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zirconmusic posted:Speaking of difficulty, modes and such: Talk to me about adding 100+ game difficulty modifiers, each with their own slider, button, and or knob. e: ooh, top of the page! Hey come watch my Tangledeep dev strim: http://www.twitch.tv/playdungeonmans
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Nov 15, 2017 17:34
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I consider Invisible Inc the gold standard for game modifiers. You can punch up or disable every system in the game and give yourself zero to infinity rewinds and restarts. Perfect both for learning the game at your own pace or making it exactly as hard as you want it.
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Nov 15, 2017 17:39
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Too Shy Guy posted:I consider Invisible Inc the gold standard for game modifiers. You can punch up or disable every system in the game and give yourself zero to infinity rewinds and restarts. Perfect both for learning the game at your own pace or making it exactly as hard as you want it. Do you know if the devs have talked about usage of those modifiers? Like, what percentage of players ever change any of the difficulty settings?
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Nov 15, 2017 17:48
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LCS has really neat modifiers. You can: -Prevent the creation of your rival the Conservative Crime Squad -Start the game with the CCS already created and at 100% power -Start with the Arch-Conservative agenda 99% complete (Nightmare Mode, combine with the previous for an extremely difficult game) -For a long game, prevent Liberal Constitutional amendments that purge Congress and the Supreme Court of Conservatives
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Nov 15, 2017 17:52
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To clarify the kind of stuff I'm thinking about adding, I was thinking of having a fourth "mode" selection when you start a game in Tangledeep. Right now you have Heroic (permadeath, but w/ metaprogression), Adventure (no permadeath), and Hardcore (permadeath + no metaprogression) You could select "Custom" and be presented with some toggle options like: * Passive HP regeneration * Passive resource generation * Monster HP regeneration * Start with no abilities, learn abilities from scrolls instead * Chance for monsters of any level to spawn on any floor * 50% JP gain * Item stacks limited to 9 * No NPCs in town, find NPCs randomly in the dungeon instead Some make the game harder, some easier, some of them add more randomness/chaos that could be fun. But I would want these separate from the primary 3 modes.
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Nov 15, 2017 17:59
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zirconmusic posted:To clarify the kind of stuff I'm thinking about adding, I was thinking of having a fourth "mode" selection when you start a game in Tangledeep. Right now you have Heroic (permadeath, but w/ metaprogression), Adventure (no permadeath), and Hardcore (permadeath + no metaprogression) Maybe lock these behind an amount of progression achievable to most players so they don't instinctively turn on stuff like passive HP regen without actually seeing how the normal systems play out?
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Nov 15, 2017 18:06
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I think the problem becomes - how are you actually balancing the game. I realize that Tangledeep has already gone down this wormhole, but I think ToME is a good example of a game that really seems balanced for a certain mode - spiky one hit kill damage is terrible design in a game that lasts dozens of hours and has permadeath, unless you do something like add additional lives. ToME is primarily designed around the adventurer mode. Yeah, you can do stuff like play permadeath, just like you can play Nethack with conducts, but that’s not what the game is really designed for. Codifying conducts and variants for players to play around with is fine, you just need to make it really clear what you consider “the game” that you spend 80% of your effort balancing. What can kill a game is telling people (either explicitly or implicitly due to UI and genre conventions) to play a certain mode and then balancing for a different one. In other words the modifiers are probably a good way to go, just don’t spend any time focusing on them once they’re implemented.
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Nov 15, 2017 18:11
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I think a solution like cogmind/dead cells kinda work, where you can hop into more challenging branches almost immediately.
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Nov 15, 2017 18:23
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I would absolutely try to set things up so that players are encouraged to play the mode(s) you primarily balance around. Again looking at 20XX, its special difficulty modifiers aren't even available unless you're playing on Hard to begin with; Hard turns off most of the metaprogression in addition to being labeled as hard, so players are naturally going to ignore the special difficulty modifiers until they feel like they have a handle on the game. I'm not sure how easy something like that would be to achieve if you want to have modifiers that make the game easier.
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Nov 15, 2017 18:27
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Why can't the game just say "okay, this time you start with a shotgun and green armor" or "this time, you start with a pistol and a knife and red armor"? And start the player at character level 3 instead of 1, so they can immediately make some build decisions. Then just don't have the first couple of dungeon levels and start the player immediately against monsters that have a little more variety to them. I think a core feature of roguelikes is that you don't get to choose what hand you're dealt, you have to play with what you're given. The first three chests you open can actually make a pretty big difference in the rest of your run and that early roll of the dice is as important as the later ones. If you're automatically rolled 3 pieces of gear you can just savescum until you get what you want, and if you can just pick a handful of decent starting choices I think that's a little degenerate too since you're going to keep picking what you want every time and making the same decisions, and the whole point of roguelikes is that you can't make the same decisions every time. I mean you can say that you can always get a +1 War Axe pre-Lair in DCSS but I think that's a fault of DCSS, not the structure of roguelikes writ large. Meanwhile three different runs as Crystal in Nuclear Throne can be in extremely different places going into 4-1, both with weapons and mutations. And sure, maybe the Wasteland is a pretty easy faceroll, but if I could just start in 3-1 with two mutations of my choice I'm gonna take Strong Spirit and Trigger Fingers every time, or keep rolling until I do.
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Nov 15, 2017 18:38
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Sure, there's going to be that temptation to savescum, but I'm not convinced that discouraging it literally by just saying "you don't get to see what your starting build is until you've invested 15+ minutes in the character" is a good solution. Nuclear Throne doesn't have this issue because the entire game takes 15 minutes. I'm talking about the games that take 5+ hours for a single run: I posted:The problem of retreading the early game over and over again is part of why I increasingly favor short roguelikes and/or Dungeonmans-style metaprogression... I don't know where the cutoff is, but I'm a lot less likely to worry about having to faceroll the early game of an hour-long roguelike than I am about one that takes ten hours. Of course, the ideal solution is to not have a facerollable early game to begin with.
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Nov 15, 2017 18:49
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zirconmusic posted:To clarify the kind of stuff I'm thinking about adding, I was thinking of having a fourth "mode" selection when you start a game in Tangledeep. Right now you have Heroic (permadeath, but w/ metaprogression), Adventure (no permadeath), and Hardcore (permadeath + no metaprogression) Personally, I love this kind of thing. I'm not usually someone who needs to make a roguelike harder, but having the options is good for those that want them. And, despite huffy purists, being able to play at an easier level makes the game more accessible to a wider array of folks. It is a good idea to require at least one run at 'default' difficulty, and explain that the game is balanced around that point, but being able to control the game's systems can add a lot to its longevity and friendliness. Don't Starve is a great example of this to me, letting you individually adjust a huge number of game elements to get your own experience out of it. Maybe you don't get achievements in 'custom mode' but that's okay. Games were fun before achievements too.
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Nov 15, 2017 20:17
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Jordan7hm posted:ToME is primarily designed around the adventurer mode. No it isn't. DarkGod has made a couple posts roughly indicating that the balance of Normal difficulty is a priority -- not exclusively, mind you, just "I wanted to make a game everyone could play, not just the 1% of top players" -- but that's pretty much it. Anything else is just assumptions that the gameplay couldn't possibly be the way it is on purpose. The game is perfectly winnable on Insane / Roguelike. There's a random factor to it, like there is to most games in this genre, but frankly, if you really invest in the tools the game gives you it's probably more consistent than some of the other popular traditional roguelikes, although probably not quite Nethack-level "you can ascend 99% of the time with skill." Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 20:54 on Nov 15, 2017 |
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Nov 15, 2017 20:51
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Oh my god. In Liberal Crime Squad, there are special bluff messages depending on your armor, like if you're wearing a labcoat you'll say ""Make way, I'm a doctor!" There's an extra special one if you're wearing the Mithril Armor from the swords shop at the mall.
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Nov 15, 2017 21:05
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Insane is definitely winnable the majority of the time with the caveat that your class/race selection has an enormous impact. My last win was Insane Roguelike with 3 deaths, and all 3 were avoidable - 2 from not bothering with buffing before a fight due to laziness, and 1 from refusing to flee from a dangerous situation. That was a Mindslayer though, if you tried it on an Alchemist or something you'd be relying heavily on sheer luck to avoid nasty random bosses. Normal mode is pretty much winnable 100% of the time on any class/race, it's just very tedious. Removing tedium is a big priority at the moment but there's some serious fundamental flaws in the game, like how there's no attrition/resources but 95% of singular fights have no risk, so on normal difficulty anything outside of a boss or particularly dangerous base type like horrors might as well not even exist. Even on Insane it's the same, except there's a lot more mobs that matter thanks to randboss spawns.
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Nov 15, 2017 21:06
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I think a good scheme would be to have four options:
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Nov 15, 2017 21:38
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As an aside on difficulty changes, I remember I got some version of ADOM, I forget which kind, that I could 'custom' change into a sort of UltraADOM by expanding the window size to full screen, which would rewrite levels to be loving MASSIVE. Easily x10 the usual dungeon size. However, it didn't really affect spawns or anything else, which left each dungeon level a starvation hell run to find what few enemies wandered the giant empty maze. I used Sage to tool around the whole game and found only a few levels weren't affected to become massive. The Casino got a gigantic amount of extra items, and locales like the Scintillating Cave turned into a complete war zone. I sort of miss trying to beat that version, but starvation was just too frequent.
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Nov 15, 2017 21:59
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I remember reading an article about Age Of Empires a long time ago. They calibrated the difficulty settings by measuring the success of their playtesters into standard deviations. It's not a very interesting way to create difficulty, but it did at least achieve consistency.
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Nov 15, 2017 22:48
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zirconmusic posted:* Start with no abilities, learn abilities from scrolls instead I haven't played the game (yet) but this sounds like a really good idea for an alternate mode. Having to make do with what you find and coming up with weird wonky builds that you've never done before and probably never will again is great. It adds a lot of replayability for experienced players who've won a billion times and end up just doing the same build every game, while also adding a fun way for newbies to try out and get familiar with stuff they haven't played with before.
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Nov 15, 2017 23:17
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RE: Skipping the boring early game: Isn't that the purpose of meta-progression in games like Dmans?
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Nov 16, 2017 01:14
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Why can't the game just say "okay, this time you start with a shotgun and green armor" or "this time, you start with a pistol and a knife and red armor"? And start the player at character level 3 instead of 1, so they can immediately make some build decisions. Then just don't have the first couple of dungeon levels and start the player immediately against monsters that have a little more variety to them. FWIW DoomRL actually has that, kind of, in the form of the Angel of (Over)confidence modes -- which start you with a significant pile of extra gear but skip the first ⅓ or ⅔ of the game. Of course, since they're challenge modes, they don't start you with any of the level-ups you would otherwise have gotten in playing through those levels, and the extra kit, while significant, is less than what you would have at that point in normal play. PMush Perfect posted:RE: Skipping the boring early game: Isn't that the purpose of meta-progression in games like Dmans? Yes, as TooMuchAbstraction pointed out in one of the posts that kicked off this whole discussion last page.
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Nov 16, 2017 01:18
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Razakai posted:Insane is definitely winnable the majority of the time with the caveat that your class/race selection has an enormous impact. My last win was Insane Roguelike with 3 deaths, and all 3 were avoidable - 2 from not bothering with buffing before a fight due to laziness, and 1 from refusing to flee from a dangerous situation. That was a Mindslayer though, if you tried it on an Alchemist or something you'd be relying heavily on sheer luck to avoid nasty random bosses. Normal mode is pretty much winnable 100% of the time on any class/race, it's just very tedious. Removing tedium is a big priority at the moment but there's some serious fundamental flaws in the game, like how there's no attrition/resources but 95% of singular fights have no risk, so on normal difficulty anything outside of a boss or particularly dangerous base type like horrors might as well not even exist. Even on Insane it's the same, except there's a lot more mobs that matter thanks to randboss spawns. I lost my first "serious" run of ToME a few hours ago. I spent 3 lives in rapid succession while I was surrounded in the Dreadkeep(sp?) after breaking into the vault and lost my last life on the next floor to some bad positioning a burn damage. I kept thinking I was close enough to the boss but the tower kept on going. As frustrating as it was to lose my level 17 Bulwark, seeing the list of classes I had unlocked laid out for me was nice. Too bad I never got a chance to send any one to the anti-magic town. I ran into three while in the keep but they couldn't stay out of danger long enough to escape.
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Nov 16, 2017 02:53
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The constant tip I see about TOME is “don’t open vaults in Dreadfell”. I of course throw caution to the wind and kill many characters that way.
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Nov 16, 2017 02:56
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Dr. Arbitrary posted:Oh my god. In Liberal Crime Squad, there are special bluff messages depending on your armor, like if you're wearing a labcoat you'll say ""Make way, I'm a doctor!" Note, this is from a game where I've goofed around with all sorts of stats for giggles, please ignore the 43 charisma. 
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Nov 16, 2017 04:44
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Geez, going from a tank who can faceroll everything to an Archmage is like running headlong into a brick wall. I died maybe a half-dozen times before I finished the starting quest (mind you that I didn't know that I could move out of the way of projectiles and use Phase Door). Then once I got out I had to acclimate to someone whose resources a) were necessary to combat and b) didn't restore at a comical rate. Watching my mana restore at .5 a turn is nuts, but then I remembered the formerly-useless "rest" key and things became a little more manageable. Still wiped to some skeleton in the lvl 1 dungeon. Next time I'll focus on fewer schools of magic and dabble in the temporal magic in the hope that it'll help me kite enemies. Should I be too concerned with the additive cooldowns on inscriptions that comes with using them too often? I found myself leaning on them a little more for mana regen and I wondered how badly that ramped up. Keep in my that "roguelike endgame" is a foreign concept to me; I beat Rogue Legacy and that's pretty much my only claim to fame. LawfulWaffle fucked around with this message at 05:43 on Nov 16, 2017 |
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Nov 16, 2017 05:40
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Every time someone says 'roguecel' I think it's some new weird incel thing.
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Nov 16, 2017 08:09
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packetmantis posted:Every time someone says 'roguecel' I think it's some new weird incel thing.  ALART: Everbody's* Favorite* roguelike themed hunger relief charity is back for 2017 Stop the Hunger Clock The kickoff is on Friday but I thought it'd share it here early The site: http://dungeonmans.com/hungerclock/ The sell sheet, so you can see exactly what's up: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1u-8Eb9rqE_NEBpWUo6dl4oEPVRY6sejJ5FuhXsGF1fc/edit If you have spare game keys you don't want, I'll take 'em and hand them out when people contribute. I ended up with hundreds of keys last year to crazy, small, good, bad, who knows games, it was a treat to send them out along with the big ticket games people requested. If you are a fellow goondev and you're not already up here, you can correct that. Everyone should be cowed by the ferocious generosity of Defiant who gave me a whole mess of keys for Hand of Fate 2 which JUST LAUNCHED and is in the prime of its selling period. Surely you can part with a dozen keys to entice your fans out into the world to fight hunger. Unused keys are returned to you at the end of the promotion, my collateral here being the name and reputation I use to make a living. Send questions, keys, and good cheer to: hungerclock@dungeonmans.com or just ask in the thread and send PMs, that works too. madjackmcmad fucked around with this message at 08:56 on Nov 16, 2017 |
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Nov 16, 2017 08:31
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I have a dozen or so spare keys collecting dust. How can I hook you up?
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Nov 16, 2017 08:52
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Ignatius M. Meen posted:I have a dozen or so spare keys collecting dust. How can I hook you up? hungerclock@dungeonmans.com -- I'll add this to the post above too, thank you.
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Nov 16, 2017 08:55
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Everything I can send is sent, I still have four keys left over for games that are butts about multiple keys being owned by the same person for reasons. It's probably fine though, that's going to be a mostly fine variety of games as is!
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Nov 16, 2017 09:26
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I got linked to this wiki page randomly from a discussion about "ridiculous game mechanics" and reading it made me very mad again, please destroy ADOM
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Nov 16, 2017 09:37
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tote up a bags posted:I got linked to this wiki page randomly from a discussion about "ridiculous game mechanics" and reading it made me very mad again, please destroy ADOM the cat lord doesn't actually matter. if you made it to him you have won the game anyway (this is the actual problem with adom)
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Nov 16, 2017 09:57
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tote up a bags posted:I got linked to this wiki page randomly from a discussion about "ridiculous game mechanics" and reading it made me very mad again, please destroy ADOM Yeah the Cat Lord is piss in a hot glass. You either avoid him altogether, or you lure him up, web him, and use teleport and slaying ammo to reap massive XP gains. He is legit a vicious murdermonster if you're stupid enough to melee him, though.
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Nov 16, 2017 10:05
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Black August posted:Yeah the Cat Lord is piss in a hot glass. You either avoid him altogether, or you lure him up, web him, and use teleport and slaying ammo to reap massive XP gains. He is legit a vicious murdermonster if you're stupid enough to melee him, though. xp gains were nerfed and web doesn't work on him anymore either so he's just kind of a jerk. but get this: the phial and cursed invis pots are still busted so he's a chump.
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Nov 16, 2017 10:08
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Kobold Sex Tape posted:xp gains were nerfed and web doesn't work on him anymore either so he's just kind of a jerk. but get this: the phial and cursed invis pots are still busted so he's a chump. He nerfed the XP gains? gently caress's SAKE what a boring thing to do. I know invis curse fucks things up, but what does the phial do?
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Nov 16, 2017 10:14
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Black August posted:He nerfed the XP gains? gently caress's SAKE what a boring thing to do. I know invis curse fucks things up, but what does the phial do? blinds humanoids when thrown, a.k.a. completely trivializes everyone e: in retrospect i dont think he nerfed the xp of the cat lord, he just fixed the bug where you were getting the bonus xp from killing an invisible thing while being able to see invisible. so now you're getting normal xp instead of double xp. Kobold Sex Tape fucked around with this message at 10:35 on Nov 16, 2017 |
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Nov 16, 2017 10:31
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madjackmcmad posted:hungerclock@dungeonmans.com -- I'll add this to the post above too, thank you. Are any games cool or just roguelikes? I have like 3 months of humble monthly sitting untouched because work and alcohol 
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Nov 16, 2017 13:12
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LawfulWaffle posted:Geez, going from a tank who can faceroll everything to an Archmage is like running headlong into a brick wall. I died maybe a half-dozen times before I finished the starting quest (mind you that I didn't know that I could move out of the way of projectiles and use Phase Door). Then once I got out I had to acclimate to someone whose resources a) were necessary to combat and b) didn't restore at a comical rate. Watching my mana restore at .5 a turn is nuts, but then I remembered the formerly-useless "rest" key and things became a little more manageable. Still wiped to some skeleton in the lvl 1 dungeon. Next time I'll focus on fewer schools of magic and dabble in the temporal magic in the hope that it'll help me kite enemies. A common early Archmage build involves going 1/3/4 in Lightning/Manathrust/Flame to have 3 beam spells you can rotate. Note that Archmages survive by putting up damage shields before they fight anything dangerous, so once you have Phase Door controlled and 1 point in Teleport/Arcane Eye you'll want to start pumping your generics into Shielding/Arcane Shield and grab Light if an escort offers it. quote:Should I be too concerned with the additive cooldowns on inscriptions that comes with using them too often? I found myself leaning on them a little more for mana regen and I wondered how badly that ramped up. Keep in my that "roguelike endgame" is a foreign concept to me; I beat Rogue Legacy and that's pretty much my only claim to fame. Inscription saturation is pretty negligable unless you have to sustain pressure on a boss for a long time, which is uncommon. If you're bumping into heavily increased cooldowns you should probably have escaped to reset a long time ago. Note that runes and inscriptions have seperate saturation effects, so having some of each can alleviate this if you're feeling overly concerned about it.
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Nov 16, 2017 13:42
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Klaus Kinski posted:Are any games cool or just roguelikes? I have like 3 months of humble monthly sitting untouched because work and alcohol I have a ton of unused keys that aren’t roguelikes. I try to give them out at Xmas but never get rid of them fast enough.
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Nov 16, 2017 14:56
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Klaus Kinski posted:Are any games cool or just roguelikes? I have like 3 months of humble monthly sitting untouched because work and alcohol Jordan7hm posted:Yes this. Keys are best -- Steam gifts are tougher to give out, but you can send them to steam account madjackmcmad and I will offer them up too. Ignatius M. Meen posted:Everything I can send is sent, I still have four keys left over for games that are butts about multiple keys being owned by the same person for reasons. It's probably fine though, that's going to be a mostly fine variety of games as is!
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Nov 16, 2017 15:15
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