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PleasingFungus posted:This is basically also how I feel about autoexplore & rest-until-healed buttons. I can understand autoexplore, but if your game has rest in it, it should have a rest until healed button.
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May 2, 2015 16:31
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victrix posted:I don't like that much either, just like the loot filter coming in PoE, it's tacit acknowledgment that your game has piles of poo poo loot that isn't worth the brain power it takes to parse it. Well not really - it's a way to let you get cool drops and also steadily progress in terms of money gained, without the hassle of having to pick it all up manually or juggle inventory weight for trash loot. It keeps gameplay options open (choosing cool loot for your hero, juggling inventory weight for non-trash loot) while dealing with the tedium. If they just cut the loot way down odds of getting something you want are lower and you'd get less money. Also Dungeonmans - so good, but it really, really needs an auto-explore button.
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May 2, 2015 17:08
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Klaus Kinski posted:I can understand autoexplore, but if your game has rest in it, it should have a rest until healed button. this is true only if you heal when resting - I'm sure that goes without saying but it's an assumption that can be changed
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May 2, 2015 19:39
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Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:this is true only if you heal when resting - I'm sure that goes without saying but it's an assumption that can be changed What would you do then no regen? Healing only through combat? Basically a game where everyone is a DD?
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May 2, 2015 19:45
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Heal on pickups or upon accomplishing things/going deeper can work pretty well.
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May 2, 2015 19:50
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Cerepol posted:What would you do then no regen? Healing only through combat? Basically a game where everyone is a DD? Everyone is a DD with healing on dealing damage, healing on kills, healing on exploration, healing on random drops like corpses or something else. Just a musing - I don't think crawl is the right game to make that change in but it'd be interesting to design a game like that. I think that's what dredmor wanted to do but they didn't have the balls to actually make resting not heal you.
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May 2, 2015 19:56
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Unless I am just really bad and never figure out how, you don't heal from time passing in Sproggiwood and it works really well.
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May 2, 2015 19:58
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I wish you could use Melody in the daily for Necrodancer, favourite character by far since you can play through the entire game without ever stopping moving.
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May 2, 2015 21:15
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DatonKallandor posted:If they just cut the loot way down odds of getting something you want are lower and you'd get less money. The game designer has more control than just flipping a lever between "more loot" and "less loot". The idea is to change the loot generation so that players get a few very good items and no bad items, rather than giving them a few hundred items with a 1% chance to be useful. Of course doing it that way is harder, but it makes a better game.
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May 2, 2015 21:31
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Klaus Kinski posted:I can understand autoexplore, but if your game has rest in it, it should have a rest until healed button. Either taking time to heal 'out of combat' is meaningful, or it's not. If it's a meaningful choice to trade time for healing, then you're rarely going to want to rest to full - when speedrunning in DCSS, for example, I'll often heal to only half or two-thirds. (Though ideally I'm not wasting any turns resting at all!) If it's not a meaningful choice, don't present the player with it - don't even bother making them hit a 'rest' button. Either heal them automatically after fights (how do you determine if the player is in a fight?), or just don't heal them at all. Off the top of my head, 868-HACK, Hoplite, Crypt of the Necrodancer, Spelunky, FTL, and Nuclear Throne all take the latter approach - as does Sproggiwood, apparently?. I can't think of anything that does the former, though in a game like FTL, where fights are clearly delineated, it seems like it'd be in principle possible. This isn't something that you can really retrofit onto legacy roguelikes. It's embarrassing for something like Dreadmor, though - by 2011, the developers really should have known better.
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May 2, 2015 21:34
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Sproggiwood only has native healing for one character class (farmer, requires some levels to unlock the ability". Otherwise you need to hold onto a health potion as your inventory item, or find a healing or wish pillar and hope the wish pillar grants health.
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May 2, 2015 21:38
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The Banner Saga does the former if I recall correctly, but don't play it, it's poo poo.
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May 2, 2015 21:43
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The Banner Saga is Oregon Trail with the world's worst turn based strategy bolted on instead of hunting for bison, so it's not terribly relevant.
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May 2, 2015 21:44
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Tangentially: coming from a DCSS perspective, the fact that Nuclear Throne's green rats drop ammo & health seems really weird to me. Everywhere else (as far as I've been - haven't seen zone 7 yet), there's a very strict number of enemies/item drops available, but here there's an infinite supply from respawning enemies. (Or at least until missed shots/corpse impact damage kills the mother rat.) Doesn't this kind of encourage grinding, esp. with Rabbit Paw or Lucky Shot?
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May 2, 2015 21:48
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Big Green Rats actually only spawn a finite amount of Small Green Rats in batches. Once they run out, they will charge at the player and burst into a final batch of small green rats. Theoretically this encourages waiting around to let them spawn them all, but I have never ever seen anyone do that even when trying to play as optimally as possible on dailies, so who cares.
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May 2, 2015 21:57
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PleasingFungus posted:If it's not a meaningful choice, don't present the player with it - don't even bother making them hit a 'rest' button. Either heal them automatically after fights (how do you determine if the player is in a fight?), or just don't heal them at all. Off the top of my head, 868-HACK, Hoplite, Crypt of the Necrodancer, Spelunky, FTL, and Nuclear Throne all take the latter approach - as does Sproggiwood, apparently?. I can't think of anything that does the former, though in a game like FTL, where fights are clearly delineated, it seems like it'd be in principle possible. FTL does this both wrong and right, actually. You can't heal your ship between fights unless you get a hull repair drone, which effectively turns combat consumables (drone parts) into hitpoints. But your crew, systems, and any hull breaches can and should be manually healed/repaired after every single encounter. This can often mean e.g. waiting for your puny level-1 O2 system to slowly replenish the air in the ship after having vented the ship to deal with enemy boarders. I don't see a good way to solve this issue without doing away with the occasional "my remaining crew are stuck in the medbay, getting healed exactly as fast as they take damage from asphyxiation, too weak to make it to the broken O2 system to repair it" story. But it is definitely a problem. Dredmore is particularly nasty about this because a) many characters directly trade health with enemies when fighting them, and b) in-level enemy respawns are pretty aggressive, so you don't want to do a "rest until healed" unless you've stacked a ton of physical regeneration bonuses. But this isn't immediately evident so you get players walking back and forth in a room until healed, then opening a door and getting buried under a pile of diggles.
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May 2, 2015 22:14
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A few more notes on Qud for Unormal and co, this is all minor stuff but I figure it's worth posting in case you're unaware of it
The new art looks great and the Steam build seems much more stable now too, I've played the latest build for maybe six hours or so and I haven't had any of the lockups that used to be a fairly frequent occurrence.
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May 2, 2015 22:36
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:FTL does this both wrong and right, actually. You can't heal your ship between fights unless you get a hull repair drone, which effectively turns combat consumables (drone parts) into hitpoints. But your crew, systems, and any hull breaches can and should be manually healed/repaired after every single encounter. This can often mean e.g. waiting for your puny level-1 O2 system to slowly replenish the air in the ship after having vented the ship to deal with enemy boarders.
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May 2, 2015 22:38
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victrix posted:So did/has anything happened with Adom? I think the last public build is ancient, and I have no idea what the state of the game is in private. There was a prerelease build for testers last month and they're aiming for a june Steam release.
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May 2, 2015 22:40
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IronicDongz posted:Big Green Rats actually only spawn a finite amount of Small Green Rats in batches. Once they run out, they will charge at the player and burst into a final batch of small green rats. Ah, OK. I have seen that behavior, but didn't know what triggered it. That seems reasonable. TooMuchAbstraction posted:FTL does this both wrong and right, actually. You can't heal your ship between fights unless you get a hull repair drone, which effectively turns combat consumables (drone parts) into hitpoints. But your crew, systems, and any hull breaches can and should be manually healed/repaired after every single encounter. This can often mean e.g. waiting for your puny level-1 O2 system to slowly replenish the air in the ship after having vented the ship to deal with enemy boarders. Yeah, agreed. I was thinking about that as I typed up my last post - should've added an asterix...
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May 2, 2015 22:45
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I think it's kind of funny that I've had more interesting game design discussion in this thread than I have on any game related forum anywhere. Roguelikes truly are the mother of all games 
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May 2, 2015 22:59
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I picked up Crowntakers while it was on GMG a little ago, and I'm kinda digging it so far. It's nothing spectacular, but does its own thing pretty competently.
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May 2, 2015 23:21
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victrix posted:I think it's kind of funny that I've had more interesting game design discussion in this thread than I have on any game related forum anywhere. A lot of traditional design pitfalls bubble to the surface once you add in permadeath - how many games would play terribly if you lost all your progress when you died? Getting rid of health bars has a similar effect in games like platformers.
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May 2, 2015 23:23
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RPATDO_LAMD posted:The game designer has more control than just flipping a lever between "more loot" and "less loot". The idea is to change the loot generation so that players get a few very good items and no bad items, rather than giving them a few hundred items with a 1% chance to be useful. Of course doing it that way is harder, but it makes a better game. So what makes a good item? That's actually surprisingly hard to pin down. Early on in the game, anything I can equip is a good item, because odds are that equipment slot is empty. But even things I can't equip might be good items -- maybe I'm 6 STR short of being able to wear that nice armour, but finding it prompts me to dedicate my next two levels to raising STR so that I can wear it when I wouldn't have done that otherwise. Once I have at least something in each equipment slot -- well a good item is something that's better than what I already have in that slot. But what makes it "better"? Should it value a high-power, high-cooldown infusion over a weaker one that can be used more often, or vice versa? Should gear with lightning resistance be considered higher priority if I'm in a dungeon with a lightning theme? What if I'm not in that dungeon, but am planning to enter it next and am thus keeping my eyes open for jewelery with lightning resistance on it? What about equipment that isn't directly comparable but has the potential to drastically change my playstyle? Maybe I'm playing a melee character and using a giant fuckoff two-handed sword. A flashy artifact staff meant for mages clearly isn't "good" for me -- but what if the elemental damage bonuses on it apply to my special abilities? Or what if they don't, but I also find the Ring of Elemental Fury and suddenly that staff is looking a lot nastier than my sword as the bonuses from the ring and the staff complement each other? Might be worth using for at least a few levels. Yeah, there's some loot pruning that's easy -- for example, if all the equipment I'm using is in some way magical, it can prune most* non-magical gear. But it's a lot more complicated than "only drop good items lol". * except for runes and infusions better than the ones I already have, or non-magical rings that can be fashioned into gemmed jewelery better than at least one of the rings I'm wearing, or non-magical Voratun amulets that can be used with a quest later on, or if the non-magical gear is better than the item I'm wearing anyways because it's a better base item and the enchantment on mine is mediocre, or possibly a few other things I'm forgetting.
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May 2, 2015 23:32
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ToxicFrog posted:So what makes a good item? That's actually surprisingly hard to pin down. It's a lot harder to pin down when items in your game can have a billion random little modifiers. And that's absolutely one valid way to design your gear. But it's definitely not the only way to design gear. You could, for example, have a game where everyone has implicit equipment, like the fighter starts out with, say, an Iron Sword and Iron Shield and Iron Helmet and so on, and these items have "vanilla" stats and every item you find that goes in a given slot is a sidegrade instead of a potential upgrade. Your character can still get stronger via innate progression (leveling up, gaining skillpoints, getting blessings from shrines, whatever), but the gear is all designed to complement specific playstyles instead of to just make the player more stompy. So e.g. when you find the Blood Sword you can swap out your Iron Sword and deal 10% more damage at the cost of taking 1% of your max health every time you hit something. The Iron Sword is still a perfectly viable piece of gear though, and you can swap it back in if you decide that you'd rather use the Blood Helmet (which has less defense than the Iron Helmet and deals 1% of your max health per turn per invisible enemy in your LOS, but at least you can see the fuckers). Anyway, under such a scheme every single piece of gear in the game would be designed (and thus presumably interesting), instead of randomly generated, and you could hand out a random piece each time the player accomplishes something significant. There'd be few enough such items that you wouldn't need to worry about the Too Much Junk problem and thus don't need to faff about with filter scripts or auto-looters or whatever. And your players won't dread seeing an item drop, because every item could be useful if they adapt their build. It does have the obvious tradeoff of there not being an unlimited number of potential items, of course, but that's never been a huge draw to me honestly.
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May 3, 2015 00:35
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This is one reason I'm a fan of horizontal power over vertical - more choices, more abilities, vs 'bigger numbers lol'. You can see the endgame of the latter with WoWs stat crunch - the numbers got so big they had to shrink them down to something readable, and the hilarious thing is there's no difference in the way any of your abilities function, it's an entirely psychological thing. Well that and people like going back to old content to smash it. But even that they're working on scaling up, much like how GW2 has everything scaled in the first place, since it's such a waste to have all this content created that's obsolete in numbers, even if it's perfectly fine in terms of mechanics. I think I've harped on this before, but a lot of rpg stat crunch crap is really just math nerdery that I don't think is a lot of fun. LOTS of people do, many people love optimizing their character in Diablo 3 or PoE or WoW or <insert rpg here>, but I think it's a whooooooole lot of design time and effort that would be better spent creating more interesting gameplay variety than how you interact with a tohit/resist/crit %. A lot of roguelike melee combat is ultra guilty of this (and quite a few big budget rpgs too!) - melee combat consists of @@ humping with a bunch of math in the background that I'm sure the designer thinks is extremely clever and well thought out, but you compare it to the wide array of tactical options 'mages' typically get and it just doesn't stack up (not true everywhere of course, some roguelikes do have cool melee classes/abilities). How many variations of dodge/block/parry/tohit%/crit% mechanics do we need developed on sword swings vs. all the neat things that 'spells' and unique abilities can do? I'd rather much more of the latter and a lot less of the former. There's something to be said for simplicity of course, you don't want to have to make critical decisions every step or you'll burn out, and there's something cathartic about smashing lots of mans in any rpg, but you can still have that and a rich array of tactical possibilities if less time is spent on obtuse mechanics operating behind the scenes (which would be another rant, I detest obfuscation of mechanics, though there has been a great trend in recent roguelikes to be very clear and transparent about how stuff works - not always true in the 'AAA' game space, let's talk about Agility in Dark Souls 2). If you've got a good ebb and flow to your encounter design, where chaff intersperses with champions and set piece encounters, the amount of brainpower it takes to handle the encounters isn't excessive, and it creates natural high points that are memorable. Bringing this back to the horizontal concept, it also means that you very likely have many different methods of approaching those encounters, vs simply 'My axe is now +10, I cleave them all dead'. It's possible to bake customizable power into equipment, Guild Wars 1 and 2 both did it (though GW2 is a strange hybrid of vertical progression and horizontal customization), just as it is through breadth of class abilities (say, Diablo 3 runes on skills, though I'm not going to hold up D3 as a paragon of expansive gameplay for a lot of reasons  ).All of which is a very long way of saying that if your game is on a vertical item treadmill, as the player progresses, an ever increasing % of loot drops will become 'trash', but if your loot is more about providing options, drops can be interesting for a very long time indeed, at least up until the point where a player considers their build 'done', or until your playerbase figures out a tiny handful of broken combos because you failed at the design  Off the top of my head, some games with good horizontal loot systems are Guild Wars 1 (and 2 to a lesser extent), Sproggiwood, and Brogue to some extent (fairly strong weapon differentiation + the value of every item you find). Honorable mention to a bunch of games like Necrodancer, Binding of Isaac, Nuclear Throne, Spelunky, and probably some other similar ones I'm forgetting. Maybe FTL? It kind of has a mix of power and varied functionality I guess. Curiously, Warframe is almost on this train - it has a metric asston of different guns and melee weapons you can craft, and a great many of the guns handle in unique, cool ways - but Warframe has vertical progression bolted on and DE are terrible devs when it comes to any sort of balance so I can't say it's actually a great example Diablo 3 and Path of Exile would be poster childs for too much garbage loot, and WoW (and a lot of MMOs) are good examples of the negatives of pure vertical scaling (content obsolescence, eventual absurdity of your 25000dps sword and 2 million dps combat parses). ToME, Dungeonmans, Dredmore, Crawl, the 'old' roguelikes (Angband/Adom) and any other roguelikes that follow in the lootsplosion theme are in a similar design space, with a ton of items dropping that you just won't care about. Some are kind of more in the middle - One Way Heroics has very quickly parsed gear and not a lot of it, so you can generally evaluate stuff almost instantly. Maybe The Pit? Dunno, hated the crafting too much to really get a feel for it And that's way too loving many  Remind me to stay away from this thread when my laptop is handy and I've been musing on game mechanics. We need an armchair developer emote somewhere between  and 
victrix fucked around with this message at 00:44 on May 3, 2015 |
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May 3, 2015 00:35
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Personally, nowadays I find stat-growth treadmills extremely transparent and unsatisfying. I'm increasingly interested in games and game systems who still maintain an RPG-style leveling and item system but instead of rampings stats and numbers just provide increasing variability and flexibility in dealing with tactical encounters. I think even most mainstream games are backing into this via "scaling", like Diablo 3; and at the point where all encounters are scaling to bigger numbers to the point where you never even see the effects of stat growth, I think it's just much more interesting to start with a premise that says "hey a 20th level guy is going to be about as squishy and by default hit about as hard as a first level guy, but have a bigger bag of tactical tricks to allow him to deal with more complex encounters that also have a bigger bag of tricks." So that leveling up is more a factor of learning the systems and gaining the ability to deal with more complex encounters while the guys you fought at the beginning of the game can still be a menace even at the very end. (Though perhaps in larger numbers, or mixed in with trickier leaders/skirmishers/casters) In that kind of system I'd probably want to allow a character to specialize in a particular set of stats that they can be meaningfully larger than a level 1 character in, like maybe you could have quite a few more hp, or move faster, or hit quite a bit harder or more often, but not all of those at once, even at the highest level. Unormal fucked around with this message at 00:46 on May 3, 2015 |
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May 3, 2015 00:42
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I do think there's quite a bit of value for having 'leveling' be the learning part of the game. Even fps games that have (often mindlessly) absorbed rpg progression sometimes use this well, unlocking new 'abilities' and weapons over time so the player can get their feet planted solidly in the mechanics before they have their full range of power. Scaling games are essentially 'fake' vertical progression (GW2/Destiny/D3), that might play the same in a level 2 or 70 area, but your range of options increases as you level. (We still need more Nethack style world interaction. Yes I know this is hard as balls, which is why no one does it.)
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May 3, 2015 00:48
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victrix posted:A lot of roguelike melee combat is ultra guilty of this (and quite a few big budget rpgs too!) - melee combat consists of @@ humping with a bunch of math in the background that I'm sure the designer thinks is extremely clever and well thought out, but you compare it to the wide array of tactical options 'mages' typically get and it just doesn't stack up (not true everywhere of course, some roguelikes do have cool melee classes/abilities).
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May 3, 2015 01:17
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ToxicFrog posted:So what makes a good item? That's actually surprisingly hard to pin down. To be fair, your entire post already assumes the game is going to generate piles of poo poo and then the design goal is to find out what's useful. Instead of throwing a hundred loot drops at the wall in hopes that enough of them stick to create a functional equip set a game could, instead, just generate a functional equipment set for the player. Ask a couple questions on character generation about what kinds of loot the player would like to see and there we go. Hell, ask those same questions every X equipment pieces that drop. Now, something will be lost when you change loot generation like that. A game is about whatever you spend time doing, after all. But the flip side is that by cutting equipment sifting you make room for the game to be about something else.
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May 3, 2015 01:25
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victrix posted:This is one reason I'm a fan of horizontal power over vertical - more choices, more abilities, vs 'bigger numbers lol'. Actually, the numbers were getting so big they had to have the final boss of Pandaria heal himself to full partway through because giving him enough health to make the fight last as long as they wanted would've outstripped the maximum health allocated for monsters and all the really, really big numbers were adding up and causing a signifigant amount of load just through combat math.Them being unreadably big was also a concern but it was also a technical issue.
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May 3, 2015 01:29
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All of this meele RL talk and nobody's mentioning Sil, for shame!
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May 3, 2015 01:31
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Sil is cool in a lot of ways but, at the same time, Sil is a game where a lot of enemies run away from you once they're on low HP.
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May 3, 2015 02:14
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Which is why you fight them near a chasm or stairwell so they can flee off of the map, having given your their 'spotting an enemy' xp. Or bluff them into attacking to the death. Or buy skills that give free kills when they try to move away. Or scare them away at 100% hp on purpose etc. The point of bringing up Sil was in relation to games that reward you to fight smarter, nor harder. Specifically to Jefferery's comment before. So one can't complain when the monsters require you to adjust&react, instead of just tabbing like 90% DCSS.
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May 3, 2015 05:00
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Having to run down monsters if I want to kill them just disincentivizes melee in favor of ranged combat, and going heavy into ranged is already probably better in Sil anyways.
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May 3, 2015 05:10
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sil is also a game where you don't have to kill everything to even remotely have a chance to win, so chances are a lot of the things that apply to other games like crawl won't apply to it
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May 3, 2015 05:42
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Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:Personally I feel exactly the opposite - the depths of combat you can create with just 8-directional movement, melee, and varying terrain/line of sight can make for really deep gameplay and fun decision-making, and having 30 melee "abilities"(spells) that are all variations of "hit guy with weapon to do damage + some status effect" are pretty boring and don't bring very much to the table. Crawl melee is some of the most fun roguelike gameplay that exists even if the math is obtuse. I respect and accept your opinion, even though I believe it to be insane. Personally I find melee to be hands-down the most tediously boring, repetitive poo poo in all of Crawl. Other playstyles still need positioning! They still need to manage resources and use the terrain and be clever! However they also get to do other things that aren't "hit man" or "walk away from man" or "unable to hit to death or walk away to suitable deathhitting location, use consumable" I like Crawl a lot but its melee combat is not great. It's tightly designed to a fault and can sometimes be tactically complex, but all combat can be tactically complex because that's how Crawl is intended to play from the ground up. It's still goddamn boring and it's kind of telling that the "pure" melee builds all either become hybrids or rely on gods with good abilities in the later parts of the game. I'm glad someone enjoys it, though! I'll stick to my hybrids and casters. PS: melee powers that are all "generically hit a dude with a minor rider effect" are indeed terrible design, but there's way more potential in technique-based melee combat than that. For all its slog issues, ToME loving kills it with Cursed - a fun as gently caress, unique, dynamic melee class with rad powers and a highly distinctive playstyle. It also has a bunch of other unique and challenging melee killdudesers! It's fine to prefer playing Death Checkers though
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May 3, 2015 06:47
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Zereth posted:
Wow, really? I wonder if they also imported the big boss-ending bugs in the old Final Fantasies that pulled this trick when bosses couldn't have more than 65535 health, viz. being able to bring them to near-death by overhealing them, or having script glitches that allowed you to skip the healing trigger and thus beat the boss in half the time. C'mon, guys, in this day and age you should not be running into the limits of your numerical precision.
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May 3, 2015 06:57
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Aren't like 90% of the skills anyone actually uses on Cursed passives that just make the hitting dudes and moving away from dudes stuff faster?
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May 3, 2015 06:58
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Wow, really? I wonder if they also imported the big boss-ending bugs in the old Final Fantasies that pulled this trick when bosses couldn't have more than 65535 health, viz. being able to bring them to near-death by overhealing them, or having script glitches that allowed you to skip the healing trigger and thus beat the boss in half the time. A bit over four billion hitpoints.
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May 3, 2015 08:11
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