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I'm so down for this, I've never finished developing a roguelike before so send lots of encouragement my way! Here's my pitch for Crawlsterfuck: Every alien species in the galaxy has gathered at the Yendor Archaeological Dig in harmony and cooperation, at least until the unexpected discovery of the ULTIMATE MACGUFFIN. An ancient civilization of space wizards used it for galactic domination in ages past, and whoever controls it controls the galaxy! Several highly advanced alien species have dispatched fleets to Planet Yendor and the archaeological site is swarming with heavily armed commandos blowing each other up to be the first to claim the macguffin. Human High Command has decided the macguffin is too dangerous to exist, and will carpet-nuke the entire planet once all surviving human scientists have been evacuated from the archaeological site. Your mission is to locate each scientist, summon an evacuation team of marines with a transponder beacon, and hold your ground against the inevitable onslaught of trigger-happy aliens who think you're trying to smuggle out the macguffin from under their noses! Under no circumstances should you use the security keys from the scientists to enter the deepest levels of the archaeological site and attempt to claim the macguffin for yourself, especially once the nukes have been launched! My goal is to emulate the running battles and siege events from Left 4 Dead and Vermintide using roguelike elements, and to emulate the wacky upgrade synergies from Binding of Issace using lots of fantastic technology like in Guardians of the Galaxy or Men in Black. Features
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Dec 1, 2016 05:44
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Samizdata posted:Thirded. If I could even code my way out of a VERY wet cheap white paper bag. In theory a Zombies ate my Neighbors randomizer could be made, that swaps all the monsters/items/victims and the order of levels around. I don't know how hard this would be, but at the rate randomizers are coming out I expect to see it eventually.
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Dec 1, 2016 05:52
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:"you're gonna build a mansion and then explore its evil twin" or whatever.
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Dec 1, 2016 06:44
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Since everyone's sharing, I guess I might as well write up the silly dream roguelite I thought up a while back. I'd like to build a roguelike over the winter break, but it probably won't be this one, since this is way too ambitious for a first project, so this isn't for the contest. Still, it's fun to get the idea down on paper. The hook for Rogue Agent is essentially straight from Mission Impossible: you are a freelance spy sorta person, being tutored in spycraft by your super-cool mentor, Rodney (voiced by Morgan Freeman). But at the end of the tutorial, Rodney shockingly betrays you! He murders everyone on the mission, fakes his own death, and frames you for the whole thing. So your driving goal over the course of the game is to build your own network of contacts, use them to find Rodney, hunt him down, and get your revenge, all before the cops catch up with you. There's a problem, of course. The core theme (and mechanic) of the game is lies and deception. You can't trust anyone, least of all your own supposed allies! In XCOM, for instance, you have these guys who follow you without question and will gladly charge to their deaths; here, instead, like half of them are double agents working for Rodney, or mercenary types who will betray you for cash, or just secretly cowards who will lose their nerve at the worst possible time. You can do some things in person yourself, but that's risk and time you absolutely can't afford. So you're forced to rely on all these backstabbing schmucks, and hope you can stay one step ahead of them. Mechanically, many bits of information in the game are Secrets. When you pull up an NPC's file, it'll list their real name, their stats, their traits, their location, etc... but all the things you see are just "to the best of your knowledge." NPCs have a very important stat called Deception, and will use it to hide their own details from you if they aren't extremely loyal. Thus the best spies are exactly the ones you can trust the least, since being good at deceiving your enemies means they're good at deceiving YOU, too. Probably the biggest Secret about an NPC is their Allegiances. Every NPC is motivated by specific things: loyalty to the player, loyalty to other NPCs, greed, honor, fear. These are naturally lied about pretty much constantly; everybody you meet is going to tell you that their loyalty to you is sky-high, and that's all they care about, honest! All the NPCs are randomly generated, of course, so you've got this horrible tangled nest of Allegiances to untangle if you want to get anything done. Intrude on everyone's privacy. Learn what makes them tick. Bribe them, coddle them, intimidate them, blackmail them, turn them against their friends, make them trust you. Or have them murdered and find somebody less opinionated. Or make them trust you, abuse that trust, and then have them murdered. To unravel a Secret, you have to gain intel about it. The higher the intel, relative to the Deception of whoever's secret it is, the more likely that your "best guess" is correct. You passively get a trickle of intel over time, and you can mark NPCs as Trusted Informants, which means they'll add a little bit over time as well (of course, if they actually hate you, they'll subtract intel instead!). For simple, poorly-hidden facts, that might be enough. But for bigger secrets -- for instance, Rodney's location, which he is naturally protecting with his gigantic Deception score -- you'll need to leave the safety of your control room and Gather Intel, or convince people to do it for you. Knowing personal details like the target's real name or hometown will massively improve the effectiveness of those missions, and of course if your trusted agent is actually a mole, you're gonna get a ton of negative intel dumped on you. You can also send people on missions to kill troublesome NPCs, steal money, influence people to your side, acquire useful new contacts, and so on and so forth, but you don't own them; they'll only do it if it aligns with their interests (which usually include large sums of money, of course). Every time you're running the risk that things could go terribly wrong, leading to dead agents, heat from the police, or even more knives in your poor back. megane fucked around with this message at 07:12 on Dec 1, 2016 |
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Dec 1, 2016 07:10
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hito posted:
Your procedurally generated enemies/bosses sound absolutely great! After playing Sil I knew I wanted to see something like that (because of how it does the enemy IDing/documentation).
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Dec 1, 2016 10:30
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It's actually been really cool seeing this thread spark up with everyone sharing their ideas and I hope people try to bring their designs to life even if they don't win 
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Dec 1, 2016 11:27
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In both modern and classic roguelikes, scoring systems are something of an afterthought. The reasons are obvious: when you have a sprawling, epic-scope adventure and dozens of wildly interacting mechanics, it quickly becomes unfeasible to attach a meaningful score to the whole experience. Tom Clancy's Tactical Corridor Assault will be designed from ground up to be a score attack game. There's one corridor and one direction: forward. I'm envisioning a game that's more akin to a turn-based tactical Guitar Hero, than a traditional roguelike. Basic gameplay: A several tiles wide corridor segment is generated, and filled with various obstacles, monsters and loot. The objective is to reach the end of the segment while collecting as much loot as possible. After a segment is completed, a new segment is created, and may be viewed by the player. At this point, the player may use some of their collected loot to purchase new equipment and powers. The remainder of the loot is then taken from the player and turned into score. This is the crux of the game: viewing the next corridor segment, and then cheaping out on the gear needed to survive it. Unspent loot is the only scoring mechanic in the game; no style points awarded! Planned features:
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Dec 1, 2016 11:45
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Samizdata posted:Liking the ideas (didn't like Hoplite though - UI didn't sit right with me). The hat mechanic is charming. Might I recommend whiskey bombs though? Also, the title pun is cute. Add some loving skewering of Western cliches and this sounds awesome. Thanks for the feedback, everyone! Whiskey bombs do sound like they fit the theme better, so I'll make a note of that.
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Dec 1, 2016 14:12
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madjackmcmad posted:Nearly every combination of two words is already a game. Also nearly every type of sound effect has been used in a game. In this case, it was the high thin whooshing sound caused by the joke going by. On topic: someone mentioned procedurally generated bosses. There's an old procgen bullet hell game called Warning Forever that might interest. The whole game is a series of boss fights, and each new boss's design is influenced by the strategy you used to defeat the previous bosses. Stay with one tactic too long and you'll be fighting a boss perfectly designed to beat you.
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Dec 1, 2016 16:27
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Jedit posted:Also nearly every type of sound effect has been used in a game. In this case, it was the high thin whooshing sound caused by the joke going by. e: Warning Forever owns, it chewed up hours of class time back in college, and it's part of why Demon Truck's bosses are how they are. Sodomy Non Sapiens posted:It's actually been really cool seeing this thread spark up with everyone sharing their ideas and I hope people try to bring their designs to life even if they don't win hito posted:I'm having fun following all of the entries so I put them in a spreadsheet. You can view it here. RoboCicero posted:Here's my pitch. Tentatively called Manse, a roguelike inspired by gothic horror and writings such as House on Haunted Hill.
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Dec 1, 2016 17:03
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Wayback posted:I'm going to type up a larger and more in-depth proposal later, but, having used ruby to make a rudimentary Zelda-like with random maps in college, I'm down with learning game maker or one of those tools since I've done enough modding and hacking apart of other games' code to try my hand at it. Would. I mean, roguelike XCrawl is extremely my poo poo anyway. All the other stuff is gravy.
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Dec 1, 2016 17:04
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Jedit posted:. There's an old procgen bullet hell game called Warning Forever that might interest. The whole game is a series of boss fights, and each new boss's design is influenced by the strategy you used to defeat the previous bosses. Stay with one tactic too long and you'll be fighting a boss perfectly designed to beat you. ...a Gratuitous Space Battles rogue-like would be rad as hell.
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Dec 1, 2016 18:24
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Yeah I can't wait to play an RPG with persistent character build choices designed to inevitably punish me for my choices. I also enjoy IVAN and slamming my foot in doorjambs e: i'm being an rear end and these things could be overcome by a Cogmind-esque system of "your equipment is your build" or whatever but at the same time a huge part of the draw of RPGs is that you get to be what you want and be good at it Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 18:36 on Dec 1, 2016 |
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Dec 1, 2016 18:33
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Yeah I can't wait to play an RPG with persistent character build choices designed to inevitably punish me for my choices. You jest, but I think you could probably make a good system that was explicitly adaptive and antagonistic, where the goal becomes being able to beat the system in spite of its attempts to defeat you. Like, IVAN except more open about how it hates you. It'd need to be done carefully to avoid the "you specced into warhammers, so we're going to drop nothing but swords" kind of problem. Maybe you could force the game to collect intel on how the player is operating before it's allowed to adapt, so the player would want to kill spies before they get away with knowledge of the player's gear, or disguise how they kill things so the dungeon's cleanup crew won't say "man, we've been seeing a lot of blunt force trauma deaths lately".
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Dec 1, 2016 18:59
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Yeah I can't wait to play an RPG with persistent character build choices designed to inevitably punish me for my choices. Warning Forever doesn't have character progression. Bosses evolve to counter your tactics, like if you fly around a ton it'll develop homing missiles, or if you stay mostly in front of it it'll concentrate its guns and armor in front. There are no permanent choices to be punished for, you just change your approach. megane fucked around with this message at 19:05 on Dec 1, 2016 |
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Dec 1, 2016 19:02
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megane posted:Warning Forever doesn't have character progression. Bosses evolve to counter your tactics, like if you fly around a ton it'll develop homing missiles, or if you stay mostly in front of it it'll concentrate its guns and armor in front. There are no permanent choices to be punished for, you just change your approach. Right, I know, I'm talking about porting the concept to a roguelike context.
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Dec 1, 2016 19:05
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Yeah I can't wait to play an RPG with persistent character build choices designed to inevitably punish me for my choices. This would be less of a problem in a game designed to be short and maybe even played in a single sitting. Procedural generation can lend itself to replaying over and over (see how many hours some people. myself included, have in Binding of Isaac for example). If you're playing a game that'll take 10+ hours to get to the end or a point where you die and feel like you're being punished for your choices after sinking a chunk of time into it, then that sucks. But if you can try out a new build and either die or win and start over in an hour or two and the content will still feel fresh as you replay, then that is a lot more exciting. It also avoids the issue with some lengthy RPGs where the early game can frequently feel very samey regardless of build.
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Dec 1, 2016 21:16
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Yeah I can't wait to play an RPG with persistent character build choices designed to inevitably punish me for my choices. I think it says a lot about your worldview that you view a game with adaptive difficulty as 'punishing you.' Not trying to be an rear end, don't read that as especially cutting or jerkish, I legit just wanted to point that out.
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Dec 1, 2016 21:23
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Danger - Octopus! posted:This would be less of a problem in a game designed to be short and maybe even played in a single sitting. Procedural generation can lend itself to replaying over and over (see how many hours some people. myself included, have in Binding of Isaac for example). If you're playing a game that'll take 10+ hours to get to the end or a point where you die and feel like you're being punished for your choices after sinking a chunk of time into it, then that sucks. But if you can try out a new build and either die or win and start over in an hour or two and the content will still feel fresh as you replay, then that is a lot more exciting. The first 30 minutes of your game are the most important 30 minutes, by, like, orders of magnitude over everything else. Not only are these the minutes that players will replay most often, they're also the minutes that you have to sell a player on actually continuing to play the game. Like, I played Oceanhorn (basically a Zelda clone) for 30 minutes, nothing interesting happened*, I closed the game and uninstalled it. I have so many other games in my queue that I could play instead, why would I stick with a game that can't convince me it's worth playing. There's also a lot to be said for games that can be consumed in bite-sized chunks. That doesn't necessarily mean that the campaign, or metagame, or whatever, can't be many hours long, just that a single "unit of interaction" (one dungeon, or one liife, or one fight) probably shouldn't take more than an hour at most. * By which I mean I watched an intro cutscene, killed a few rats and crabs, did a trivial tutorial dungeon, sailed a boat to a "town" island, talked to some townsfolk, and went to buy bombs only to discover that, to nobody's surprise, you had to complete a quest to actually get the bombs. In other words it has all the pacing problems endemic to post-OoT Zelda games.
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Dec 1, 2016 21:35
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John Lee posted:I think it says a lot about your worldview that you view a game with adaptive difficulty as 'punishing you.' I don't think he's referring to all cases of adaptive difficulty, but rather a system that deliberately looks at your character build and produces whatever obstacle it calculates will be the least possible for your character to overcome. Like the example given earlier in the thread of a system where the game generates fewer warhammers the more points your character has in warhammer proficiency, or generating exclusively fire resistant monsters whenever the player acquires a powerful fire spell.
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Dec 1, 2016 21:36
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John Lee posted:I think it says a lot about your worldview that you view a game with adaptive difficulty as 'punishing you.' I actually don't like adaptive difficulty much either (at least not unless it's 100% transparent and controllable) but it's a little more nuanced than that. I see a game which counters your build as "punishing" -- in the context of RPGs, where the point that you can inhabit a particular character who has their own traits and abilities distinct from yours as a player. It's at cross-purposes with itself. Mzbundifund posted:Like the example given earlier in the thread of a system where the game generates fewer warhammers the more points your character has in warhammer proficiency, or generating exclusively fire resistant monsters whenever the player acquires a powerful fire spell. Exactly. If it were "design a monster who shoots out fast-moving waves of flak in response to a player who zigzags all over the playing field to avoid getting hit by big slow attacks" that's one thing; there's a skill being tested there, which is the player's adaptability. But the fire spell / fire immunity situation is just testing "do you have alternate resources you could use, and do you know that you should use them?" which is a knowledge check at best and pure tedium at worst. e: You could also have both at the same time, like an FPS where each gun requires different types of aim (projectile vs. hitscan, continuous tracking vs. alpha strike, etc.) to use, but at the same time, the game deliberately throws Cyberdemons at you when you run out of rockets. That's better than the spell/immunity situation by itself, but still kind of a dick move. e2: To compare to Cogmind again, Kyzrati seems to have put a lot of effort into giving every broad style of play tools to solve the various situations through the complex, and while certain strategies might work better against certain obstacles (and you have to make do with less than ideal tools depending on what you have available) it doesn't actively become harder if you lean on the tools you do have and the playstyle they support. Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 22:20 on Dec 1, 2016 |
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Dec 1, 2016 22:08
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Hey caught up and we're still alive, this is new territory for me.
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Dec 1, 2016 22:09
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I think we used our amulet of lifesaving though.
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Dec 1, 2016 22:42
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I'm unsure if we are close to or already over a year since starting a new thread was considered.
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Dec 2, 2016 00:24
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Floodkiller posted:I'm unsure if we are close to or already over a year since starting a new thread was considered. Jordan7hm was working on a new thread, but I think he got overambitious and never finished it, which is a shame.
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Dec 2, 2016 00:28
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hito posted:I'm having fun following all of the entries so I put them in a spreadsheet. You can view it here. 1 vs 1 arenas? I'm quite fine with multiple enemies! I do like tactical instanced arenas though.
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Dec 2, 2016 00:29
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StrixNebulosa posted:Jordan7hm was working on a new thread, but I think he got overambitious and never finished it, which is a shame. Chargen paralysis: the worst of all deaths.
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Dec 2, 2016 00:46
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megane posted:Since everyone's sharing, I guess I might as well write up the silly dream roguelite I thought up a while back. I'd like to build a roguelike over the winter break, but it probably won't be this one, since this is way too ambitious for a first project, so this isn't for the contest. Still, it's fun to get the idea down on paper. To be fair, while your idea is easily one of the most ambitious in terms of difficulty to complete, it's probably one of the easiest to start, because such a high % of the dev would just be coming up with the rules and algorithms. So in that regard I think it would actually be good for the contest - a lot of these ideas require gobs of infrastructure being laid down before the game design part can even start (including me - I don't even know which programming tool to use yet!), but you can easily run Rogue Agent using text prompts in a terminal.  Also, I did some brainstorming on how a RL murder mystery would need to work some time ago, and one of the conclusions I came up that you might be able to use is to write an engine where all of the characters take actions in their own self-interest. This would affect the game state and adjust their relationships with other characters. By taking the time to write this logic once, you get a ton of plausibility work for free because you can just run the engine X number of times at the start of the game to "seed the world". And this ALSO helps a lot with the investigating peoples motivations part, because now you can organically infer things about characters based on information from other characters. You know that Joe Hencherman has a short temper and doesn't care much for loyalty, so while you don't have direct game information whether Tony Mobboss tends to keep his promises, the fact that Joe has never used his action to spitefully get even suggests that Tony is probably one to keep his word. rchandra posted:Your procedurally generated enemies/bosses sound absolutely great! After playing Sil I knew I wanted to see something like that (because of how it does the enemy IDing/documentation). Thanks! I agree, the slick angband monster memory feels like a waste when you realize it's just all spoilers you could look up. Jedit posted:On topic: someone mentioned procedurally generated bosses. There's an old procgen bullet hell game called Warning Forever that might interest. The whole game is a series of boss fights, and each new boss's design is influenced by the strategy you used to defeat the previous bosses. Stay with one tactic too long and you'll be fighting a boss perfectly designed to beat you. Funny enough, this is exactly opposite to what I'm going for with the procedurally generated bosses - the idea is that the bosses are strong enemies that you can research the attributes of so you can adjust yourself to THEM.
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Dec 2, 2016 01:45
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https://twitter.com/epyoncf/status/804482084702187520 Everyone, please go and download DoomRL while we still can - it's one of the best roguelikes out there, and captures Doom perfectly.
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Dec 2, 2016 02:04
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StrixNebulosa posted:https://twitter.com/epyoncf/status/804482084702187520 kind of weird though because that's like, 90s era cease & desisting bullcrap. they are waist deep in the past here
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Dec 2, 2016 02:13
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StrixNebulosa posted:Jordan7hm was working on a new thread, but I think he got overambitious and never finished it, which is a shame. It's actually been like a year and a half. At least. The last serious attempt was last Christmas. Thread consensus at the time was that an old school multi OP approach was the way to go and... yeah overambitious. I think I still have the write ups somewhere.
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Dec 2, 2016 02:23
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what's better, double shotgun or assault shotgun
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Dec 2, 2016 04:53
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IronicDongz posted:what's better, double shotgun or assault shotgun Assault shotgun is better for most of your normal fights, the double shotgun is something to swap to if something gets super close and you want it out of your face fast (and also probably dead). If you can get a power and technical mod, put it into the assault shotgun to turn it into a combat shotgun, which removes the need to pump it between shots.
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Dec 2, 2016 04:57
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Floodkiller posted:Assault shotgun is better for most of your normal fights, the double shotgun is something to swap to if something gets super close and you want it out of your face fast (and also probably dead). If you can get a power and technical mod, put it into the assault shotgun to turn it into a combat shotgun, which removes the need to pump it between shots. Basically this. The assault shotgun is the golden standard for shotguns that you use at midrange from behind cover. It is somewhat weak against heavily armored targets (mainly barons and bosses) and especially so at longer range, so complement it with something that can cause big explosions from far away. Also, you have the assault shotgun and the combat shotgun confused. The combat shotgun is the common, base-level weapon that can be turned in to an assault shotgun-like beast with PT mods. The assault shotgun is an exotic-level weapon that can already fire on consecutive turns without pumping.
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Dec 2, 2016 05:04
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double shotgun seems super awesome with Shotgunner though, since it reloads both shells in one move e: I did just find a "tristar blaster" in hell's armory though oh, but it's not actually a shotgun. If I don't want to consume a shell box/ammo chain when I reload, do I need to alt reload or something? Or do I just need to take it off? LazyMaybe fucked around with this message at 05:37 on Dec 2, 2016 |
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Dec 2, 2016 05:30
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I've been scribbling notes on how I might make a rudimentary town-to-town drifter roguelike while trying to penetrate the Python tutorial. Mostly I'm trying to overcome my own laziness, but it still has that good old feeling of "maybe this time I'll learn something and do something." Endless possibilities await! I think my drifter roguelike will have some things in common with post-apocalyptic survival games, in that you're just trying to scrape together enough stuff to survive, only the world isn't ruined, you're just basically a loser that everyone dislikes on sight and avoids. They're doing just fine, but it's unwise to mess with them. So you'd have to make choices about whether to sleep in an alleyway and be super uncomfortable but largely unmolested, or break into a house and hope there's something worth stealing, but nobody home, or maybe it's an abandoned building. I'm vacillating between that and something less gritty and realistic and more fantastic as a theme, like, say, you're a drifter in the far future on the ruins of terraformed Mercury. Something like that might give me more leeway to be weird (running ahead of the sun instead of a hunger clock, for instance) and less simmy. I'm not getting too darn specific about what I'd like to see just yet because I don't think my bad programmer first roguelike will be able to do much; I'll just be happy to maybe generate a crude town generator and an evasion mechanic. In the meantime, I'm learning to use the Python command line as a calculator, which is not super stimulating, but baby steps.
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Dec 2, 2016 05:52
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IronicDongz posted:If I don't want to consume a shell box/ammo chain when I reload, do I need to alt reload or something? Or do I just need to take it off?
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Dec 2, 2016 06:02
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IronicDongz posted:double shotgun seems super awesome with Shotgunner though, since it reloads both shells in one move Double shotgun is awesome in close quarters but has a really bad effectiveness dropoff over longer ranges. I think it peters out before it even hits the edge of LOS. Keep a regular, combat, tactical, or assault shotgun in your main slot so you can blast fuckers at long range, and keep the double-barrel in your quickswap slot so you can switch to it to turn particularly nasty enemies into a fine mist when they get the drop on you. If you have Shottyman, the Elephant Gun (regular shotgun + Power + Power iirc) is a great workhorse weapon. Good range for a shotgun, beefy damage even at the edge of vision, and nicely ammo-efficient for the amount of damage you get out of each individual shell.
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Dec 2, 2016 06:07
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It's also the coolest loving mental image, let's be real.
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Dec 2, 2016 06:08
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Poison Mushroom posted:It's also the coolest loving mental image, let's be real. No sorry, killing the Angel of Death with the chainsaw is the coolest mental image. The double shotgun is a close second.
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Dec 2, 2016 06:10
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