done anything to that extent so...

but anyway, I'm sure all that stuff is possible and when I jump those hurdles it will mean I actually have a game to distribute.

 

[justinhoffman]

Ok, so since my first post...

--- The game will now either run in a jframe or as an applet (depending on whether or not i comment out main method) so there is no difference between running the game stand alone or browser dependent as of now.  It won't require any work on my part to provide difference versions, though I suspect saving/loading will be different.

--- Ranged combat/Spell targeting AI is now in the game.  AI will choose a target with a differing friendly rating, and attempt to cast a spell or fire a bow attack if they have one and check to see who they'd hit if they cast towards a target (they won't cast if they'd hit any friendlies, although I might make hostile mobs cast anyway if they'd hit the player and the player is low on life).  Eventually, I will give the AI up to 7 spells.  Casters will have up to 3 damage spells, there will be a slot for an escape spell (think blink or invisibility), a debuff spell, and a healing spell, and a buff spell.  AI will be able to heal friendlies, and choose based on resistance, enemy status, and enemy position which spells to cast.  Only offensive AI is in place so far though.  Spells are there own object and can be 'equipped' more or less, so it's pretty easy to just hand the AI a different spell and they will decide what to do with it.

--- added every evocation spell.  Evocation will be a straight forward damage school with limited utility, so spells were easy to implement.  They all do more or less the same thing with only three exceptions doing lifestealing, blind, and stun respectively.

--- added 1/4th of the conjuration spells.  Conjuration will offer a mix of offensive, summon, and utility spells.  The offensive spells will do less damage than offensive evocation spells, however as conjuration spells rely on physical material they will offer additional effects.

--- added blind (reduces vision to 2 spaces preventing ranged targeting), knockback (knocks enemy back 2 spaces), daze (unable to cast spells, lowers dodge/block rate), frozen (lowers speed by 15),  and fear (prevents you from attacking, causes AI to retreat).

--- added a morale check which if failed will cause AI to retreat.

-- dodge and block now work on bolt type spells.

--- added an in game message system.  Messages appear over the game view in a larger text and provide useful non-combat information.  A message will trigger the first time you discover an enemy, level up, or standing over stairs for example.

--- auto target.  If a mob is in view and you have no target, you will auto target the enemy.  Makes an enemy coming into view more noticeable.

--- fixed some issues with non-symetric FoV between AI and player.  Unless blinded, you will always have FOV advantage over AI.

--- visable spell effects.  Spell effects from AI casting are now visible until next key hit.

And here is a picture of a summoned hell fiend taking on a random place holder mob.  The '*' surrounding the 1 represent the hell fiends heat blast, a low radius AE spell with heavy damage.

With summoned mobs, I set up the AI to work for either hostile or friendly mobs, so it was pretty easy and worked just fine which was exciting.   You will only be able to have one summon, summoning another will make your first companion very jealous and ultimately hostile.   It's important for me to make the AI reflexive.  The highest mind spell (enchantment) will dominate an enemy and make them your pet.  So it will be possible to find and enslave high level casters who can cast, debuff, buff, or even heal you, and I also will have them take the stairs with you.  Something normal enemies will not do.

[justinhoffman]

Hey if anyone makes it past the last post and on to this one lol, I have a question regarding potions.

I'm thinking that certain potions could give you a negative amount of a certain status effect.  So say I found some 'eye drops' or something.  I could use those, and gainer a negative amount of blind.  It would take a few casts of blind to then effect me.  So if I was facing an enemy that was throwing 'sand blasts' at me, I could consume some and eat a few blinds.  Negative amounts of a status effect would tick away each turn though so it would be short duration.

I think that might be more interesting than a potion that just cures a status effect or provides a boolean resistance.   That would make it very easy to handle status resistance buffs too.  Say bravery would give me -500 turns of fear and confusion.  If an enemy casts a 7 turn fear on me, it would tick away at that resistance and i would become afraid if it reached a positive amount.  Each turn the resistance could approach 0.

[getter77]

-Potion idea sounds nifty and outside of the norm, go for it!

-Congrats on this latest slate of progress since post #1!

-Heh, who knows on me and ASCII?...You might somehow hit upon that magical, subconscious "something" with it in some kinda similar way as Triangle Wizard does---the only other Roguelike to manage this feat with me.

[justinhoffman]

hehe cool.

Check this out.  In melee/range attacks now have additional effects based on elemental focus.

In melee or close range, it's a cone effect towards the target, but a bit farther and it turns into a ball AE.

The radius will depend on the elemental skill, going up every 6 points.  So at 6,12,18.  At first they will be relatively minor but scale up with damage/skill.  So positioning melee attacks will do extra damage.

Fire, Acid, Cold will deal extra damage.  Other elements will do other things, aside from temporal which will have other effects
here is a pic of a ratling monk with toxic fist style  .   There is a bit of a bug with it though i'll have to iron out.  In that the effect displays after the enemy has moved...