I've released version 0.15 of my game.
The Hero decision making logic has been completely rewritten to take in to account differing personalities, and as a result the game balance is completely different in terms of how the heroes behave.
There should be a reasonable connection now between sales activity and hero movements in town, and they are in general much less likely to go in and beat the living crap out of the dungeons for no reason.
Fighters, barbarians, thieves etc. still spend plenty of time in the dungeons, with the less combat-oriented heroes spending more time messing about in town.
I'd love to hear any feedback on the end result, I'm pretty happy with it - but whether it is any more fun will clearly be a subjective thing.
Get it at the Bay12 Forums thread:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=105835.msg4194939
v0.15
*Hero AI rewrite, each guild gets different personalities based on Loot, Wealth, Leadership, Balance, Contracts, Glory, Social and Knowledge
*Sales metrics introduced to better inform hero sales decisions, personality based; generally:
-> Balance: Heroes seek out unpopular shops
-> Wealth: Heroes seek out popular shops, lots of sales
-> Loot: Heroes seek out shops, lots of purchases
-> Social: Heroes seek out popular shops, attendance
*Heroes come to town more often if the contract list is well populated (i.e. lots of work available)
*Dungeon crawling logic rewritten based on contracts and personalities
*Phases of operation for heroes should clear up behaviour a little;
*Better transparency for hero decision making in general
*Basis laid for Mayoress, noticeboard, and contracts, implemented in part.
*Some rumours started, but no effects on behaviour yet.
*Contracts moved to a new class, data storage and methods etc.
*Monsters moved to new contract / decision flow system.
*Dungeons expanded slightly, with floor by floor features that can de discovered, with different effects for each feature.
*First pass on game balance for new systems.
*Numpad works where numbers are viable input.
Monday 22 April 2013
Thursday 11 April 2013
BRAINS!!!
After much strife and worry, the hero behaviour has been further refined - or at least the method of controlling things has been framed out, and now I just need to slop the wet paper on to the chickenwire and wait for it to dry. It will take a little bit of time (thinking and doing), but I reckon I know what it should look like, and it seems reasonable in concept.
They now have a bunch of driving forces, which are effectively weightings towards acting a certain way. A merchant will be entirely interested in the creation or dispersal of wealth, a swashbuckler will have an insatiable lust for idle chat, and possibly doing things that make him/her look good (a trait they share with the Barbarian - for different reasons). Fighters go for leadership, mages seek knowledge, Druids are hand in hand with balance, thieves and loot, assassins looking for paid work etc. All of course mixed about, and with context specific missions for each driving motive.
The hero is now looking entirely within the bounds of the town for something to do - that is - they do not necessarily have any real knowledge of what is going on in 'The Ruins of Pyromania' or whatever the latest dungeon to be created has been called. This is abstracted away, so that they must check the town noticeboard (which is generally maintained by the Mayoress, and can be inputted in to by the shops or the player) for a compatible contract.
If there aren't any contracts available, they will revert to a default action type for that motive.
Social motives, for instance, would likely generate - as a default - a mission that makes them wander about town looking for other heroes to chat with. On the other hand, a fighter may issue a 'Call to Arms', which might prove to be a more interesting (and lucrative) role for the socially active hero to pursue.
Wealth and Loot motives would generate, as a default, consumerist actions such as buying a replacement sword, or selling a redundant sack shirt. Alternatively, a thief may enjoy the prospect of going on an 'item hunt' for a shop keeper. By generating context specific sets of goals, the system should allow for a hero to know that they are after an item for a shopkeeper, the shopkeeper should know that the hero ACTUALLY WANTS to find an item, so would be happier about shelling out a few coins to the thieves guild en masse to populate their shop with ill-gotten gains. An enterprising thief would probably even think about going on his own item hunt, if things were looking quiet in town (activated in conjunction with the 'Loot' motive).
A player creating a contract to go and kick the living crap out of that monster that has just been sprung from the dungeon would appeal to an assassin (looking for paid work), a Barbarian (looking for glory) and possibly a Druid (seeking balance). I'm toying with a different method of determining contracts, as an experiment, whereby the highest price contracts will be the preferred ones to be accepted by heroes. They then decide whether or not a contract is appropriate by the danger level. Presently it is a bit of a hack-job where they only accept contracts if they are at a certain threshold (ungainly and opaque to the player). If I end up with a system whereby cheaper contracts get ignored because there are more lucrative things to do - not just because some arbitrary thing has been met - I will be happy.
Not all contracts will be visible to the player, as some of them will be decidedly 'meta' - to generate interesting movements of heroes rather than be an actual binding contract between the Town, the Player, the hero etc. but the hope is that the contract board will look rather interesting, as townfolk start complaining about the influx of monsters ruining their lumber / crop operations and generating small bounties appropriately. This approach should also throttle the utter destruction of the dungeons a little - once they are small enough, they should cease being a real issue, but it will allow them to grow again back to the point where they are an issue.
The player could however facilitate the destruction of a dungeon by paying lots of small bounties for people to delve repeatedly. This makes me think I should make them spend less time in the dungeon based on the reward, which should be relatively trivial, and a hard lower limit might even be necessary. It's a bit artificial but probably required to stop lots of $1 contracts skewing things unnecessarily.
The main reason for all this work is just that my previous abomination of code was not only opaque to the player in some ways, it was beginning to be very opaque to me, and I had no idea why the heroes were doing some of the things they were doing (or not). Hopefully this will streamline their decision making, allowing for more varied, interesting, and robust behaviours and allow the code to grow far easier.
It certainly seems to be getting there, anyway:
They now have a bunch of driving forces, which are effectively weightings towards acting a certain way. A merchant will be entirely interested in the creation or dispersal of wealth, a swashbuckler will have an insatiable lust for idle chat, and possibly doing things that make him/her look good (a trait they share with the Barbarian - for different reasons). Fighters go for leadership, mages seek knowledge, Druids are hand in hand with balance, thieves and loot, assassins looking for paid work etc. All of course mixed about, and with context specific missions for each driving motive.
The hero is now looking entirely within the bounds of the town for something to do - that is - they do not necessarily have any real knowledge of what is going on in 'The Ruins of Pyromania' or whatever the latest dungeon to be created has been called. This is abstracted away, so that they must check the town noticeboard (which is generally maintained by the Mayoress, and can be inputted in to by the shops or the player) for a compatible contract.
If there aren't any contracts available, they will revert to a default action type for that motive.
Social motives, for instance, would likely generate - as a default - a mission that makes them wander about town looking for other heroes to chat with. On the other hand, a fighter may issue a 'Call to Arms', which might prove to be a more interesting (and lucrative) role for the socially active hero to pursue.
Wealth and Loot motives would generate, as a default, consumerist actions such as buying a replacement sword, or selling a redundant sack shirt. Alternatively, a thief may enjoy the prospect of going on an 'item hunt' for a shop keeper. By generating context specific sets of goals, the system should allow for a hero to know that they are after an item for a shopkeeper, the shopkeeper should know that the hero ACTUALLY WANTS to find an item, so would be happier about shelling out a few coins to the thieves guild en masse to populate their shop with ill-gotten gains. An enterprising thief would probably even think about going on his own item hunt, if things were looking quiet in town (activated in conjunction with the 'Loot' motive).
A player creating a contract to go and kick the living crap out of that monster that has just been sprung from the dungeon would appeal to an assassin (looking for paid work), a Barbarian (looking for glory) and possibly a Druid (seeking balance). I'm toying with a different method of determining contracts, as an experiment, whereby the highest price contracts will be the preferred ones to be accepted by heroes. They then decide whether or not a contract is appropriate by the danger level. Presently it is a bit of a hack-job where they only accept contracts if they are at a certain threshold (ungainly and opaque to the player). If I end up with a system whereby cheaper contracts get ignored because there are more lucrative things to do - not just because some arbitrary thing has been met - I will be happy.
Not all contracts will be visible to the player, as some of them will be decidedly 'meta' - to generate interesting movements of heroes rather than be an actual binding contract between the Town, the Player, the hero etc. but the hope is that the contract board will look rather interesting, as townfolk start complaining about the influx of monsters ruining their lumber / crop operations and generating small bounties appropriately. This approach should also throttle the utter destruction of the dungeons a little - once they are small enough, they should cease being a real issue, but it will allow them to grow again back to the point where they are an issue.
The player could however facilitate the destruction of a dungeon by paying lots of small bounties for people to delve repeatedly. This makes me think I should make them spend less time in the dungeon based on the reward, which should be relatively trivial, and a hard lower limit might even be necessary. It's a bit artificial but probably required to stop lots of $1 contracts skewing things unnecessarily.
The main reason for all this work is just that my previous abomination of code was not only opaque to the player in some ways, it was beginning to be very opaque to me, and I had no idea why the heroes were doing some of the things they were doing (or not). Hopefully this will streamline their decision making, allowing for more varied, interesting, and robust behaviours and allow the code to grow far easier.
It certainly seems to be getting there, anyway:
Friday 5 April 2013
The Mayoress
The Mayoress is going to be an entity that stores some information about the town as a whole. She needs to understand how much cash the town has access to, where the threats are likely to come from, and the current state of the town so that she can respond appropriately.
If the Mayoress is wealthy (or feels a little underdefended), she may consider it appropriate to hire a couple of the town peasants to shift up to guard duty, at a cost to equipment and an ongoing wage. So she needs to understand at what level of threat the town is at, how much cash she holds, what else she might need that cash for in the near future, and how much income she is enjoying. At the start of the game, there are plenty of shops in town (13), and they all pay about $25 per month. So the Mayoress will probably receive in the region of $325 on the 1st February. This gives a baseline to balance stuff around, which will hopefully start to drop off pretty rapidly if things start getting too chaotic.
Hopefully she can be pretty proactive about things, although sometimes that might not be enough. If (for instance) a monster is sprung from one of the dungeons, she will need to take a quick view on how safe the town is. She could:
a) Hire some guards and hope they can stop the menace. Or perhaps raise a militia from the townfolk.
b) Set up a contract for one of the Heroes to stop the menace.
c) Do nothing, hoping that it will take care of itself. Maybe she has been blessed with some foresight, and already has the town set up sufficiently.
She will want to stop the monster, as it is in her interest to keep order so that she can charge more taxes per month. If she gets particularly clever - she may recognise that the order of the town is on a downwards trend, perhaps due to a particularly successful dungeon, and she may make a concerted effort to purge that dungeon of demonic inhabitants (by raising contracts for heroes to pick up).
In the future she will also need to understand what material resources the town currently holds (say these are primary goods such as iron ore, cattle and wood, with secondary goods like leather, paper, charcoal and iron) and either react to low supplies or stockpile goods as necessary. She might need to build a charcoal burners hut, a tanners, a paper makers (?) and a smelter, if she doesn't already have one. Monsters also need to recognise that these things are valuable targets, and the town industry should protect them and lament their loss (as it represents their route to producing cheap items for sale). This should be pretty straightforward, as I imagine the town will operate on a fairly communist manifesto (outside the specific shops), so any workers would just gather stuff up and dump it at the feet of the Mayoress.
She will maintain a noticeboard, from where she will pin a few jobs for the heroes to examine. She will use this to generate here own contracts if she needs to sub-contract the protection of the town. She may even feel the need to take a more active stance in telling the heroes of the town various things. So the noticeboard should function as something that the heroes can look at, and also something that can be put in front of the heroes noses.
This goes hand in hand with the heroes getting new brains and desires, and hopefully it should be quite a neat but coherent solution to collecting the needs of the town and communicating that to the heroes - and the player - whilst allowing for some interesting expansion of the various mechanics in the future (town industry, for one thing).
But whatever she does, she needs to look after the town.
And perhaps most interestingly, that should include the desire to destroy the player, if that is what is required.
Hmm.
If the Mayoress is wealthy (or feels a little underdefended), she may consider it appropriate to hire a couple of the town peasants to shift up to guard duty, at a cost to equipment and an ongoing wage. So she needs to understand at what level of threat the town is at, how much cash she holds, what else she might need that cash for in the near future, and how much income she is enjoying. At the start of the game, there are plenty of shops in town (13), and they all pay about $25 per month. So the Mayoress will probably receive in the region of $325 on the 1st February. This gives a baseline to balance stuff around, which will hopefully start to drop off pretty rapidly if things start getting too chaotic.
Hopefully she can be pretty proactive about things, although sometimes that might not be enough. If (for instance) a monster is sprung from one of the dungeons, she will need to take a quick view on how safe the town is. She could:
a) Hire some guards and hope they can stop the menace. Or perhaps raise a militia from the townfolk.
b) Set up a contract for one of the Heroes to stop the menace.
c) Do nothing, hoping that it will take care of itself. Maybe she has been blessed with some foresight, and already has the town set up sufficiently.
She will want to stop the monster, as it is in her interest to keep order so that she can charge more taxes per month. If she gets particularly clever - she may recognise that the order of the town is on a downwards trend, perhaps due to a particularly successful dungeon, and she may make a concerted effort to purge that dungeon of demonic inhabitants (by raising contracts for heroes to pick up).
In the future she will also need to understand what material resources the town currently holds (say these are primary goods such as iron ore, cattle and wood, with secondary goods like leather, paper, charcoal and iron) and either react to low supplies or stockpile goods as necessary. She might need to build a charcoal burners hut, a tanners, a paper makers (?) and a smelter, if she doesn't already have one. Monsters also need to recognise that these things are valuable targets, and the town industry should protect them and lament their loss (as it represents their route to producing cheap items for sale). This should be pretty straightforward, as I imagine the town will operate on a fairly communist manifesto (outside the specific shops), so any workers would just gather stuff up and dump it at the feet of the Mayoress.
She will maintain a noticeboard, from where she will pin a few jobs for the heroes to examine. She will use this to generate here own contracts if she needs to sub-contract the protection of the town. She may even feel the need to take a more active stance in telling the heroes of the town various things. So the noticeboard should function as something that the heroes can look at, and also something that can be put in front of the heroes noses.
This goes hand in hand with the heroes getting new brains and desires, and hopefully it should be quite a neat but coherent solution to collecting the needs of the town and communicating that to the heroes - and the player - whilst allowing for some interesting expansion of the various mechanics in the future (town industry, for one thing).
But whatever she does, she needs to look after the town.
And perhaps most interestingly, that should include the desire to destroy the player, if that is what is required.
Hmm.
Friday 29 March 2013
Starvation, Murder and Overwhelming Peace
My dad is lying on the ground, next to a bushy-green spruce splashed with his blood - shuffling gently in the cool spring breeze.
There is a definite smell in the air and the rasp of a large animal breathing heavily somewhere. I can't see it. I stand still.
The mulch underfoot rustles and the footfall of this beast is heavy and increasing in speed. A few seconds and I realise the animal is leaving us to our little spot in the forest, moving away. My heart is racing.
I creep over to my father and hold his head in my hands.
One eyelid has been taken off by a claw, the other closed over and his chest is still and covered with bloody, thick saliva. His fur shirt is torn from the shoulder down to his stomach and bright red muscle glistens in the morning light. He looks straight through me with with his one staring eye.
He is dead, taken for the care of the Gods, and I am alone.
---
And so describes a typical starting point in UnReal World, an old and wise Roguelike crafted lovingly over the course of several decades by Sami Maaranen.
---
A cry, a yelp - the recognisable mew of a fox. The little bastard can smell my small stockpile of fish pulled out of the lake this morning, and has been systematically picking clean the various small morsels I have been using to try and lure him to a deadfall-induced brain haemorrhage over the last week or so. But the little git is too clever for my rudimentary traps - maybe he can smell me on the wood - or more likely he is just plain a better engineer than me.
At least I can fish, so I won't starve, but I could do without this. I'll take a few of my dried lavaret and go a couple of days south to clear my head.
---
It's a game that demands to be roleplayed and taken very seriously. If you don't, you will die. But if you do, you will get entirely sucked in and probably cry when this little slice of iron-age Finland inevitably crushes you.
I've fallen in love with Unreal World again and it has recently gone free-to-play donationware in lieu of the previous purchasing method, with a view to giving the developer less of an admin overhead and thereby giving him more time to develop the game.
I hope it is a success, and we get another few decades of progress.
http://www.unrealworld.fi/
There is a definite smell in the air and the rasp of a large animal breathing heavily somewhere. I can't see it. I stand still.
The mulch underfoot rustles and the footfall of this beast is heavy and increasing in speed. A few seconds and I realise the animal is leaving us to our little spot in the forest, moving away. My heart is racing.
I creep over to my father and hold his head in my hands.
One eyelid has been taken off by a claw, the other closed over and his chest is still and covered with bloody, thick saliva. His fur shirt is torn from the shoulder down to his stomach and bright red muscle glistens in the morning light. He looks straight through me with with his one staring eye.
He is dead, taken for the care of the Gods, and I am alone.
---
And so describes a typical starting point in UnReal World, an old and wise Roguelike crafted lovingly over the course of several decades by Sami Maaranen.
---
A cry, a yelp - the recognisable mew of a fox. The little bastard can smell my small stockpile of fish pulled out of the lake this morning, and has been systematically picking clean the various small morsels I have been using to try and lure him to a deadfall-induced brain haemorrhage over the last week or so. But the little git is too clever for my rudimentary traps - maybe he can smell me on the wood - or more likely he is just plain a better engineer than me.
At least I can fish, so I won't starve, but I could do without this. I'll take a few of my dried lavaret and go a couple of days south to clear my head.
---
It's a game that demands to be roleplayed and taken very seriously. If you don't, you will die. But if you do, you will get entirely sucked in and probably cry when this little slice of iron-age Finland inevitably crushes you.
I've fallen in love with Unreal World again and it has recently gone free-to-play donationware in lieu of the previous purchasing method, with a view to giving the developer less of an admin overhead and thereby giving him more time to develop the game.
I hope it is a success, and we get another few decades of progress.
http://www.unrealworld.fi/
Tuesday 26 March 2013
Friday 1 February 2013
Unblocking the Drain
I'm not sure what to do.
I mean, I know I still have to find the time to play and review LambdaRogue, but in terms of my own project.
It's probably a bit like completing a story, or concluding a screenplay, but the 'easy' thing about those is that you can be enigmatic with the ending and be satisfied that you have wrapped things up okay. I actually LIKE stories that leave you hurtling down a path and catapult you off the end, leaving the reader to decide what happens after the conclusion. Perhaps those Raptor eggs are infertile because Richard Attenborough had the foresight to genetically engineer it to be the case, and we don't subsequently need to worry about them getting out in to the wild five years from now. More likely, we fear the worst, and the little tikes have actually started breeding in order to put tourists in mild peril before eating them.
Whatever, we don't need to be explicit, we just need to set up the prior part of the story so that the consumer of the piece is left sufficiently interested to care in the slightest about what happens after the end.
But in a game with an open sort of narrative typical of many roguelikes, every decision needs to lead to interesting, meaningful moments within the context of the game mechanics. A decision the player makes can't lead meaninglessly to a point outside the narrative of the game, it should be interactive - and it should feed back.
100 Heroes is a bunch of dice rolls at the minute, with limited interlinked mechanics that gives the impression that certain things are happening because the Heroes want them to. They take up contracts because they have a sense of adventure, they buy a scroll because they have a lust for arcane knowledge. None of this is true, they just happen to do things because I designed a little system that comes up with random occurrences of similar events at the sorts of frequencies which nearly look convincing, at a sort of balance that approximately works to produce a mildly fun game.
But this isn't the game I set out to make, and it isn't where I want to leave it. So I have to make things a little bit more complicated to give the Heroes a set of needs, wants, traits and personalities that lead to real motivations. And the player needs to be able to witness these things happening and intervene with their retail know-how to sate those needs. Outside this the player needs to build reputations, both individually and throughout the game world, so that a first-time-visiting Hero who knows nothing about the shops in the town (apart from their own Guild-house) should be able to make value judgements on each establishment to decide what they should do, once they evaluate their position in the world.
They SHOULD lust for arcane knowledge, and some of them should have a wild streak that means they take contracts without knowing whether they are capable of meeting the terms of a contract. A conniving summoner who takes money down on a contract and leaves town, after stealing the scrolls from the player's shop amongst the commotion of reading out loud a 'Summon Imp' scroll that he has just bought from the same shop.
And of course the player should be able to recoup their losses by taking out a contract on that Hero, at a significant cost to the relationship with all Summoners, one presumes. Lawful, chaotic, good and evil. And all meaning something in the behaviour that they engage the player with.
I can't easily rationalise how to integrate all this in to working game mechanics. I know it is achievable within (or just outside) the bounds of my current knowledge of the Libtcod library and Python, and if not, I am sure that I can find the gaps in my knowledge via various reputable search engines.
I just don't have the confidence to start doing it.
I just don't know whether the paths I choose to go down will be ones that lead to any greater sense of implied narrative, complexity or realism beyond the silly little dice-roll functions that are already there.
So my hope is, by furtling around under the grate - nudging a few loose bits of information this way and that, perhaps bringing to order some of those grandiose, stringy thoughts that have got intertwined together at the trap disallowing the bilge to exit the sink, we can finally get this drain unblocked and move on with this thing.
I mean, I know I still have to find the time to play and review LambdaRogue, but in terms of my own project.
It's probably a bit like completing a story, or concluding a screenplay, but the 'easy' thing about those is that you can be enigmatic with the ending and be satisfied that you have wrapped things up okay. I actually LIKE stories that leave you hurtling down a path and catapult you off the end, leaving the reader to decide what happens after the conclusion. Perhaps those Raptor eggs are infertile because Richard Attenborough had the foresight to genetically engineer it to be the case, and we don't subsequently need to worry about them getting out in to the wild five years from now. More likely, we fear the worst, and the little tikes have actually started breeding in order to put tourists in mild peril before eating them.
Whatever, we don't need to be explicit, we just need to set up the prior part of the story so that the consumer of the piece is left sufficiently interested to care in the slightest about what happens after the end.
But in a game with an open sort of narrative typical of many roguelikes, every decision needs to lead to interesting, meaningful moments within the context of the game mechanics. A decision the player makes can't lead meaninglessly to a point outside the narrative of the game, it should be interactive - and it should feed back.
100 Heroes is a bunch of dice rolls at the minute, with limited interlinked mechanics that gives the impression that certain things are happening because the Heroes want them to. They take up contracts because they have a sense of adventure, they buy a scroll because they have a lust for arcane knowledge. None of this is true, they just happen to do things because I designed a little system that comes up with random occurrences of similar events at the sorts of frequencies which nearly look convincing, at a sort of balance that approximately works to produce a mildly fun game.
But this isn't the game I set out to make, and it isn't where I want to leave it. So I have to make things a little bit more complicated to give the Heroes a set of needs, wants, traits and personalities that lead to real motivations. And the player needs to be able to witness these things happening and intervene with their retail know-how to sate those needs. Outside this the player needs to build reputations, both individually and throughout the game world, so that a first-time-visiting Hero who knows nothing about the shops in the town (apart from their own Guild-house) should be able to make value judgements on each establishment to decide what they should do, once they evaluate their position in the world.
They SHOULD lust for arcane knowledge, and some of them should have a wild streak that means they take contracts without knowing whether they are capable of meeting the terms of a contract. A conniving summoner who takes money down on a contract and leaves town, after stealing the scrolls from the player's shop amongst the commotion of reading out loud a 'Summon Imp' scroll that he has just bought from the same shop.
And of course the player should be able to recoup their losses by taking out a contract on that Hero, at a significant cost to the relationship with all Summoners, one presumes. Lawful, chaotic, good and evil. And all meaning something in the behaviour that they engage the player with.
I can't easily rationalise how to integrate all this in to working game mechanics. I know it is achievable within (or just outside) the bounds of my current knowledge of the Libtcod library and Python, and if not, I am sure that I can find the gaps in my knowledge via various reputable search engines.
I just don't have the confidence to start doing it.
I just don't know whether the paths I choose to go down will be ones that lead to any greater sense of implied narrative, complexity or realism beyond the silly little dice-roll functions that are already there.
So my hope is, by furtling around under the grate - nudging a few loose bits of information this way and that, perhaps bringing to order some of those grandiose, stringy thoughts that have got intertwined together at the trap disallowing the bilge to exit the sink, we can finally get this drain unblocked and move on with this thing.
Sunday 20 January 2013
NetHack? In SPACE???
And now for something completely different. PRIME.
PRIME, as suggested previously, is kinda sorta NetHack in space (based on Zap'm as noted). For all I can tell it has the same procedural level generator but it really is no longer NetHack, at all, as you will find out should you do the right thing and play this.
It reminds me of being 10 years old with my brother and playing the Space Crusade boardgame on a Sunday morning. Finding the original game somewhat lacking, we would recruit any action figures we could lay our hands on (including the pony out of the Hobbit), extend the board with hand-drawn bits of map and just make the rules up as we went along.
But this is better - because PRIME is actually fun.
And my brother isn't taking a hissy fit as soon as things start to go against him.
But that's further on.
At the start, as most people do with such things, I begin the game. I'm standing in a blue-walled, procedurally generated space ship (not a dungeon) and inspect my inventory. I am a Space Marine (a forgiving starting class, apparently) wearing a +1 debugged flak jacket, wielding a pulse rifle (set to burst) and am ready to go. I can't figure out if I can put my rifle on single-shot fire, but I crack on regardless. The keybindings screen is comfortingly shorter than the three-page incomprehensible mess of NetHack.
I pop a few bullets through some bore worms - wander about the place - and it's immediately evident that this game is laced with a nice dose of humour. I like it.
Thinking ahead to how these things often play out - I decide to try and conserve my dwindling ammunition - proceeding to smash things with the butt of my rifle. It's actually an effective tactic as giant cockroaches, grid bugs and warp fungi alike all fall to my violence. But then, in this blue, dire space ship (not dungeon) I see some space goblins (not normal goblins) and am warned that one of them is wielding 2 grenades. I just happened to pick up some grenades myself, coincidentally, and decide that it might be a good opportunity to use them.
The flashbang explodes on the floor, and the four goblins start wandering about aimlessly as I walk up to them and smash their faces in with my rifle. It's about now (shortly after beating up blind space goblins) that I decide to try and 'read' the 'scrolls' that I have picked up - rebranded in PRIME as 'executing' 'floppy disks' (well what else would you use to store information in the far future?). I'm pleasantly surprised that I fail - I actually need a computer to use these things, and - not having one - I wonder if all those disks I have picked up will be a bit useless.
I shoot a few fuel barrels (nearly killing myself in the process) and wake up a sludge monster from a sludge vat (although realising the likelihood that this is PRIME's kitchen sink, I steer clear from thereon in). I find a ray gun, and zap it off harmlessly at nothing, without understanding what it did. I find a 'mega-computer' lying about on the floor, and kill a few phaser-toting redshirts and space orcs.
And best of all, I decide to play a bit of dress-up, putting on a plaid jumpsuit, a pink ornate armour, and a pink pointy helmet. It's like I'm going to G.A.Y. on New Year's Eve, and I feel fabulous.
I start running some programs with my new computer, and manage to detect some lifeforms, teleport across the level, identify some of my equipment, and infect my 'optimized +3 megacomputer' with something or other. Not really sure what the infection was, to be honest, as it didn't really seem to affect things. Perhaps it was adware that the game thought fit to abstract away - after all who wants to be reminded every time you run a floppy disk that a 'pop-up appears on the screen asking you if you want to enlarge your penis y/n?'.
Unfortunately, this bout of software operation and identification has given my outfit much more serious names, and I realise that I am wearing 'chaos power armour' and an 'elven helmet'. If truth be told, I do feel a little more combat capable if a little less camp. I'm still wearing the plaid jumpsuit though, which is small consolation.
And I am very combat capable, as I achieve level 5, enhance some of my skills, and veritably charge through everything the game has thrown at me so far (including an Orc pyromaniac with a flamethrower, and a 'high-ping-bastard').
But then I run out of places to go. Presumably there is a secret door somewhere to take me to a room containing the next stairs down, or I might be missing something else. I don't know, but I start to worry that my boss will come and look over my shoulder and I 'save and quit' the game.
It's another day, and the itch takes me again. I restart as a Reticulan Abductor (leaving Zack the Space Marine in stasis), and all newcomers of this particular class are charmingly dubbed 'Crop Artists'. Checking out my inventory, I seem to be wearing a Reticulan Jumpsuit, a powered shield, wielding a Reticulan Zap Gun, and have various items ready to presumably help me on my way. Like a +1 Anal Probe.
The Reticulan is certainly not as hardy as the Space Marine, as an instant death to an exploding fuel barrel and a single, fatal chomp from a man-eating plant readily confirm.
I'm really glad I've actually spent a little time with this game, as it is amusing, fun and feature-packed. One thing that struck me is that this game really seems to take some interesting steps away from it's NetHack grandparent, in gameplay principles as well as the obvious alterations to the detail.
It feels far more of a 'romp', perhaps fairer to new players, not so much spoiler dependent (at least as far as I have taken it) and my favourite part - there is no 'hunger'. Maybe it's just me, though, charmed by the content - and happy to die in ignorance (as I may have felt when I first picked up NetHack ten-odd years ago).
The painstaking attention to detail of NetHack is there. Each item has a complete, entertaining and informative description and some of the crafty identification sub-games of Grandpa are present and correct (apparently, for instance, you can empty canisters in to the sludge vats and observe the reaction to give you clues as to its nature). If I was to say I haven't explored the range of gameplay options present in this game that would be an understatement.
It's full of references and nods to other sci-fi culture, with Warhammer 40k and Star Trek being the most obvious ones to me - with loads more which I'll leave you to pick up on. The character classes are also very broad (there are about a dozen to choose from), and I can take a trip back in to PRIME in the near future as a Space Orc janitor, a Yautjr Hunter (the Predator!), or perhaps I should go back in and figure out how the Anal Probe can aid an enterprising Abductor. Or maybe I'll just try all of them.
PRIME is being constantly updated, with a new version just being released (version 2.1; 20th January). I can't help but feel I'm selling the game short by constantly comparing it to NetHack - and whilst the influence of that game is pretty pervasive - PRIME really is a game standing on it's own two feet - and to this particular player - it's standing in a position that is a lot more fun.
Give it a chance, go on. You might even enjoy it.
http://arcywidmo.republika.pl/prime/ - The Website
Wednesday 16 January 2013
Intermission
The Slimy Lichmummy
This game doesn't meet the criteria I set at the beginning of this small escapade - in that it should have received between 10-12 votes in the 2012 ROTY poll - but being that I am now sat at a computer that won't tolerate the retrieval of the rest of the games on my 'to-do' list (due to filesize) I thought it would be nice to carry on in the spirit of things and start playing with a roguelike that I have meant to have a crack at in a good few months - The Slimy Lichmummy (which came joint 63rd in the poll at 15 votes).
The notable thing about the game for me, is that it foregoes any levelling system. That is, you don't get better at anything for the normal sorts of reasons you would come to expect (the ritual slaughter of creatures that aren't you), you get better at the game ONLY by getting better at the game. A noble concept indeed. The game does offer your character opportunities to increase their abilities through 'augmentation chambers', although all the stats of your character generally remain hidden behind the scenes.
So I enter the dungeon, and I don't even have to choose a race or a character class or anything. I don't even get to pick someone out of some magical cryosleep chamber. It's just me, a name. And I shall be called Morten.
The interface is very clean and clear, and looks good. I'm pretty sure I know what most of the things are from a first glance, and I soon begin to recognise monsters and the various types of items pretty reliably, although as the monsters do not generally move as fast as you, sometimes I try and pick something up which turns out to be an enemy (I thought I had found a pair of gloves, and started to attack a severed hand).
The attacking mechanic is clever and interesting, in that for each particular weapon you undertake an attack 'combo' when engaging enemies. Some (mainly heavier) weapons need a couple of turns (or three) before they are ready to swing, and once you get in to an exchange of blows with an enemy the damage caused cycles through this combo of numbers. In the catacombs in my first playthrough, I found the 'Stormhammer', which after three turns allowed me to do a huge 15 damage on the first swing (killing most things straight off) followed by a couple of 2 damage attacks before cycling back to the start again. I felt invincible, and sure enough this feeling ensured my rapid downfall (to a bunch of slimes).
On the other side of things (receiving damage), the health mechanic is simple - but in the context of this game it works really well. It follows (as it is written in the rules of RPGs) that if you have no levels, you have no regular boosts to maximum health. So in a masterstroke of simplicity, the Slimy Lichmummy just puts this to one side.
Any medkits you pick up just give you extra health, without worrying about what your total is. You then have to control your health loss as you progress to ensure you don't end up in a situation where you don't have any health left. It's really simple to understand, and the game seems very nicely balanced to ensure you get the right amount of health throughout the progression of the game in the frequency of appearance of the health items.
Different types of armor are available to help prevent your loss of health, potions, wands and scrolls to help or hinder you, and things in the environment react as expected in a Roguelike manner (e.g. you can freeze water with a ray of frost).
The level design deserves a little mention as well, as I believe it is generated using different pieces hand designed by the developer. This gives a good feeling to the game, with all the areas being pretty interesting and avoiding the possibility of garbled areas that can occur with pure procedural generation - although I did get one playthrough where the gods were conspiring against me and I couldn't for the life of me find the secret door that would lead to the stairs to the next level (and subsequently got killed by the respawning monsters on the level).
Progress is nicely nudged along by the limited overall health pool, respawning monsters, and also the lifespan of your light source. Whilst light doesn't provide a 'hard limit' to the amount of time you can spend in the dungeon (e.g. a typical NetHack hunger clock), it certainly makes you aware of the need to make constant progress through the levels. Augmentations are available to minimise this detriment, as well, although if you linger anywhere for too long, you will eventually get beaten down to zero health. It's a nice bit of tension between hanging about trying to get enough loot on a level, and just pressing on and retaining your hitpoints and light for the later levels. In fact, the mechanics all round feel very well tuned and balanced within the framework of a randomly generated game (which expectedly throws up a few oddities) and I am rewarded with progress as I am punished by my mistakes. I want to continue playing.
I really like the details and the character of the game. Heads get decapitated as you fight away, you run people through with spears and bash teeth in with hammers - and the use of shotguns and grenades are encouraged, alongside crystal swords and the 'Pike of Thon'. This is all whilst fighting chainsaw ogres, ghouls and slimes amongst the Laboratory, Communications Hub and the Catacombs.
If you haven't already played it - you should.
http://www.happyponyland.net/roguelike.php
Friday 11 January 2013
String Theory Quartet
And now, Steam Marines.
I've never really given steampunk much thought, or attention. My closest and most intimate relationship with it is probably a good twenty years old, playing a fair amount of The Chaos Engine - the top-down shoot-em-up thingy smeared with Victoriana.
Now, as we are floating through space in a presumably steam-driven spacecraft, being attacked by presumably steam-driven evil robots, armoured in presumably steam-driven power-suits, I can afford to give it a little more thought. Is Victoria still on the throne? And if she is, is that because there was an overnight technological breakthrough that allowed for giant robots and space travel - or did it develop over many years whilst Victoria was kept young by a presumably steam-driven youth-machine? What does the facial hair of my male Marines look like under those helmets, and are the women wearing whale-bone corsets?
We don't get to find out any of those things yet, with Steam Marines being firmly in Alpha development the exposition and story are only hinted at through the artwork and the occasional quip from a Marine, presented as part of the normal game.
This game unashamedly calls itself a roguelike, and therefore by my reckoning it unashamedly IS a roguelike. It's not really anything like Rogue, though (go figure) but it IS turn-based. Instead of the single protagonist, you get four. These are the titular Steam Marines, and at the start of a new game, you can build up your squad as you see fit from a choice of four different types of Marine.
These are:
Leader - Has a shotgun (short range, medium damage, with knockback) and some reasonable armour. As the leader character develops with experience, s/he gains talents that generally aid the group.
Scout - Has a long range, accurate rifle (longer range, medium damage) and light armour. Typically has the most 'Action Points' of any class, allowing for the most number of actions in a turn.
Grenadier - Has a grenade launcher (area of effect damage) and heavy armour. Typically slower than the Leader, the grenades are useful for softening up groups of enemies.
Support - A high damage machine gun allows it to pick individual targets off quickly. With similar AP per turn (typically) to a Grenadier, and a 2AP cost to fire, sometimes difficult to use effectively - but can be devastating when a Support Marine is in the right place at the right time.
As hinted at, each Marine gains experience individually, and as s/he level up gets to take 'talents' (skills usable at a set cost to AP) and stat increases to make them better soldiers.
Movement, and firing, are limited to the cardinal directions only, and all of the procedurally generated spaceship is destructable. Individual Marines get a number of Actions Points per turn, and APs are used up by firing, changing facing (without moving), moving, using items and deploying talents. The cardinal movement / firing limitation allows for simple player analysis of each turn and the interface is slick enough that you can execute your plans easily.
Mouse support is in, and works well, although it is not forgiving if you accidentally click somewhere that you didn't mean to when you are moving your little warriors. I get the impression that this game is currently supposed to be primarily played with the keyboard, and there are handy shortcut keys for doing just about anything you would expect to (press 't' to get a tutorial overlay to explain the main things). Laptops fare well without a numpad, as you only need the four drectional keys for movement.
Each mission has a primary goal (e.g. 'get to the elevator' or 'kill all enemies') and a secondary goal, which may be significantly harder to achieve (e.g. 'knock an enemy out in to space'). You are then tasked to carry out this goal to each mission, through exploring every last corner of the space ship and dealing with enemies as you encounter them. Currently, as far as I have played the game, enemies appear to be pretty passive until you spot them (or they spot you, I guess), and they generally are not able to outrun your Marines. This puts you in a position whereby you should not (if you are playing cautiously enough) ever get caught out. Of course, it never works like that, and God help you when you think to yourself; "Yeah, I've got two shots left on that flamejack. I'll take him out.".
Because the almighty RNG will take umbrage with your arrogance, and you will get burnt.
Later levels promise 'boss' monsters, so I hear, although I haven't got there yet. There is also an interesting mechanic in place throughout a normal level where the evil robots 'teleport' about the place using grates in the floor. Once you realise this is the case, it makes you extra cautious in watching your back, as you could get ambushed at any moment.
A 'Guard' switch allows your Marine to end their turn (using up all APs) and enter in to an 'Overwatch' mode, and along with the various items, talents and the initial squad selection, there are a wide variety of tactical options available for you to choose how you play this game - which only increases as you get further and further in to the game. Permadeath (by squad member) means you want to keep your guys alive, to retain the benefits of the higher level talents,
And the game looks SO good. The pixel art is excellent and the visual design aesthetic - through the characters, tiles, backgrounds, details and level generation to the UI and the title screen - are wonderfully coherent and it all resonates with itself. It just works, and is a pleasure to play.
As far as the game goes, I really enjoy it, however I think with something that offers such 'simplicity' that this will really come in to its own when all the features get implemented and the developer does some serious iterative tuning of all the relevant gameplay mechanics (although, for an alpha, it is surprisingly well balanced). It lacks the feature sprawl of something as wild as NetHack or IVAN, but in this is an opportunity to create something super-tight and finely-balanced and I'm hugely excited to see where it goes.
I have given it a little nudge in it's quest for a Verdant Glow of a Vapourous Nature (which sounds far more Steampunk than Steam Greenlight). You should check it out and maybe do the same.
http://www.worthlessbums.com/forums/index.php - The Forums
http://www.steammarines.com/ - The Website
I've never really given steampunk much thought, or attention. My closest and most intimate relationship with it is probably a good twenty years old, playing a fair amount of The Chaos Engine - the top-down shoot-em-up thingy smeared with Victoriana.
Now, as we are floating through space in a presumably steam-driven spacecraft, being attacked by presumably steam-driven evil robots, armoured in presumably steam-driven power-suits, I can afford to give it a little more thought. Is Victoria still on the throne? And if she is, is that because there was an overnight technological breakthrough that allowed for giant robots and space travel - or did it develop over many years whilst Victoria was kept young by a presumably steam-driven youth-machine? What does the facial hair of my male Marines look like under those helmets, and are the women wearing whale-bone corsets?
We don't get to find out any of those things yet, with Steam Marines being firmly in Alpha development the exposition and story are only hinted at through the artwork and the occasional quip from a Marine, presented as part of the normal game.
This game unashamedly calls itself a roguelike, and therefore by my reckoning it unashamedly IS a roguelike. It's not really anything like Rogue, though (go figure) but it IS turn-based. Instead of the single protagonist, you get four. These are the titular Steam Marines, and at the start of a new game, you can build up your squad as you see fit from a choice of four different types of Marine.
These are:
Leader - Has a shotgun (short range, medium damage, with knockback) and some reasonable armour. As the leader character develops with experience, s/he gains talents that generally aid the group.
Scout - Has a long range, accurate rifle (longer range, medium damage) and light armour. Typically has the most 'Action Points' of any class, allowing for the most number of actions in a turn.
Grenadier - Has a grenade launcher (area of effect damage) and heavy armour. Typically slower than the Leader, the grenades are useful for softening up groups of enemies.
Support - A high damage machine gun allows it to pick individual targets off quickly. With similar AP per turn (typically) to a Grenadier, and a 2AP cost to fire, sometimes difficult to use effectively - but can be devastating when a Support Marine is in the right place at the right time.
As hinted at, each Marine gains experience individually, and as s/he level up gets to take 'talents' (skills usable at a set cost to AP) and stat increases to make them better soldiers.
Movement, and firing, are limited to the cardinal directions only, and all of the procedurally generated spaceship is destructable. Individual Marines get a number of Actions Points per turn, and APs are used up by firing, changing facing (without moving), moving, using items and deploying talents. The cardinal movement / firing limitation allows for simple player analysis of each turn and the interface is slick enough that you can execute your plans easily.
Mouse support is in, and works well, although it is not forgiving if you accidentally click somewhere that you didn't mean to when you are moving your little warriors. I get the impression that this game is currently supposed to be primarily played with the keyboard, and there are handy shortcut keys for doing just about anything you would expect to (press 't' to get a tutorial overlay to explain the main things). Laptops fare well without a numpad, as you only need the four drectional keys for movement.
Each mission has a primary goal (e.g. 'get to the elevator' or 'kill all enemies') and a secondary goal, which may be significantly harder to achieve (e.g. 'knock an enemy out in to space'). You are then tasked to carry out this goal to each mission, through exploring every last corner of the space ship and dealing with enemies as you encounter them. Currently, as far as I have played the game, enemies appear to be pretty passive until you spot them (or they spot you, I guess), and they generally are not able to outrun your Marines. This puts you in a position whereby you should not (if you are playing cautiously enough) ever get caught out. Of course, it never works like that, and God help you when you think to yourself; "Yeah, I've got two shots left on that flamejack. I'll take him out.".
Because the almighty RNG will take umbrage with your arrogance, and you will get burnt.
Later levels promise 'boss' monsters, so I hear, although I haven't got there yet. There is also an interesting mechanic in place throughout a normal level where the evil robots 'teleport' about the place using grates in the floor. Once you realise this is the case, it makes you extra cautious in watching your back, as you could get ambushed at any moment.
A 'Guard' switch allows your Marine to end their turn (using up all APs) and enter in to an 'Overwatch' mode, and along with the various items, talents and the initial squad selection, there are a wide variety of tactical options available for you to choose how you play this game - which only increases as you get further and further in to the game. Permadeath (by squad member) means you want to keep your guys alive, to retain the benefits of the higher level talents,
And the game looks SO good. The pixel art is excellent and the visual design aesthetic - through the characters, tiles, backgrounds, details and level generation to the UI and the title screen - are wonderfully coherent and it all resonates with itself. It just works, and is a pleasure to play.
As far as the game goes, I really enjoy it, however I think with something that offers such 'simplicity' that this will really come in to its own when all the features get implemented and the developer does some serious iterative tuning of all the relevant gameplay mechanics (although, for an alpha, it is surprisingly well balanced). It lacks the feature sprawl of something as wild as NetHack or IVAN, but in this is an opportunity to create something super-tight and finely-balanced and I'm hugely excited to see where it goes.
I have given it a little nudge in it's quest for a Verdant Glow of a Vapourous Nature (which sounds far more Steampunk than Steam Greenlight). You should check it out and maybe do the same.
http://www.worthlessbums.com/forums/index.php - The Forums
http://www.steammarines.com/ - The Website
Tuesday 8 January 2013
Knitted Kitten Jumpers
Cargo Commander
The working man.
Day after day of mindless toil. Pushing things this way and that. An extension of the machine in front of you. You carry out the instructions that were given to you in a time long past, for reasons which you can't fully remember, for a purpose which is forgotten.
In another part of the galaxy, the Bourgeois revel in the ultimate fruit of your work whilst all you see is a few small coins which serve to keep your many screaming children off the streets and in a state of adequate sustenance. Silver, rat-eaten donuts and knitted jumpers with pictures of kittens on them - the building blocks of an empire.
But you tolerate the work, because you get to do it in the middle of space, in a ship equipped with a huge electromagnet, and your right arm is augmented with a massive industrial drill that can also function as a nailgun.
Good times indeed.
We are introduced to the game with minimal exposition, this Cargo Commander operating out in his spaceship in the middle of some sector somewhere, floating amongst a load of space junk. Controls are really simple and intuitive, W, A, and D to move left, right and jump, with E to activate things (like the ships giant magnet).
Left click shoots, and right click either thrusts out a large box-breaking hammer-like protrusion from your mechanical arm, or if you are next to a destructable wall, you can use a drill to break through it with a bit of a concerted effort. And another thing that is made very clear to us from the start is that this man has a beard. It is neatly combed. It's probably very useful to help resist the cold of space.
A tutorial level eases us in to the game, where we learn about the basics of moving our man through the big cargo boxes that smash in to our craft after the operation of the magnet. We shoot some enemies, collect new guns, and pick up some cargo.
Each cargo box is procedurally generated and operates like a platformer, with relative gravity and the position of walls and floors different every time. You can drill a hole in the wall of a box and eject your good self out in to space, where you swim in a zero gravity environment to get back to somewhere safe (and you have as long as you can hold your breath to get there).
After a time, wormholes appear which serve to suck the large cargo boxes back in to some kind of oblivion - which is the cue to get the hell out of that particular box. It doesn't make any sense, but I don't really care.
And we repeat these tasks during our work day, attracting boxes to smash in to our ship (these boxes also get magnetised, attracting further boxes which can act like a sequence of levels). We plunder these for goods and return to our ship to take stock. Once we have enough cargo in a given work day, we get a chance to explore a kind of 'boss' box, where if we are lucky, we will find a pass to go to another sector.
The game is a lot of fun, and has a great character. It's clearly not meant to be an accurate portrayal of life in space, with the constantly appearing wormholes and the apparently arbitrary approach to how gravity works. All this serves to build a slightly daft game world forming the veneer to all the clever gameplay mechanics decisions.
It leans heavily towards the Arcade side of the Roguelike spectrum, and if you like your gaming experience to be cerebral and slow-paced, you may not appreciate the twitchy platformer mechanics and the constant time pressure of the wormholes limiting your presence within each procedurally generated container. It certainly feels a bit too fast-paced for my jaded mind and I can't play it for too long without worrying a little bit that I might go in to some unwanted state of increased excitement.
To add further to the arcade elements, high scores are kept online for each sector, so it's great if you want to compete with the world.
It's original, amusing, interesting and full of great visual and gameplay design elements - all sitting within a relatively simple, coherent and unpretentious wrapper. If you like this sort of thing, I would definitely recommend picking up a copy and giving it some playtime.
http://playcargocommander.com - Visit the Website!
Saturday 5 January 2013
BDSM - In That Order
Rogue's Tale
So onwards we march in the inexorable pursuit of happiness via the means of the Roguelike, and we land at the door of Epixx and Rogue's Tale. Getting the game started is an absolute doddle - just download the Client from the website, create an account (via the same Client) using a name and a password, and go!
A simple looking character creation system is presented to us which allows us to nudge a few points in to Strength, Agility, Charisma or Stamina, distributing 28 points between them, with limits of 6-8 as a starting point. There is a well considered system of mechanics in place, and these are all presented very transparently at the website, but 'in a nutshell' each 'skill check' revolves mainly around the roll of two six sided dice, trying to equal or beat a base score of 7. An 8 would give the character a +1 bonus in things related to that skill, so if you want to regularly hit things with sharp objects, for instance (which turns out to be a useful skill), it makes sense to get an 8 in agility.
All that's left is to give your little adventurer a name, and you are a Ready Rogue.
The nature of your Rogue is decided by the decisions you make whilst adventuring, in that your character grows by learning talents along his level progression. These give the character new ways to interact with the world; e.g. some talents give you different ways to attack (at the cost of energy) whilst others allow you to read scrolls of a particular nature. I grow tired of reading the manual so decide I can't really figure out anything more without just jumping right in and making some decisions of my own.
Staring at this bearded adventurer I have wrought from the earth; on the screen in front of me with his dagger in hand - there is a warm feeling running through me - I think this is going to be good.
A Tutorial Dog appears on the screen and tells me that he is annoying (he's not, really), but he is going to tell me what to do. I read intently, and I engage with the world. I feel great. Frostmourn Keep is mine.
I pick up some stuff, kill a giant snail and I loot a cabinet. I then proceed to shoo off the dog before I register how to access the inventory (he tried to tell me ... ). In a blind panic, I mash the keyboard to find that 'E' stands for 'Equipment' and - thankfully - my heart rate returns to normal, the wife hangs up from an emergency call and the world starts to turn again ...
... But then I get killed by a bat. Oh well, to be expected really, I got caught out experimenting with the game mechanics. Happens to the best of us.
And so Morten is reborn to the world, to empty this cave of all the vile beasts that inhabit the thing. And I actually do okay. (Kinda).
I figure out that lighting up wall torches gives you a single point of experience (very useful in taking you the first ten to the second level) and killing a few more vile creatures lifts me to the third level. I find a hat, some armour, and I wander down through the second level to encounter (and defeat) a few enemies. Resting between engagements keeps me in good order, and I plod on.
But then I get killed. Probably by a wolf, or a bat. I can't remember.
Because the next ten or twenty playthroughs are but a blur.
Morten living out such painful, pitiful, parallel existences.
5 turns. Dead. 6 turns. Dead. 14 Turns. Dead. 60 turns. Dead (extended because I spent most of that cowering next to a dog in the starting room).
And so on, and so forth.
There are glimmers of greatness in here, but I can't help but think the balancing in the early stages is a little unfair. Not ... you know ... 'Roguelike' unfair, but just plain and simple 'unfair'.
Get caught in the first room with a spider and a venomous snake - and I may be missing something or other - but unless you are very lucky you are dead. Next go you are target practice for an archer in the starting room, and get turned in to a pincushion in single figure turns. Some really hard Orcs and Humans smash your face in with a single critical hit, and the weapons you do find you feel compelled to equip - whether they are cursed or not.
You might argue that only a few characters should actually get to a position where they CAN compete - after all, if it is TRULY fair then shouldn't you have an equal chance against a human who is equal in equipment and skill? This is a reasonable point.
In the field of Gender Politics, anyway.
I have become frustrated.
This being a game, I find myself thinking that I want my decisions to make a difference. I want to be punished for my mistakes and rewarded for the occasional risky move - or just better tactical play (than a normally dumb AI). I just don't get that, and there appear to be too many situations that are a dead-loss for an early character.
The game is SUPER easy to pick up and play, with the modern mouse-driven interface and context sensitive left / right clicking. It runs smoothly, things happen as you expect them to (even if you quickly learn that most of it involves burying another corpse) and the whole things reeks of quality.
Another fifteen or so playthroughs and then it happens. I kill enough things to stumble across enough equipment so that I may become something dangerous - and I realise why I have persisted with this. I get the pay off, my character is working and I feel great again. A dual-wielding level 5 rogue, feared throughout all the World's End Mountains, cutting snakes, wolves and duelists in to tiny little pieces with a hatchet and a dagger. I die soon after, of course, but the progress IS there!
I'll leave you with the following thought;
If the younger brother from the TV series American Chopper came up to me, resplendent in a loose-fitting 'WEEN' t-shirt, and he were to ask:
"Paul, should I ask Charlize Theron out on a date?"
I would say:
"Yes."
And likewise, despite the fact that it will reject you IF IT TAKES NOTICE OF YOU AT ALL - if you are wondering whether you should take the chance to download and play Rogue's Tale, the answer is a categorical "Yes".
http://rogue.epixx.org/index.html - The Website (and a comprehensive manual)
Thursday 3 January 2013
In Good Company - Or What I Learnt From 2012 ROTY
Amongst all the interesting and lively discussion surrounding the value and the meaning of the Roguelike Of The Year poll in the first place, somebody somewhere made a really nice suggestion that people should actively use the poll to find some promising Roguelike games and try them out.
http://roguelikedeveloper.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/full-results-for-ascii-dreams-roguelike.html
So that's what I've done, but using as the basis the performance of my own 'roguelike' in this particular poll. My own game did phenomenally well, scoring a total of 11 votes (one of them was me) and I mean that sincerely (totally exceeded my expectations). So I thought I would try and get a feel for games that are apparently as popular as mine, and it's fair to say that so far (for whatever reason) I appear to be in some very nice company.
I have chosen to have a closer look at all the games that were within one vote of mine, which are listed below, with my first impressions also below. Whilst I wouldn't consider myself an expert or authority on roguelikes, I'm a little disappointed that I haven't already played any of the roguelikes that made my shortlist, but at least that means this little exercise is doing what it is supposed to be doing :).
I'll be using subsequent posts in this blog to post some thoughts on these games as I get to grips with them in the early stages, and hopefully it will encourage people to check these games out (if you haven't already) or maybe try and devote some time to some of the other strange and wonderful sounding games that are out there on the list.
100 Heroes - 11 votes <- My game
PRIME - 11 votes
Steam Marines - 12 votes
Rogue's Tale - 10 votes
LambdaRogue - 11 votes
Castle Dungeon - 11 votes
Cargo Commander - 10 votes
First Impressions
PRIME
http://arcywidmo.republika.pl/prime/
An extension and reworking of a roguelike called Zap'm, summarised as NetHack in space. I'm certainly intrigued, and the ASCII interface looks recognisably NetHack. I notice there appears to be a character class called a toilet scrubber, and my interest is piqued even further. Can't wait to dive right in.
Steam Marines
http://www.steammarines.com/
Procedurally generated spaceships, gorgeous looking graphics reminiscent of a SNES, and the promise of controlling a squad of up to four marines in a 'steam punk spaceship'. I'm sure I've seen that concept before, but this game looks like it has a genuine character all of it's own. I really am looking forward to playing this one, as well.
Rogue's Tale
http://rogue.epixx.org/
I'm actually slightly confused at first glance as to what I am looking at. This game is another cracker to look at, clearly, but there is some sort of online registration thing that I can do to make a high level character. Apparently this game follows the Berlin Interpretation closely, so I should be expecting some classical Rogue gameplay. I'm less excited to actually start playing this, as I've not been suckered by a USP or some easy on the ears catch line, but I remain intrigued to see what this game has in store.
LambdaRogue
http://lambdarogue.net/
Amaterasu, oh wise and munificent god - why have you held this knowledge back from me all these years? Did you really try and hide this from me?
This game sounds awesome, and another beautiful looking thing whether it's compared against the grotesque form of the Roguelike or anything else. This bills itself as a Roguelike with an intuitive interface and a strong concentration on story, and has been in development for 6 years.
Castle Dungeon
http://goldenhammersoftware.com/castledungeon.html
Castle Dungeon is a roguelike for Kindle eInk devices. I won't get a chance to playtest this, as I don't have a compatible Kindle, but I'm really happy that somebody has gone ahead and done this. The game looks simple, as would be expected on a monochrome Kindle device, but I can't really gather too much more without playing it.
Cargo Commander
http://playcargocommander.com
A commercial roguelike, available on Steam, and looks to consist of some really nicely done procedurally generated levels consisting of large interlinked cargo containers floating about in space. You get to control a 'working class hero' zapping things within these containers, floating about in space, or destroying the environment as you see fit. The game is presented in full, glorious, rotating 3D and it looks like a lot of fun. At the time of writing it is available on sale for just under two quid on Steam (normally retailing at £6.99).
Also see http://roguebasin.roguelikedevelopment.org/index.php?title=Main_Page for some further descriptions of the games, provided generally by the developer's or the relevant community in wiki form.
Crikey, my silly little game is in some really good company, and I feel a little bit like a fraud. Oh well, onwards we go.
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