NLarn - a Larn remake

[jaydg]

Hello everybody,

I am working on a remake of Larn.
I baptized it NLarn.
You can have a look at it.

It's already quite playable but still lacks some things,  thus I posted it here.

Some notable differences to Larn:

• There can be more than one item on the floor
• A friendlier interface with color
• FOV

Greetings.

[Ex]

Hello everybody,

I am working on a remake of Larn.
I baptized it NLarn.
You can have a look at it.

It's already quite playable but still lacks some things,  thus I posted it here.

Some notable differences to Larn:

• There can be more than one item on the floor
• A friendlier interface with color
• FOV

Greetings.

This is fantastic! Great job! Always nice to see a new version of Larn.

[getter77]

Cool!  Keep at it!   

[Archaalen]

Thank you for this.  I am interested.

[stu]

Larn is my favourite, so I'm very interested in this indeed!

[ido]

Very nice game, keep up the good work.

[jaydg]

Thank you all for your interest!

For the next version I made the town level static and much nicer than the original bunch of capital letters. Attached is a screen shot of the new town.

How do you like it?

[Slash]

Looks cool!

[Perdurabo]

That looks beautiful

[stu]

I like that alot.

[jaydg]

Today monsters learned to pick up weapons, wield them and hit the player with them, if the are aware of armed combat. Simple monsters like the gnome and hobgoblin can be dangerous now, as they are able to damage the player when wielding a proper weapon. Unfortunately all slayed monsters leave a weapon and turn the caverns into a junkyard. Now all monsters need a strength attribute, and finally monsters and the player will fight with the same rules.

The next important step toward completion (is there such a thing?) will be time management. Currently NLarn suffers from a very simple player-centric time management inherited from Larn. I want to transform that into a world-centric time management, which deserves to bear the name. Unfortunately I'm pretty clueless how to do that, as everything I have done till now just turned the time by a certain number of turns.

This will turn into a big rewrite of almost everything, which will be pretty time-consuming. I hope this will allow me to fix all problems regarding time, e.g. knowing that a spell book can not be understood before reading it or to allow to abort actions which take multiple turns when under attack. Speed is another aspect connected to time. This has to be fixed, too.

[Vanguard]

I like the idea of a kobold or something with the lance of death - arguably the deadliest weapon in roguelike history.

[jaydg]

Currently the lance of death is a simple wooden lance. In Larn  it's totally unbalanced and makes the game too easy once you can afford it (at least that's what I hear).

I think I will turn it into a "one hit wonder" which will instantly break after killing something. This way it will turn into an emergency solution.

[stu]

I disagree, the lance is SUPER expensive, making it a one hit wonder is pointless. also nuetering it breaks some of larn's charm.  It does make the game easier but surviving without it becomes really hard, yeah its a balance thing but its part of larns flavour

[Vanguard]

I like the lance of death in Larn, personally.  Yeah, it's broken balance-wise, but once you get it, the game's mostly over anyway, and it's fun.  I look at it like I look at the dark energy gravity gun segments of half life 2, or being supersonic in a sonic game, it's just a sort of reward for making it to the end.

Anyway, if you're set on nerfing the thing, maybe a better way to do it would be to have it damage the player every time you use it, or make them more vulnerable defensively while wielding it.

I really don't think it's necessary though, a lot of my favorite single player games have intentionally unbalanced rewards for their players.  Morrowind is an unbalanced mess, and, in my opinion, it's all the better for it, or what about Crissaegrim or the Shield Rod in Castlevania: Symphony of the Night?  The game is easy enough on its own, and it hardly needs those to make it easier, but they're fun.

I do understand that roguelikes are about challenge, but it seems to me that a powerful character fighting powerful enemies is more fun than if both sides are just average.