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General Emergency posted:If you like the theme check out Renowned Explorers if you haven't yet. It's great. I bought this for my girlfriend during the holiday sale and I've watched her play through it a few times. It does look great, but for some reason seeing her play it for a few weeks has made me lose most of my desire to play it!
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Feb 8, 2016 05:54
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The hype towerclimb is...warranted, to say the least. I find the keyboard controls fine actually, though item throwing is awkward. Granted, I still cannot get to chapter 2. I just died at floor 19. 
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Feb 8, 2016 06:19
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I've been playing Towerclimb the last few weeks on and off and I have yet to reach anywhere near the top as well. I mapped the controls to a controller and the game feels a bit better but still a little awkward for holding/storing/selecting items. Great game though, I have never felt like any of my deaths were BS, it's always something I've done wrong. I've also been playing Nuclear Throne and haven't gotten to the throne yet. I should probably pick one of these games and stick with it until I make some actual progress instead of continuing my roguelike ADD.
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Feb 8, 2016 06:49
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Roguelike dev chat: How do Roguelike developers typically test difficulty, specifically in the case of catering to a variety of player skill levels ("causal" RL players vs. the hardened old guard)? I'm thinking specifically of games that use a RNG as part of the challenge in the vein of Nethack/DCSS/Caves of Qud.
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Feb 9, 2016 03:40
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It's ancient history now and they may have relented but there's a hilarious quote where one of the Crawl devs said that a 50% win rate for the best players in the community would be too high, which pretty much sums up everything wrong with Crawl in a sentence.
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Feb 9, 2016 03:50
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I may be an idiot scrub but as I think of most roguelikes as heavily skill based games an expert player should be able to win almost every time.
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Feb 9, 2016 03:54
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Whether or not a developer wants a <50% or 100% win rate for elite players, there is probably some testing done beyond correlation of time played/win rate to ensure that rate. I'm curious what the testing looks like. Do you build basic bots and track strategies for success? Traditional beta-style player feedback like Cogmind?
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Feb 9, 2016 04:00
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tokenbrownguy posted:Whether or not a developer wants a <50% or 100% win rate for elite players, there is probably some testing done beyond correlation of time played/win rate to ensure that rate. I'm curious what the testing looks like. Do you build basic bots and track strategies for success? Traditional beta-style player feedback like Cogmind? I'm pretty they just play the game when it's early in development, eventually when it's beta or beyond they use player feedback.
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Feb 9, 2016 04:06
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RPATDO_LAMD posted:I'm pretty they just play the game when it's early in development, eventually when it's beta or beyond they use player feedback. Yeah, basically this. I mean, there's some tricks you can use to help you balance your RPG, by having target values for "how hard is this monster to kill", "how much damage can this monster do", "what quality of loot should it drop", etc. but those will only ever get you into the ballpark, and the rest is just iterative refinement. If your roguelike is simple enough that you can write a bot to help you balance it, then it's probably not very interesting to play.
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Feb 9, 2016 04:11
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tokenbrownguy posted:Whether or not a developer wants a <50% or 100% win rate for elite players, there is probably some testing done beyond correlation of time played/win rate to ensure that rate. I'm curious what the testing looks like. Do you build basic bots and track strategies for success? Traditional beta-style player feedback like Cogmind? There's a huge difference between balancing a game once it's out and you have a crowd of people playing it and beforehand ones that are out the devs can follow successful strategies directly (ascension records on NAO, oook.cz ladder for *bands, streak recordings for BoI, etc) but before you've got that mass of skilled players it is really hard to tell what skilled play is even going to look like, not just with roguelikes but really with games in general there's a lot of learning from the mistakes of games past in roguelikes to at least get vaguely in the realm of balance before you start, it's such a weird niche these days i can't imagine a roguelike developer ityool 2016 who didn't start specifically because they were big fans of what came before with a lot of lessons they can pull from those
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Feb 9, 2016 04:18
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A lot of games have pretty poo poo difficulty anyway, either in terms of missing the mark badly (way too easy, way too hard), having really awful artificial difficulty settings (Impossible mode = 2x hp and damage!!!), or in terms of awful community response (well, the guys on our forum say its too easy, so lets crank this badboy to 11, nevermind they're literally part of the 1% of players). Few games do difficulty levels well, DMC and Platinum action games are usually pretty rad because higher difficulty adds new mechanics and challenges to fights, which is really nice - you can up the difficulty as your own mastery improves, and the game pushes back harder to give you a new challenge. I don't think roguelikes are well suited for that approach, for a lot of reasons - heavily (or even partly) randomized content is a bitch and a half to hit the right mark with, because testing for specific cases becomes extremely time consuming, but that one case that someone runs into and wipes their dude in one turn is a really super feel bad situation. Really a lot of it just comes down to raw iteration - something many (most?) devs don't have the luxury of, simply due to time/budgetary restraints. I suppose in that regard, some roguelikes that are developed by one guy (or a small team) over the course of years as a fan project are actually slightly better off than commercial games, just because they can continue to refine the product based on feedback and real playtesting. It's not unusual for a dev to be worse at the game than their players, and it's normal for players to have 234892348x more hours logged in a game than the devs, so good logging of player data can provide a mountain of useful objective feedback, vs. the narrow and skewed responses you get from subjective forum posts that already only make up a tiny % of your userbase (I suppose in the case of some super niche roguelikes, that's probably less true than a more popular widely spread game). Although neither is perfect - objective data can be misinterpreted just as easily as subjective anecdotes can be biased or outright false. Commercial expansion packs/dlc are often the 'fix all the obvious-to-players broken poo poo' releases, since they can be financially justified, but the lag time between launch->feedback->actual implementation of fixes is immense. I kinda like Twitch and youtube streams/videos of people playing a game. Even though that's still going to represent another skewed slice of your userbase, it can be refreshing to see someone who is not a diehard player go at a game, and see what they really struggle with. Or you can watch a real vet just take a game apart piece by piece. On a personal level, it drives me up the loving wall when devs push out a new game in an existing genre and either willfully or unintentionally ignore good lessons from past games - but not every dev or dev team will have played every game in genre X, and their motivation for creating the product the way they did in the first place (after accounting for all the usual technical/time/design compromises any game goes through) may be wildly different than what you get out of the game or the genre. (games are occasionally hard, gamedev is always hard  )
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Feb 9, 2016 04:40
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:It's ancient history now and they may have relented but there's a hilarious quote where one of the Crawl devs said that a 50% win rate for the best players in the community would be too high, which pretty much sums up everything wrong with Crawl in a sentence. There is at least one player who won 27 games in a row. In general, the best players are able to get into the double-digits of sequential wins, though mostly they spend their time working on high scores instead. The 50% winrate thing sounds familiar, but I think it may have been a joke 
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Feb 9, 2016 06:14
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"Players must never win my game" has a fine established tradition in roguelike development; it was the attitude of the original Moria developer. The "Evil Iggy" monster in that game was created to enshrine a character who won the game immediately after the dev declared it unwinnable. It's still a dumb philosophy though.
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Feb 9, 2016 06:19
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PleasingFungus posted:There is at least one player who won 27 games in a row. In general, the best players are able to get into the double-digits of sequential wins, though mostly they spend their time working on high scores instead. The 50% winrate thing sounds familiar, but I think it may have been a joke Yeah given how good players can break dcss over their knee I'm not sure that quote holds up.
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Feb 9, 2016 06:58
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I would be sad if no roguelikes that consider winning to be a glitch were ever made again but it should definitely be a rare exception.
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Feb 9, 2016 07:06
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Clever Spambot posted:I would be sad if no roguelikes that consider winning to be a glitch were ever made again but it should definitely be a rare exception. Sil jokes around that killing Morgoth is a "glitch" - the normal way to beat the game is just to free a silmaril from his crown and escape with it.
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Feb 9, 2016 07:09
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People complain that Crawl can't be reliably won every time and that you can win every Nethack game if you know what you're doing so you're hosed from both ends basically.
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Feb 9, 2016 09:51
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packetmantis posted:People complain that Crawl can't be reliably won every time and that you can win every Nethack game if you know what you're doing so you're hosed from both ends basically. The Nethack thing was probably more applicable with the unnerfed Elbereth. No clue if that still holds up with the recent release. Floodkiller fucked around with this message at 13:42 on Feb 9, 2016 |
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Feb 9, 2016 13:17
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IVAN is a fine example of a game that transparently doesn't want the player to win, but is fun anyway because the player knows it hates them and there's a ton of goofy poo poo to play with before you die. Unless you want to do some of the same things - the cheerful, obvious malice, the tongue-in-cheek "lol naked peasant sent into a death cave by the Frog Church" type storyline - you should certainly be trying to design your game such that a very skilled and knowledgeable player has the ability to consistently win it. How hard it is for them to do that is up to you, though. And that said, there are people who can semi-consistently win IVAN anyway. Anyone who specifically wants their game to be unwinnable, or potentially unwinnable, despite having a clear goal and victory condition is kind of a weird rear end in a top hat imo. Angry Diplomat fucked around with this message at 13:51 on Feb 9, 2016 |
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Feb 9, 2016 13:49
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Are there any procedurally generated sci-fi games around nowadays like Gearhead 2? That game was the poo poo back when it was being developed. Then the developer just up and disappeared one day. It looks like the website finally went offline a year or two back too so good luck finding an up to date copy of it too. The mech combat was hilarious too. I once used the mechanic I was playing to make a mech that was gently caress all useless on the ground and in the space colonies due to gravity but was basically a glorified thirty story tall mechanized The fact that it had randomly generated storylines, out of mech combat with your pilot (I once made a kung fu dude who ended up being the equivalent of something straight out of an anime by the end of his story. I straight up annihilated the giant robot my rival was piloting with my kung fu fists of steel.  ), other vehicles you could pilot like fighters and tanks, and a ton of at times Dwarf Fortress tier levels of complex fluff content made it pretty awesome for its day.
Archonex fucked around with this message at 14:36 on Feb 9, 2016 |
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Feb 9, 2016 14:15
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It's not exactly the same, but Cogmind is what you're looking for. Don't let the fact that it's in alpha scare you away- if you want to build a death machine out of the remains of your enemies, this is the game to play.
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Feb 9, 2016 14:32
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Actually, GearHead and such is kind of back alive again as of some days back, so hope springs anew. http://www.gearheadrpg.com/
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Feb 9, 2016 14:55
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:"Players must never win my game" has a fine established tradition in roguelike development; it was the attitude of the original Moria developer. The "Evil Iggy" monster in that game was created to enshrine a character who won the game immediately after the dev declared it unwinnable. Didn't the FTL guys say that players were only 'supposed' to win something like thirty percent of the time?
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Feb 9, 2016 15:02
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ExiledTinkerer posted:Actually, GearHead and such is kind of back alive again as of some days back, so hope springs anew. gently caress yes. 
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Feb 9, 2016 15:08
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Archonex posted:gently caress yes. Looks like yet another reboot attempt that's gonna die in 6 months like all the others.
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Feb 9, 2016 15:23
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dis astranagant posted:Looks like yet another reboot attempt that's gonna die in 6 months like all the others. He just needs to put starship and capital ship combat into gearhead 2 and it'll be pretty much perfect. I remember he was suggesting that way back years ago before he went inactive. Also maybe add more stuff to do with the factions fluff and content wise. They're pretty much a pain in the rear end if you're not geared up already.
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Feb 9, 2016 15:40
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Archonex posted:He just needs to put starship and capital ship combat into gearhead 2 and it'll be pretty much perfect. I remember he was suggesting that way back years ago before he went inactive. GH2 is dead, he's calling the latest GH spinoff half started a couple years ago GH3 now.
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Feb 9, 2016 15:43
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Gearhead needs the Cataclysm treatment. It's quirky and wanted enough you'd think fans would pick it up and run with it.
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Feb 9, 2016 16:09
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dis astranagant posted:GH2 is dead, he's calling the latest GH spinoff half started a couple years ago GH3 now. That's a drat shame. GH2 is legitimately an isometric roguelike sci-fi Skyrim with mechs, ground combat, batshit insane anime, a ridiculous ton of fluff content, and a fully procedural storyline that changes from the start each time you play. Also, despite the anime it riffs off of it has a ton of insanely neat stuff in it. Like being able to record stuff in your PDA/laptop/cybernetic brain (Because you can literally put software on a personal computer inside the game on the computer you're playing on.  ), become a roboticist and make a ton of neat utility robots and killbots, (and from what I vaguely recall) become a literal loving rock star, and just about anything else you can imagine. It's also batshit insane in that every game's story is pretty much 100% different from the very moment you make a new character.In contrast to my last post I remember at one point I made a punk rockstar mercenary that ended up rolling around in a mech that basically spammed missiles and what I think were some sort of sonic weapons. Think a massive war machine that pretty much just traveled from colony to colony dispensing anarchistic justice with two super powered boom boxes/missile launchers on it's shoulders. Somehow I ended up hooking up with some sort of royalty (Probably a princess, since Gearhead 1 had them. There's even a post on the webpage about her joining a test character and betraying him.) or elite from one of the factions and ended up pissing off an entire faction. We ended up going out Bonny and Clyde style after we were both shot down and crashed into a mountain side in our jets. Which were the fallback I had built in case Boombot got nuked to hell. It's a legitimately great game that just needs the content that's there to be filled out. Some of the features are either so obtuse to figure out that they appear lacking or they actually are. On the other hand, it looks like Gearhead 1 received a graphical update to make it sort of on par with Gearhead 2 visually. And it has procedural content too. So maybe it's more fleshed out now. Killer-of-Lawyers posted:Gearhead needs the Cataclysm treatment. It's quirky and wanted enough you'd think fans would pick it up and run with it. According to the github the source code for the games were released. Assuming he hasn't done something to make it uneditable that could actually be a thing if there were people actually interested in it. I'm trying to figure out how to compile the thing with the given instructions at the moment since i've never worked with Pascal before. Never mind trying to track down all the libraries and DLL's it apparently needs. Archonex fucked around with this message at 16:45 on Feb 9, 2016 |
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Feb 9, 2016 16:36
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Archonex posted:According to the github the source code for the games were released. Assuming he hasn't done something to make it uneditable that could actually be a thing if there were people actually interested in it. One of the many aborted spinoffs over the years was a Python conversion, which would probably be easier to work with if it wasn't dead.
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Feb 9, 2016 16:53
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I just saw an old college buddy playing ADOM on steam. What's up with that? I thought it was all ascii like nethack? I've only really liked, played nethack. Slash'em seems like someone thought nethack didn't have enough things that could gently caress up your day and tried to fix it, and ADOM seemed like it was too busy and had too much going on, like any time I tried to find out what to do it was like okay go in this cave but only to level whatever, then go here, then go do that quest, grind off random encounters in the wild, etc, etc, but now that my eyes are old and hate ascii and it has graphics, what's ADOM actually like? Krinkle fucked around with this message at 21:01 on Feb 9, 2016 |
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Feb 9, 2016 20:55
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Krinkle posted:I just saw an old college buddy playing ADOM on steam. What's up with that? I thought it was all ascii like nethack? ADOM is an rear end in a top hat Sierra adventure game disguised as a roguelike.
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Feb 9, 2016 21:27
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In ADOM you can make a few mistakes and continue to play for 10 unaware hours before you die due to those mistakes.
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Feb 9, 2016 21:34
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Floodkiller posted:ADOM is an rear end in a top hat Sierra adventure game disguised as a roguelike. Mzbundifund posted:In ADOM you can make a few mistakes and continue to play for 10 unaware hours before you die due to those mistakes.
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Feb 9, 2016 23:08
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Ive never heard of gearhead i want to play it now. How old is it
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Feb 9, 2016 23:16
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Isaac posted:Ive never heard of gearhead i want to play it now. How old is it The last GH2 release was in 2010. GH1 ended a couple years before that.
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Feb 9, 2016 23:28
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[sagely] ADOM is good.
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Feb 10, 2016 03:45
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So what has changed with the latest ADOM versions?
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Feb 10, 2016 04:29
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You can pick your starsign now. Which after wanting to be able to do so for years, now just paralyzes me with "do I want to play this class or that class" now that I won't get something that's clearly good for wizards and just pick wizard. If you haven't played since the pre-kickstarter days, it fixes all the horrible bugs, has a lot of reward tweaks, adds Ratling and Mist Elf races and Chaos Knight and Duelist classes. All the ways to cheese the game hard were removed. (Can't transform 10 rings of stunning into 10 rings of djinni summoning, can't sacrifice 200 stomafillas for an easy precrowning, that sort of thing.) Lots of quest reward rebalancing, a new Ice Queen's Domain area, a few extra generic random dungeons scattered across the world map. (Which help immensely for preventing that mid game fatigue where you can run out of places to go before giving up on saving Khelly or getting fire immunity for the tower.) Also tiles.
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Feb 10, 2016 08:23
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RPATDO_LAMD posted:I'm pretty they just play the game when it's early in development, eventually when it's beta or beyond they use player feedback.  tokenbrownguy posted:Whether or not a developer wants a <50% or 100% win rate for elite players, there is probably some testing done beyond correlation of time played/win rate to ensure that rate. I'm curious what the testing looks like. Do you build basic bots and track strategies for success? Traditional beta-style player feedback like Cogmind? Angry Diplomat posted:IVAN is a fine example of a game that transparently doesn't want the player to win, but is fun anyway He says he wants the game to frequently reflect the reality of being in helpless situations (and sometimes there are ways out of them if you get creative, but often you're just screwed).
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