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alarumklok posted:The registration page has about ~150 entries so it's not THAT bad, just few devlogs. Which is a shame, because I want to code vicariously. e: for more in-depth updates, the other two spots for centralized info are 7DRL.org and the 7DRL board at the Temple. Kyzrati fucked around with this message at 23:34 on Mar 6, 2016 |
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Mar 6, 2016 23:27
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Sil/Marvin-PA also alters monsters that he thought where annoying, one example showcasing the crawl-dev mentality for coding around Hypothetical Optimal Men: There is a monster that spawns very early in the game, when the floors are tiny, that can cause you to forget the map. Marvin argued that someone could just stop playing and scribble out a map upon seeing this monster, so he removed the ability. Glorious. Serephina fucked around with this message at 00:49 on Mar 7, 2016 |
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Mar 7, 2016 00:24
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Serephina posted:Sil/Marvin-PA also alters monsters that he thought where annoying, one example showcasing the crawl-dev mentality for coding around Hypothetical Optimal Men: There is a monster that spawns very early in the game, when the floors are tiny, that can cause you to forget the map. Marvin argued that someone could just stop playing and scribble out a map upon seeing this monster, so he removed the ability. I can't really fault anyone for taking that view - maprot is a horrible mechanic. Crawl was certainly improved with its demise.
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Mar 7, 2016 01:24
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Kyzrati posted:Check out Twitter for lots of #7DRL updates. I guess I should have realized twitter would be where everyone would move their blogging. There's already some pretty neat stuff, like using laid down tetris blocks for map gen
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Mar 7, 2016 01:49
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Serephina posted:Sil/Marvin-PA also alters monsters that he thought where annoying, one example showcasing the crawl-dev mentality for coding around Hypothetical Optimal Men: There is a monster that spawns very early in the game, when the floors are tiny, that can cause you to forget the map. Marvin argued that someone could just stop playing and scribble out a map upon seeing this monster, so he removed the ability. You may be shocked to hear this: MarvinPA was right.
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Mar 7, 2016 01:54
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The only time I see maprot really working is if you intend the player to never return to an area, so you are just wiping the unneeded details away. For example, the Abyss in Crawl is mostly featureless, infinite in all directions, and destroys any terrain you might have seen whenever you teleport (in addition to constantly shifting terrain), so it makes sense that preserving map information is useless.
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Mar 7, 2016 02:08
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netcat posted:Seems to be pretty low interest for it this year, there are barely any devlogs on http://7drl.org/ and there used to be quite a lot of activity. I'm doing a 7drl, but this is the first time. What's this devlog thing you speak of? Usually I just talk about whatever I'm making over in the making games megathread here on SA.
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Mar 7, 2016 02:22
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Is there a game that combines Sil's documentation improving with more times fighting/killing a monster, with random monster design? I think that's a neat feature but it's pointless if the monster doesn't actually change between games, and I don't enjoy Sil itself.
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Mar 7, 2016 02:24
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Serephina posted:Sil/Marvin-PA also alters monsters that he thought where annoying, one example showcasing the crawl-dev mentality for coding around Hypothetical Optimal Men: There is a monster that spawns very early in the game, when the floors are tiny, that can cause you to forget the map. Marvin argued that someone could just stop playing and scribble out a map upon seeing this monster, so he removed the ability. Good. A game should not only be balanced around a theoretical optimal player, it should be designed to be fun for a theoretical optimal player. Otherwise you create a trap where the better you get at the game the less enjoyable it is, which is bad in general and terrible for a genre that prizes replayability.
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Mar 7, 2016 02:26
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Think I've finally got a UI layout in Godsrune that I'm happy with.  A lot of the GUI is obviously placeholder graphics, but I like how it all fits together now. The four blank red bottom right buttons would be "Log", "Help", "Options", and "Quit". girl dick energy fucked around with this message at 02:33 on Mar 7, 2016 |
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Mar 7, 2016 02:30
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Poison Mushroom posted:Think I've finally got a UI layout in Godsrune that I'm happy with. It looks like Shadowgate on the NES, this is a good thing.
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Mar 7, 2016 02:42
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I want it to be fully mouse controllable, hence the action buttons. A big design goal for me has been cutting some of the cruft off the formula that has drowned the mainstays of the genre in newbie-deflecting levels of complexity, and "eighty billion actions" was an easy one to get rid of. Basically what I'm saying is that "mobile port" shouldn't be the only reason you streamline your design and layout in a game, and "elegance of design" is one of my major goals with Godsrune.
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Mar 7, 2016 02:55
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rchandra posted:Is there a game that combines Sil's documentation improving with more times fighting/killing a monster, with random monster design? I think that's a neat feature but it's pointless if the monster doesn't actually change between games, and I don't enjoy Sil itself. Most/all *bands have the same monster knowledge system, but none of them randomly generate monster types AFAIK
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Mar 7, 2016 03:07
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Poison Mushroom posted:Think I've finally got a UI layout in Godsrune that I'm happy with. Looks pretty clean and simple, and, with tooltips, really easy for a new player to pick up.
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Mar 7, 2016 03:08
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Poison Mushroom posted:I want it to be fully mouse controllable, hence the action buttons. A big design goal for me has been cutting some of the cruft off the formula that has drowned the mainstays of the genre in newbie-deflecting levels of complexity, and "eighty billion actions" was an easy one to get rid of. If it was not for Vulture Nethacks GUI I would never have attempted Rogue-likes at all. Now that I have "seen the matrix" or whatever its fine, but back then prospect of learning such a game just didn't seem worth it. Once I started playing Vulture Nethack with the map open 100% of the time I smacked my head and realized I was just playing normal Nethack, and transitioned over to the regular interface. It turns out Vulture actually has a terrible interface, once you actually know the game. But if it weren't for it holding my hand and transitioning me from Diablo I don't think I would have bothered.
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Mar 7, 2016 03:14
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Vaguely related: My personal Roguelike bogart is auto-explore, and it's a feature I refuse to ever include in Godsrune for one very simple reason: If your players want to skip through a part of playing your game, it means your game is boring. Autoexplore isn't a feature, it's a lazy patch for fundamental design issues.
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Mar 7, 2016 03:22
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Poison Mushroom posted:Vaguely related: My personal Roguelike bogart is auto-explore, and it's a feature I refuse to ever include in Godsrune for one very simple reason: No, it means one part of your game is boring. I like small roguelikes, but sometimes I want something with size and scope. But filling that entire space with content is too much. So you use autoexplore to let me move quickly between the interesting parts, or the parts that I've already cleared. Clicking up fifty times is boring. Clicking Z to move quickly to the next interesting combat is the opposite of boring.
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Mar 7, 2016 04:01
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Serephina posted:Sil/Marvin-PA also alters monsters that he thought where annoying, one example showcasing the crawl-dev mentality for coding around Hypothetical Optimal Men: There is a monster that spawns very early in the game, when the floors are tiny, that can cause you to forget the map. Marvin argued that someone could just stop playing and scribble out a map upon seeing this monster, so he removed the ability. Also it's not that someone would stop playing and draw themselves a map lmao they would just hit printscreen
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Mar 7, 2016 04:10
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Jordan7hm posted:No, it means one part of your game is boring. Unfortunately I am not in a position where I can reasonably do a 7DRL this year, but I've been wandering if it's possible to make a roguelike interesting where instead of an autoexplore, the game just constructs a small scenario each time you "move on" from a cleared node. Or sneak away or random teleport or what have you. Thus you have a series of connected nodes where there's no real tunnels or geography connecting the encounter vignettes. And once a node is "cleared" then you don't have to return to it. You just move on. I guess you could compare it to having a sort of compact overworld. Ever since my 2013 7DRL where I got controls on mobile super wrong (Swipe to move every step) it's something that's been on my mind.
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Mar 7, 2016 04:21
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Potsticker posted:Unfortunately I am not in a position where I can reasonably do a 7DRL this year, but I've been wandering if it's possible to make a roguelike interesting where instead of an autoexplore, the game just constructs a small scenario each time you "move on" from a cleared node. Or sneak away or random teleport or what have you. Thus you have a series of connected nodes where there's no real tunnels or geography connecting the encounter vignettes. And once a node is "cleared" then you don't have to return to it. You just move on. I guess you could compare it to having a sort of compact overworld. Hoplite and MicRogue basically do this; each floor is only one "room". It's not at all a bad way to run things, but I'd worry a bit about it making the scope of the game feel smaller. Having some kind of network that connects the events, like FTL does, would probably help.
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Mar 7, 2016 04:32
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Poison Mushroom posted:Vaguely related: My personal Roguelike bogart is auto-explore, and it's a feature I refuse to ever include in Godsrune for one very simple reason: That's a fine philosophical point, but how do you propose to provide randomly generated, content filled maps that are interesting to explore? Crawl has very big level maps (comparatively) which allows it to fill them with interesting (randomly chosen, but not generated) vaults. The exploration part is boring and automated but the action parts are anything but, and the size of the maps add to that. Dungeonmans has smaller maps by comparison, but no auto explore and I find it very tedious compared to Crawl, it is the main reason I gave up on playing it.
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Mar 7, 2016 04:32
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Auto-explore allows for the possibility of tiles that aren't interesting to reveal but might be interesting to escape or retreat through. It also creates periods of down-time between making life-or-death decisions, which is more useful for the player than you might think. (Although this kind of clashes with making it instant, so it's a good idea to make the animation delay configurable. ToME and Crawl both do this and are the better for it.) e: It's never quite instant in ToME, sadly, but you can make it pretty close, especially with the frameskip mod. Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 04:40 on Mar 7, 2016 |
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Mar 7, 2016 04:33
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Hoplite and MicRogue basically do this; each floor is only one "room". It's not at all a bad way to run things, but I'd worry a bit about it making the scope of the game feel smaller. Having some kind of network that connects the events, like FTL does, would probably help. I haven't played MicRogue, but yeah, Hoplite is a lot like that for sure.
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Mar 7, 2016 04:43
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Auto-explore allows for the possibility of tiles that aren't interesting to reveal but might be interesting to escape or retreat through. It reminds me very much of the "cart all your poo poo back to town" part of Skyrim/Fallout/et al. Tedious, unfun, and totally unassailable as part of the gameplay cycle simply because it's How These Things Are Done.
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Mar 7, 2016 04:45
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Poison Mushroom posted:Vaguely related: My personal Roguelike bogart is auto-explore, and it's a feature I refuse to ever include in Godsrune for one very simple reason: I shipped Dungeonmans with no auto explore, got some flak for it, but I stuck to my guns. What I did add, after some time, study, and patches, was auto travel to stairs up and down if you've discovered them already. That and a r-click to Move Here for mouse breathers made the game feel much more snappy for people who wanted to spend a lot of time on every nook and cranny in a floor. But what a good thing that is-- if players are exploring every nook and cranny of your dungeons, they must be fun! Second angle, unrelated to the first. Let me check rant_heuristics.cs here... quote:it means your game is boring. Autoexplore isn't a feature, it's a lazy patch for fundamental design issues. code:
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Mar 7, 2016 04:47
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Potsticker posted:Unfortunately I am not in a position where I can reasonably do a 7DRL this year, but I've been wandering if it's possible to make a roguelike interesting where instead of an autoexplore, the game just constructs a small scenario each time you "move on" from a cleared node. Or sneak away or random teleport or what have you. Thus you have a series of connected nodes where there's no real tunnels or geography connecting the encounter vignettes. And once a node is "cleared" then you don't have to return to it. You just move on. I guess you could compare it to having a sort of compact overworld. Warioware Inc. the rogue-like
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Mar 7, 2016 04:48
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madjackmcmad posted:[/code] I was in a scrappy mood when I made that post, so I will concede that "never use auto explore" is a very hardline position to take. I'll back down to what I probably should have said in the first place: Think very hard about including any feature in the game that circumvents some other part of it, and why.
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Mar 7, 2016 04:53
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I note that Angband, that ~~~bastion of good game design~~~, would never work with auto-explore, because if you just bumble around until you can see your enemies with your physical eyeballs, they'll kill you dead. You have to be aware of them (through magical detection) long before then so you can plan your approach and not be caught out flat-footed. The game still has "running", where you move repeatedly in a straight line and/or follow corridors, but there's enough natural stopping points for that command (at intersections, room openings, screen transitions, and the like) that you can generally still safely keep track of what's around you. DoomRL is one roguelike that comes to mind where auto-explore is not needed. The levels are small, densely-packed with action, positioning is vital, and there's no backtracking.
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Mar 7, 2016 04:58
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^^^^^^ Agreed. DoomRL is helped by it being on the computer though. It would need an autoexplore or you'd need a bluetooth pad/keyboard or something if it were to have a mobile port. Potsticker posted:Sort of. I mean, Darkest Dungeon is sort of like this, too. Except instead of a top down standard roguelike setup you get JRPG-ish battles with positioning mechanics.
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Mar 7, 2016 05:03
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Quote is not edit.
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Mar 7, 2016 05:04
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madjackmcmad posted:I shipped Dungeonmans with no auto explore, got some flak for it, but I stuck to my guns. What I did add, after some time, study, and patches, was auto travel to stairs up and down if you've discovered them already. That and a r-click to Move Here for mouse breathers made the game feel much more snappy for people who wanted to spend a lot of time on every nook and cranny in a floor. But what a good thing that is-- if players are exploring every nook and cranny of your dungeons, they must be fun! That's not necessarily true, I explore every nook and cranny, because A. I'm obsessive, and B. I'm worried I might be missing something that is vital for later on (see A). Not having autoexplore in dungeonmans didn't make me stop exploring every nook and cranny, it made me stop playing dungeonmans.
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Mar 7, 2016 05:05
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Potsticker posted:Sort of. I mean, Darkest Dungeon is sort of like this, too. Except instead of a top down standard roguelike setup you get JRPG-ish battles with positioning mechanics. So wouldn't this just be Final Fantasy Tactics? 
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Mar 7, 2016 05:07
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Poison Mushroom posted:Goddamn, Jack. Way to throw the gauntlet, but point taken. I'm going to try to have something alpha that I can release "into the wild" by the end of March at the latest. I released my early rear end barely playable alpha of dmans to the goons here in 2010, and it was both exciting and useful to have people tearing it apart. Do it do it do it! Unimpressed posted:Not having autoexplore in dungeonmans didn't make me stop exploring every nook and cranny, it made me stop playing dungeonmans. 
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Mar 7, 2016 05:07
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:I note that Angband, that ~~~bastion of good game design~~~, would never work with auto-explore, because if you just bumble around until you can see your enemies with your physical eyeballs, they'll kill you dead. You have to be aware of them (through magical detection) long before then so you can plan your approach and not be caught out flat-footed.
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Mar 7, 2016 05:12
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Unimpressed posted:That's not necessarily true, I explore every nook and cranny, because A. I'm obsessive, and B. I'm worried I might be missing something that is vital for later on (see A). Not having autoexplore in dungeonmans didn't make me stop exploring every nook and cranny, it made me stop playing dungeonmans. It always bugs me when players talk about worrying about missing something in a game with an infinite amount of content. Like, why would you bother to kill everything in a zone in Diablo II when you can regenerate zones infinitely? I haven't yet played Dungeonmans (my backlog is a little worrying, honestly), but I'm guessing it has more than enough stuff to let you meet the power curve in any given game. How do you design a game so that players can't get obsessive about exploring every nook and cranny? Really aggressive food clocks seem like they'd help at first glance, but I think that'd just cause players to get obsessive about eking out as much possible exploration out of what time they have. Maybe if you aggressively destroyed portions of the dungeon somehow instead?
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Mar 7, 2016 05:17
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Rutibex posted:So wouldn't this just be Final Fantasy Tactics? Yeah, there is some similarity with strategy RPGs. Major differences including the player only controlling a single unit, and you could leave a field and return without resetting it.
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Mar 7, 2016 05:19
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Riviera: The Promised Land is the game where I first noticed cutting out the player needing to really move around to do things like even move around town. It's kind of like older first person RPGs like Lands of Lore or Sword of Hope when moving around, except the layout is in the style of action RPGs like some Zelda or Seiken Densetsu series games.
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Mar 7, 2016 05:28
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:It always bugs me when players talk about worrying about missing something in a game with an infinite amount of content. Like, why would you bother to kill everything in a zone in Diablo II when you can regenerate zones infinitely? I haven't yet played Dungeonmans (my backlog is a little worrying, honestly), but I'm guessing it has more than enough stuff to let you meet the power curve in any given game. The trick is to make the food clock something other than a strictly deterministic number. Invisible Inc. has a fantastic food clock because high alarm level doesn't mean instant death at time X, it just gets harder and harder. It's strictly optimal to be "obsessive about eking out exploration out of what time you have"; so just make it a game in itself. If you tell me "If you open 50 chests the Chestbeast will eat you", I'm gonna open 49 chests because I wanna win the video game. If you tell me "The Chestbeast gains strength with every chest you open!" then figuring out how many chests I can open starts to look suspiciously like fun gameplay.
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Mar 7, 2016 05:30
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:It always bugs me when players talk about worrying about missing something in a game with an infinite amount of content. Like, why would you bother to kill everything in a zone in Diablo II when you can regenerate zones infinitely? I haven't yet played Dungeonmans (my backlog is a little worrying, honestly), but I'm guessing it has more than enough stuff to let you meet the power curve in any given game. I don't think you really can, because it isn't a design issue, it's a player issue. You just accept that some players are going to play that way, and you either design your game in such a way that those players are accommodated (auto-exploration features help immensely with this), or you don't. And you certainly don't solve the problem by punishing people for taking their time, especially in a genre where going fast often means you're going to lose and have to restart. You can incentivize forward progress though. e: also this: Unimpressed posted:That's not necessarily true, I explore every nook and cranny, because A. I'm obsessive, and B. I'm worried I might be missing something that is vital for later on (see A). Not having autoexplore in dungeonmans didn't make me stop exploring every nook and cranny, it made me stop playing dungeonmans. It didn't make me stop, but it did make me rate dungeonmans a lot further down on my list than it would otherwise be. Dungeons solving themselves (which seems to be a nod towards this style of gameplay speeding up_ makes no difference to me, but not being able to zoom from combat to combat, or backtrack quickly, really lessens my enjoyment of the game. Jordan7hm fucked around with this message at 05:39 on Mar 7, 2016 |
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Mar 7, 2016 05:36
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Maybe if you aggressively destroyed portions of the dungeon somehow instead? You mean like One Way Heroics? There's a gigantic wall of darkness that's constantly moving forwards (and destroying the world), and you have to keep moving if you want to avoid it.
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Mar 7, 2016 05:37
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