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Viewing 15 posts - 1 through 15 (of 57 total)
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  • in reply to: couple suggestions #7814
    owen
    Participant

    Yeah, that’s true. I just want something that adds more strategy to digging and dungeon design. More undiggable rocks and cave-rivers would help in that regard.

    in reply to: couple suggestions #7728
    owen
    Participant

    I don’t know of any games, but I think that a simple cellular automata based generator would produce cave-like veins. For example, in the picture below, the white could be empty or soft stone and the black could be hard stone or undiggable stone.

    example

    I think that a perlin noise generator would work, too, as they often are used for natural-looking patterns.

    In either case, this phase would just generate the veins in the rock. The rest of the features of the mountain (lava, water, lairs with existing tribes, etc) would just be dug out from whatever this cave-vein-generation phase creates using the existing algorithms you have.

    Reason behind this is that I don’t think it’s interesting to dig a dungeon from a blank canvas every single game, it’s too easy. There was a good post on the Steam forums a few months back by some other guy that echoed a similar sentiment.

    As for seeing stuff in advance, the system that exists now, seeing two or three squares into the blackness, seems to work well enough.

    in reply to: Poison too powerful? #6782
    owen
    Participant

    yeah it gets a bit annoying at times lol

    in reply to: Upcoming gameplay changes, part I #6769
    owen
    Participant

    This was the best blog post I’ve read so far. It clearly lays out your vision and I agree with everything that’s written in it. Even though Keeper mode is the main mode, I’ve found adventurer mode to be more fun because it forces you to carefully choose your targets to level up, and I think that acquiring mana only through combat will impart the same sort of thought processes for Keeper mode.

    A couple of thoughts about this mana mechanic:

    1. While you posit that limiting research through successful conquest might make the game too linear, I think this can be mitigated if there is always a choice of which enemy to attack.

    2. The total amount of mana available will have to be carefully regulated. There should probably be some prevention mechanism in place so that players can’t farm individual tribe members for mana. Either mana should only be generated by killing the entire tribe, or the rate of recruitment by foreign tribe leaders should be limited if farming a tribe is an acknowledged tactic. There are also edge cases to consider, like if elementals, buzzards, or other summoned things should give mana.

    in reply to: Magic Damage? #6533
    owen
    Participant

    http://kingdomrush.com/play/

    It’s a tower defense game for mobile devices, but I still think it’s quite well designed. I say this because it can take a few tries to figure out the optimal tower placement to win the game. It also allows the player to control one Moba-style hero who can walk around the map and kill things. The shareware version is on the web.

    The game has physical, magic, and true damage, and I think this provides enough variety to make the game strategically interesting without adding needless complexity. There are four classes of towers: melee towers (which spawn units that deal a small amount of physical damage but whose main purpose are to retard enemies), ranged towers which deal single-target physical damage, magic towers which deal single-target magic damage, and splash towers which deal physical damage with an area of effect. Heroes can deal melee or ranged physical damage, and many of them have spells which will deal magic damage. (Spells are generally ranged, I don’t actually know if there is any melee-magic-damage combo although there theoretically *could* be). Creeps have resistance either to physical damage, magical damage, or neither, but never both.

    There’s a detailed wiki with information on everything in the game. Here are two pages specifically about the damage system:

    http://kingdomrushtd.wikia.com/wiki/Armor_and_Magic_resistance
    http://kingdomrushtd.wikia.com/wiki/True_Damage

    LoL and DOTA also have Physical, Magic, and True damage as I mentioned before.

    Anyway, the point is that damage type and attack range are two orthogonal statistics in all of these games. Dota, in particular, also has a few interesting abilities that you could adapt for a roguelike.

    in reply to: Magic Damage? #6519
    owen
    Participant

    I’ve thought about this before, clearly something that works for MOBAs could make an interesting combat mechanic in KeeperRL. I wonder if it’s not possible to do this by differentiating melee and projectile damage? These things are already present in the game, and would only require some changes in formulas (I guess projectiles would bypass armor and strength, and would use a separate stat and class of items to calculate defense). What do you think?

    Well, my suggestion would still be to make damage type and weapon range being two orthogonal categories so that damage type A and damage type B could both be dealt at any distance. Maybe it’s just because I’m used to playing games that do it like that.

    • This reply was modified 7 years, 7 months ago by owen.
    in reply to: Ideas for more tactical battles? #6306
    owen
    Participant

    I just bought Ananias roguelike on Steam. The rogue has an ally whose behaviour can be cycled between “charge,” “follow,” and “stay.” (I wonder if this is what Bas Testerink was referencing.) The cycling is performed simply by pressing a button on the UI.

    For KeeperRL, when you are controlling a unit, I wonder if there could be a “button” for every ally you have in your party. All of these buttons could be lined up along the bottom or the side of the main window. Clicking on these buttons would allow you to cycle the behaviour for that ally (or potentially do more stuff). I’m just mentioning this because I thought the UI design in Ananias roguelike that let you do this was convenient.

    in reply to: Musing about Magic Weapon Class #6295
    owen
    Participant

    … was single use and could be fused either to a minion or piece of equipment. You’d be making decisions on which minion to power up. Fusing with equipment would mean that more minions can use it and you don’t loose the ability when a minion dies (there would have to be a downside to offset that).

    If the individual minion is augmented instead of the production facility, then I think individual minions must able to be micromanaged more precisely. If runes are supposed to be rather precious items that need to be conserved if the player is to have a chance at winning, then I would probably never spend a rune to upgrade a minion that was not leading my party for fear of losing it due to bad AI decisions. I’d probably not want to spend it on a piece of equipment that wasn’t under my control either, because equipment often cannot be retrieved, at least for the time being, if the minion who holds it is killed.

    in reply to: Musing about Magic Weapon Class #6272
    owen
    Participant

    Well, just one more variant on this system of augmenting furniture with items:

    – Say that instead of finding “books” scattered around the world, you find “magical artefacts.” (e.g., a finger bone, a small statue, a broach, a mandrake root; there could be a dozen of these items).
    – These magical artefacts have the property that they can be “fused” with a particular piece of furniture.
    – Once the artefact has been fused with a piece of furniture, it unlocks a new trainable ability.

    As an example:

    Say I discover a mandrake root, I can choose which furniture item to fuse it with:

    – Fuse with a wooden book case -> spell of healing can be studied from that bookcase
    – Fuse with a work bench -> leather gloves of dexterity can be produced from that work bench
    – Fuse with a wooden training dummy -> Dragon punch can be learned from that training dummy
    – Fuse with a wooden beast cage -> Burrow can be learned by your beasts

    … you get the idea. The player gets an item that will upgrade his ability pool in one of several ways, and he tries to make the best choice possible. A better tier of the same piece of furniture will yield a different (usually better) tier of spell. And you could even make it so that fusing multiple items to a single piece of furniture will do stuff.

    The neat thing about this idea is that you could make the fusion combinations random on each game (sort of like how colors were randomly assigned to potions in the original Rogue). Only once you build a piece of furniture (or a better tier of the same type of furniture) will you be told what the outcome of a fusion with an artefact will be. All that would need to be defined in the code is “X ability requires fusion with Y piece of furniture.” Because mana serves as a power-curve regulator by the fact that it can only be generated through killing things or waiting around (thereby exposing yourself to increasing levels of danger as the world grows stronger) by limiting the type of furniture that can be built, stronger abilities will not be accessible until later in the game.

    Okay I think i’m oout of ideas now

    in reply to: Musing about Magic Weapon Class #6270
    owen
    Participant

    That’s a possibility. Maybe researching basic sorcery, for example, will also automatically give all of your creatures access to a complimentary package of basic spells that don’t need to be found. The way I see it, the game is going to have a large number of spells that will all be divided into “tiers” (e.g., basic, advanced, expert, master, to use the existing terminology). Any spell of any tier could be potentially found on the map, but by researching “basic sorcery,” it would be like giving you a one-time of bonus of 4-6 complimentary basic spells. Perhaps these are the same 4-6 basic spells each game or perhaps they are different each game.

    Only when you find the master sorcery book you get the more advanced spells.

    To be clear, I was suggesting that “master sorcery” (or “master abilities,” as I think it should be called) should still be researched at the cost of mana, but the individual spell or skill is what you would find in all of these books that are littered around the world map. So, even if you found a really powerful spell early in the game, you wouldn’t be able to use it immediately because you haven’t “unlocked it” in the the tech tree.

    But maybe a cleaner way to do what I’m describing would be to require that “good” spellbooks can only be placed in higher-tier libraries (so we could have wooden shelves, iron shelves, steel shelves), which would be unlocked with ironworking/steelworking. So if you found a powerful spellbook, but you only had wooden shelves, you’d have to wait until you unlocked steel bookcases. So, then you wouldn’t need the “sorcery” research branch any more. Well, it’s just another idea. If you think it’s horrible, I won’t take offense :p

    • This reply was modified 7 years, 9 months ago by owen.
    in reply to: Musing about Magic Weapon Class #6263
    owen
    Participant

    If you get a minion with some ability, is it able to pass it to other minions or do you still need to get a book?

    Generally, one book can teach infinitely many minions (but maybe some books have limited use). When one of the player’s raiding parties comes home, it would drop any books that it has collected at the entrance to the dungeon just as it does with all of its other loot. The only difference is that books get placed on library tiles instead of going into general equipment storage.

    Would minions do any learning automatically or all of it needs to be micro-managed?

    When you want to assign an ability to a minion, you would do so from the minion inventory window. Let’s say an orc has a free ability spot available; you click on the free ability spot and tell it to learn “strength boost.” It goes over to the library tile that has the strength boost book inside of it and it starts training to learn strength boost.

    I don’t see much point to automating the learning process. I suppose that you *could* make an addition to the immigration UI panel that tells X creature to automatically learn Y ability when recruited, but idk if that would be of much use.

    I don’t like the fact that you need to do additional research on top of finding abilities. Maybe just add minion level or stat requirements per ability?

    This would work, too, and it would be less tedious than waiting for a minion to explicitly train a new ability like I suggested. I just think that minions should have a limited number of ability slots (maybe they get more as they level up).

    • This reply was modified 7 years, 9 months ago by owen.
    in reply to: Musing about Magic Weapon Class #6254
    owen
    Participant

    So then, here’s another proposal for learning spells. This one doesn’t use magic weapons or items at all. It also involves what the game calls “skills” (e.g., knife throwing), so I’ll collectively refer to spells and skills as “abilities.” Here’s the idea:

    – The total number of abilities in the game is brought up into the hundreds.
    – Some creatures have some natural abilities along with their natural traits…
    – … but most abilities must be “found” on the world map as books that must be retrieved and stored in a library tile. In order to accumulate this knowledge, the player must constantly grow his library.
    – Once in the library, an ability can be studied by a minion. Just like crafting, learning takes time and the player has full control over what he wants to teach to whom, but minions can only learn so many skills and they take their knowledge to the grave, so study wisely!
    – Every ability that is found has a tier (e.g., basic, advanced, expert, master). The “sorcery” research items are still present in the research tree, but they no longer grant a package of spells and they are renamed to “abilities.” In order for a minion to study an ability of the “basic” tier, “basic abilities” much be researched. (This is simply to prevent the player from being able to use an overpowered ability early on in the game; Brogue does this by making heavy weapons require lots of strength, and FTL does this by making powerful weapons require lots of energy to use). It’s sort of like how you can build a forge, but you still have to research “two-handed” weapons in order to make a battle axe.
    – Certain abilities are restricted to certain types of creatures. (Yes, this means that there will be thousands of potential creature-ability pairs that need to be defined. But I or other people could help to define these pairs if need be)
    – Naturally, the player is only going to see a small subset of the available abilities in each game. This is what helps to make each replay a bit different.
    – As a subtle point, floors affect learning rate, and once an ability is placed inside a library tile, it’s magically bound to that bookshelf forever!
    – This system could also be extended to crafting stuff. Eg: the recipe needs to be discovered on the world map, and then learned by a specific unit.
    – Beasts probably wouldn’t be able to learn new things by studying because they can’t read. In this case, you could recruit a proxy unit (e.g. satyr, centaur) who could learn abilities and teach it to the beasts. Or do something else clever like that. idk

    All of that covers how abilities are learned. But it still doesn’t cover how powerful an ability is going to be, or how much its cooldown is. If an ability is scalable, then it will do so as a function primarily of the attribute values of the creature. As I said earlier, I would suggest borrowing from MOBAs and creating an abstract attribute called “intelligence” or “ability power,” which would be used by most abilities to determine the scaling power of the ability. However, some simple abilities might be independent of this ability power stat (e.g., a stat boost ability which simply multiplies an attribute by some constant factor for a short period of time).

    • This reply was modified 7 years, 9 months ago by owen.
    • This reply was modified 7 years, 9 months ago by owen.
    • This reply was modified 7 years, 9 months ago by owen.
    • This reply was modified 7 years, 9 months ago by owen.
    in reply to: Musing about Magic Weapon Class #6253
    owen
    Participant

    Okay, good points. As usual, I have a lengthy discourse followed by another proposal. So that things are easy to find, I’ve replied to what you’ve said in this post, and then I’ve presented a new idea in the next.

    Hmm, maybe. But I don’t see a problem with adding another attribute dedicated to spellcasting.

    I suggested to use dexterity simply because I thought it would be less complicated than defining (and programming) another attribute. If you do add another skill, however, I would suggest making it general, maybe like “intelligence” or “adeptness” rather than “magic power,” so that this new stat would apply thematically to non-magical creatures. For example, an orc might have a skill called “Focus” which increases its strength in proportion to the orc’s intelligence. Similarly, there could be a scroll of increase intelligence, for example, and it would augment both shamans and fighting units.

    I’m not really sure if we need magical weapons at all, maybe just let the magicians cast their spells?

    Well, we don’t “need” weapons. It would be good in some respects if a whole new class of weapons weren’t added to the game, particularly since you’ve already programmed in the skill-based rather than item-based magic.

    However, I wasn’t suggesting to add magical weapons for the sake of adding more things for the player to craft; rather, itemizing spells in the form of equipment allows the player to strategically allocate spells to different casting units. The biggest beef I have with spell-casters right now (aside from a lot of the spells not being very helpful) is that everybody gets the same package of spells. This really lowers the replay value of the game and it doesn’t make the player think about how he has to allocate spells to units. In addition, some spells don’t really help the spell caster very much (i.e., I don’t care if my orc shaman gets a strength boost; as it is now, his primary role is healing things that can actually do damage).

    I think it would be more interesting if each spell caster could learn a half dozen spells at the very most, and the particular playthrough had some bearing on which spells he could learn. In addition, “non-magical” creatures like harpies could also study, but they wouldn’t learn the same things that “magical” creatures like shamans, for example, would learn. I also think that the number of total spells in the game should be huge (like in the hundreds), but that you should only see a subset of each spells throughout the game. There can be many similar spells (maybe several different spells that start fires, in some way), but as long as they’re all a bit different, it makes the game much more fun to replay.

    in reply to: Controller support #6248
    owen
    Participant

    How would you even?

    in reply to: KeeperRL Alpha21 is released! #6212
    owen
    Participant

    It is a good build.

Viewing 15 posts - 1 through 15 (of 57 total)