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madjackmcmad posted:
And now I know why I should have bought dungeonmans. Alas.
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Dec 2, 2015 02:42
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Ok I'm way late on this but I started thinking about it so I may as well finish the post. I am relieved not to make the final tally because I don't feel like I have enough experience for good opinions on the genre. 1. IVAN - I haven't spent nearly as much time actually playing this as anything else on my list, but it left quite an impression. I think this was actually the first pure roguelike I ever experienced, and I still at least vaguely remember the first death - I was trying to get a sense of my options for interacting with the world, and one of the things I tried was throwing a glass bottle at an enemy. It hit, broke, and I forgot about it. Then walked over the glass, cut myself, and bled to death. I feel like it was a good introduction and if I ever again have way too much spare time I'd like to take a serious shot at beating it someday. Is that even possible? I have no idea. 2. Crypt of the Necrodancer - Lots of people have already talked about this one and they're all right. Deterministic combat that taps a slightly different set of skills, great atmosphere, it all comes together perfectly. 3. FTL - One of my highest playtime games on steam. It has a perfect rhythm for semi-attentive play with the charge time on weapons/ease of pausing to queue up attacks/strategic map. The balance felt extremely tight when I was new to the game, with almost no runs feeling unwinnable but it staying a struggle all the way through the boss every time - at least until I discovered boarding. Then it kind of felt solved. I don't really get much out of it anymore, but I still don't have a replacement that fills quite the same niche and I desperately wish I did. 4. ToME - The first pure roguelike I actually completed. Actually, I think it might still be the only one - it feels like a very gentle early game for the most part, and is probably what I'd look to for introducing people to the genre. The classes are tremendously varied and mostly interesting, lots of the loot is cool and fun, no worrying about consumables, etc. Just very polished and accessible. That said, I'm not really interested in ever playing it again because holy poo poo the east drags and the sandworm lair is ludicrously tedious after you've been through it a couple of times. If the environments were as good as everything else this game would have some serious staying power. 5. Eldritch - This is the only one of the FPS/roguelike crowd I think really works - exploration is great, running from weird monsters is great, accidentally blowing up huge chunks of the floor is great, and you haven't seen every possible room layout in five minutes (looking at you, Ziggurat) because it's not organized into tiny boxes. I have no idea why that's such a popular approach - it worked for Isaac, it doesn't work so well at all for the FPS-inspired entries. Honorable mentions to The Curious Expedition and Sproggiwood, which I love but haven't spent enough time with yet to have real opinions, and Renowned Explorers Society, which I like a lot but doesn't feel like it has any real replay value to me - kind of the same problem with environments as ToME. Things I feel terribly guilty about not having played yet: Crawl, DoomRL, Cogmind, Dungeonmans, Towerclimb. Irony.or.Death fucked around with this message at 08:53 on Dec 24, 2015 |
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Dec 24, 2015 07:52
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Thanks to whoever it was that was raving about Invisible Inc. in here, this is a really cool game.
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Dec 25, 2015 05:13
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Jordan7hm posted:The link to the games list is here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1cLU51h82dxdYWoJFRsKG7ghymXMra3Ehu5dJdjZ_Em8 If you really still have excess copies of Dungeonmans I'd love one of those, but my list was way late. Also, one of you jerks should take Lichdom. It's a really cool game that I am so far enjoying a lot more than I expected to. The levels are too long and you have to be willing to do some trial and error to get the crafting nonsense to click, but combat is more consistently interesting than any other vaguely diablo-y thing I've played. It's not really a great game, but it's got so many interesting elements that I want lots of people to play it anyway.
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Dec 25, 2015 21:03
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So Jordan sent me a Dungeonmans key and I opened the game up intending to just check out character creation and maybe smash the first dungeon for now, and suddenly it is three hours later. It turns out there's a spell that is poison + explode on death + summon minion all in one and I never ever want to stop casting it. This is a good game. edit: Thanks to everyone involved in making me finally play this, especially Jordan and Madjack for obvious reasons. But also to this entire thread for talking it up in the first place. Irony.or.Death fucked around with this message at 23:56 on Dec 27, 2015 |
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Dec 27, 2015 23:52
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Justin_Brett posted:It's only fifty percent off this sale but I'm having fun with Deathstate. It's clearly inspired by Isaac but doesn't seem to fall into a lot of the problems it does. Every level is basically a giant arena filled with enemies that you automatically fire at, so it's all about dodging and positioning. I'd been thinking about writing some words about Deathstate and you have prompted me to do so. I've been enjoying it a lot more than Flamebreak. It is, as mentioned, strongly Isaac-inspired; there are several characters available with different stats/special abilities/etc. You collect upgrades from chests/shopkeepers/beating up the elite enemy located in each level, and what you get is randomly selected from an extremely large list - there are relics that give you a second active ability, swords that modify your basic passive shots, books that add a second passive shot type, and then a bunch of alien organs that modify your stats. Where it differs from Isaac: also as mentioned, firing is automatic; you don't have to worry about aiming at all. You'll just automatically shoot at the closest in-range thing until it's dead. Levels vary in size, but even the smallest are much more expansive than the single-room arenas of BoI. You've got a foodclock in place, and you will not have time to clear the larger levels before it passes - your goal is to make it to the exit in time while hitting up the level's elite and any other upgrade sources you can find on your way. You also have a dodge with a sub-second cooldown and very generous invincibility frames attached to it. Finally, of course, there's the aesthetic; I don't really mind BoI's, but if it was a turnoff for you this offers cartoon Cthulhu and Hotline Miami-esque video distortion instead. You would probably think that auto-aim and incredibly generous i-frames make for an extremely easy game, and you'd be right. Sort of. To some extent. At its default setting, the game has a strong inverse-u difficulty curve. You go through four different areas, each containing three levels and then a boss encounter - the last is fixed, but the first three are pulled at random from a small pool (although each possibility has a limit to the tiers it can show up for). The first level is completely braindead, the final area is pretty easy, and the final boss is a joke, but a couple of the intermediate areas get extremely nasty. The game is not shy about flooding your screen with bullets and loving with your view. If you decide there really aren't enough bullets, one of the first things you will unlock is the ability to desecrate altars when you come across them in game. One always shows up in the first level, and if you go for it there will then be one in the first level of the second area, and so on. When you desecrate one it instantly summons a boss and turns up the difficulty for the rest of your run, stacking up to four times. There's probably also a bonus area and a boss or two that only show up with something desecrated, but I'm not good enough at the game to have seen those yet. If that still isn't enough bullets for you there's an Insanity mode the developers are on record as not being sure is actually winnable. tl;dr: be a laser-shooting eyeball and then stuff a bunch of looted alien organs into yourself because who doesn't want four eyes and seven stomachs
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Jan 1, 2016 02:32
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Fairy with crossbow, meteor, poison skill. Go for the berserker's and skullcrusher's sets. You would have to try to lose.
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Jan 1, 2016 04:58
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hito posted:You know, playing Renowned Explorers has me thinking that there's really room in the world for a squad-based automata roguelike where your loot is increasingly detailed programming. The closest match I know of to what you're describing is Carnage Heart.
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Jan 1, 2016 19:39
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If your game has interesting levels there is no "main path"; multiple entrances and exits are an absolute minimum for me to not hate you and all you stand for.
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Jan 7, 2016 02:18
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madjackmcmad posted:Edit: New Steam build is out, should be able to load the game correctly now. Bookstore guy might have vanished into thin air... Bookstore guy is currently in literally every secret room that spawns. He's not exclusive, though, he can show up with a chest or ancient king or whatever sharing his tile. This turns out to be a problem with ancient king cryomages because I'm too stupid to walk away from unwinnable fights. related: don't get greedy with Xespera's guys it's not worth it
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Jan 12, 2016 05:17
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It worked out great for me so I endorse this approach.
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Jan 21, 2016 17:40
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Johnny Joestar posted:all i've ever heard about darkest dungeon is that it's pretty much up it's own rear end about being ~hard~ and thus really unfun to actually play It's really really not, and a bunch of people in the thread back when it first hit early access were actually disappointed at how easy it is. It has one of those unfortunate but super common setups where the very beginning is more difficult than the entirety of the midgame, so I can see why someone would form that opinion if they had a run of bad luck/didn't figure out the systems as quickly as they should have, but as long as you don't pretend your favorite character dying is a fail state it's pretty forgiving.
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Jan 23, 2016 02:16
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victrix posted:So basically on any map you enter you can see all the 'stuff' to do, just not perfectly. I actually really like this idea. It's not something I'd want to see rolled into every new game forever, but I think you're right that if you baked it into the UI it could open up some really cool design space. Plus it suggests all sorts of cool thematic stuff, I want to run with it in psychic alien fungus and cyberpunk wireless brain network directions simultaneously. Maybe the network is based on drugs made out of alien fungus and you can increase the precision of your mapview/increase the power of some attacks by eating more mushrooms with a risk of opening yourself up to infection/hallucination. Man I wish I had spare time this week.
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Mar 7, 2016 23:30
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victrix posted:There is nothing on a Dungeonmans floor anything like these examples. It's definitely not on par, but someone a few pages ago brought up the skill books and I think that was a fair point. They represent strongly nonlinear power gains, and if you find a lucky few in your early levels you can be well ahead of the midgame power curve via access to your complete offensive and defensive suite vs. maybe just one of the two. This kind of thing matters to the obsessive player, especially given the likelihood of midgame one-shot by a champion you didn't see coming. Although in fairness I think madjack posted that he was toning down those accursed skeleton archers in a recent-ish patch so maybe that's less of an issue now. That said I encourage all obsessive players to keep working on beating the habit - I have so much more fun with basically all games since I kicked it.
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Mar 8, 2016 22:30
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Try and tell me you don't pine for the days of regular derailing.
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Mar 16, 2016 03:07
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Can we please leaf this topic behind us and focus on more important things, like how many hand-crafted elments you can have before a system stops counting as procedurally generated?
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Mar 16, 2016 05:43
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Deathstate is a super cool + fun game and you should check it out if you want a slightly different spin on the BoI formula.
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Apr 18, 2016 22:46
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superh posted:Daaamn dudes. Can I just ask you what is the deal with lasers? Is there a benefit that's not obvious on the player end? Because on the player end they look cool and feel like garbage, which has confused me as long as I've been playing. I think that's the worst thing I have to say about the game.
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Apr 19, 2016 22:27
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I don't pitch it much on here but I'm the lead dev on Deathstate.
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Awesome! posted:deathstate describes itself as a single stick shooter. what does that mean? you move and bullets auto aim when you push a fire button? You autofire when something's in range. Your job as a player is about dodging (it has extremely generous iframes) and active ability/consumable use. The game keeps this interesting by adding more bullets.
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Apr 20, 2016 00:15
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Cool, thank you - it's reassuring to know that wasn't all my imagination. Look forward to diving into the new patch and seeing if I can justify taking my beloved floating eye into desecration attempts now (I will still fail).
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Apr 20, 2016 01:30
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SpruceZeus posted:eye think that Eye is the best. Congratulations on your correct opinion. For a while Pumpkin Man was in the running, but now that whatever the laser dps bug was is fixed, Eye is the clear winner.
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Apr 21, 2016 04:10
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FuzzySlippers posted:I didn't want to end up something like a Daggerfall dungeon that was way too much of a pain in the rear end to navigate or understand on the map. But that's the best thing about Daggerfall! The possibility of getting lost is seriously underexplored in roguelikes - this makes sense in the classic 2-d overhead view setup where the obvious thing to try is not having an in-game map, which is really just annoying players. When you're moving into 3-d level design, though, there are lots and lots of interesting ways a room could not really line up well with a 2-d map and this could easily be a good thing.
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May 8, 2016 16:13
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FuzzySlippers posted:I get why people try to defend negative reviews with lengthy play times but its the scale of the commitment with games that changes things. You can spend 90 minutes with a movie or a couple hours with a book and finish it and go "you know, that was crap" but if you spend dozens and dozens of hours with a game it is pretty hard to cry about it being the worst. Spending the equivalent of many full workdays playing a thing shows that either it ain't that bad or you are crazy. Buy this/don't buy this from the general public is 100% worthless to any consumer who is not completely retarded, and if steam's search/sorting features make heavy use of this that's a problem with their implementation, not with people who write thoughtful and detailed reviews that fall on the negative side overall. No moral justification is required to click the thumbs up or thumbs down button no matter how many thousands of hours you've spent in a game. I will grant you that thoughtful criticism is likely to be buried in steam reviews, but I absolutely refuse to fault people for offering it there and I always appreciate it when they do. There is plenty of room for nuance because I give zero fucks about what color the icon over the text is. Fewer essentially empty reviews and more armchair designer thoughts would substantially improve my experience with the platform so I'm all in favor of them. I'm sorry if that fucks with someone's metrics (I really sincerely am, I like madjack and I like his game), but as a consumer it's a clear benefit to me.
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May 11, 2016 01:11
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I know I keep saying this but Deathstate is super good and cool. I finally finished a max desolation run a few weeks ago, which was sort of satisfying but also made me feel pretty silly. I'd been assuming it went up to 4, and over the course of the past few months I've thrown away at least three runs that would have been easy wins looking for an altar in the final area. Oops. Eye is still the coolest.
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Jun 24, 2016 04:51
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Super cool to see more people getting into Deathstate, I was starting to feel weird for liking it so much. Now inspired to take a couple more shots at the Insanity portal this weekend, maybe another try or two at a no damage run as well.
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Jun 24, 2016 23:03
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The flying eyes are really just there to make you panic and run into other stuff, they're probably the second-least dangerous enemy in the game. Least dangerous is the one that's fuzzing up your screen. Assuming you're not desecrating anything yet, at least. Honestly I'm amazed to see complaints about literally any area other than the desert, I think it's the clear standout for gently caress you. Maze is a reasonably close second if you're working on desecration/insanity, but I don't remember it feeling too bad on a vanilla run.
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Jun 29, 2016 23:58
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Carcer posted:I'm not panicking when I see them. Even in huge swarms if nothing else is around they're harmless, but if there’s anything else around that forces me to dodge incoming fire they swoop down into my path and hit me as they land. If there’s a huge fur ball going on and I see evil eyes zoom from off screen to hover over me I try and retreat so that I can deal with before going back to the fight, but sometimes this isn't at all practical. I'm not sure what to tell you about the flying eyes if this is really a problem you're having on a regular basis, they always land far enough away from you that you'll usually kill them before you even have to react unless you've gotten stuck with a particularly low rate of fire offense. Which does happen sometimes. When you talk about dodging are you talking regular movement to avoid fire or the actual dodge ability? You should be abusing the latter almost all the time, as it comes with extremely generous iframes. The guys messing with your vision don't have any actual offense of their own. You can hug them if you feel like turning your autofire off for a while. That means that whenever something starts messing with your view in the maze, you know you can retreat back in the direction you just came from and wait for it to follow you into a bullet-free area for murdering/pick off the active threats around it rather than trying to engage everything at the same time. You have to balance this sort of caution with moving through the level fast enough to not die, of course, but you'll learn to manage them. The architect can absolutely be taken early on if you're comfortable with his bullet patterns. He's got an unusually large amount of health, but as long as you don't need more than a couple of bullets to take out his summons you should be able to handle him. Often not worth the time on a large level, though, so I'll usually save him until everything else is cleared out unless I have a solid offensive loadout already. edit: and I apologize if I'm coming off as a dick, I swear it's just my personality I'm actually trying to be helpful Irony.or.Death fucked around with this message at 23:09 on Jun 30, 2016 |
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Jun 30, 2016 23:06
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Carcer posted:What exactly does desecrating those altars do? I know it says it makes the game harder but that’s a really nebulous thing that I don't immediately notice. Each level of desecration (+1/altar) changes up enemy bullet patterns a bit, usually by way of adding more bullets and sometimes adding different kinds of bullets. It also increases the damage you take from each hit. There may also be some hidden stuff at maximum desecration, I'm still missing a couple enemy entries.
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Jul 1, 2016 15:34
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:If you went looking for someone to punch you in the dick it'd probably cost a lot more than three dollars. It might take a little digging to find in a given city, but I bet you could arrange an amateur back alley sort of dick-punching pretty cheap. You'd only be paying an exorbitant sum if you wanted a more professional service than what Zaodai can provide.
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Jul 24, 2016 19:28
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Oh, man, that brings back memories. I really need to set aside some time to get back into Dominions instead of wasting it all on garbage card games that I hate.
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Sep 7, 2016 05:23
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Play more Demon, Demon rules and is all about your pets.
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Dec 3, 2016 19:53
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madjackmcmad posted:
I do not have a name for it yet, but I would like to make a game where you are a classic horror monster. Vampire, werewolf, mummy, lagoon creature, maybe a ghost. That sort of thing. There are lots of other monsters around too, of course, but unfortunately peaceful coexistence is off the table because you're in competition for resources: the humans who live in that nearby village. Your monster type (class), in addition to providing a handful of unique powers, determines how you harvest and benefit from villagers. If you're a mad scientist, you need to be sneaky enough to capture them alive and transport them back to your secret laboratory so they can help with your research. Once you make some progress on your research, huge power boost in the form of your 100% guaranteed loyal forever monster. If you're a vampire, they're food - but obviously you're in trouble if a werewolf rolls into town and decimates your food supply. Zombie? You're not going toe to toe with much of anything when there's just one of you freshly crawled out of the grave, but once you're a swarm the story's different. The major dungeons, then, are the cities and towns - your generic goal in each is to drive out the other monsters in the area and assert control of the local human supply. Each secured source of humanity is progress towards your ultimate zombification of the earth/super vampire blood magic ritual/grand scientific breakthrough. You might be able to locate competitor strongholds along the way, and launch a raid on the secret lab/spooky abandoned castle/graveyard to knock another monster out and pillage their magic item stash - and human stash, if they're into that sort of thing. Systems-wise, I'm thinking fairly traditional turn-based combat. All equipment either grants an active ability or modifies an active ability; you're a monster and would not waste your time picking up some dumb sword that isn't even magical, and there is no magic so boring that it just makes a sword one point stabbier. All NPCs work on the same equipment/ability rules as the PC, so if you murder a mummy who was wearing a crown of spontaneous fireballs and don't pause to collect it right away, a plucky villager might rush in and try to play hero. My first inclination to keep this from leading to tedious hot-swap shenanigans is to seriously limit equipment changes within a mission, but I'm not totally settled on this point yet. Loot's a lot more exciting if you can use it right away, after all. This is obviously not as well fleshed out as many of the other ideas present, because every time I've thought about the idea over the years it's changed genres. I just want more games with the opportunity for giant werewolf vs. vampire vs. skeleton brawls over who gets to eat the villagers. I feel like this would improve most forms of media, really.
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Dec 4, 2016 07:17
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Rogue Scholars 2016: Winter is Coding
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StoryTime posted:This was my favorite of the runners up! Hey, thanks for saying so. And thanks to mad for prompting this whole thing, of course. I definitely don't have time to start anything before this weekend, but I'm about a billion times more likely to get this off the ground now that I know I'm not the only one who wants to see it happen. Will report back when there's something that responds to attempts at interaction, someday.
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Dec 8, 2016 02:11
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11:59 on the 14th is tomorrow, not tonight! Why yes I did just start working through that unity tutorial why do you ask? Seriously though it took me like half a week to talk myself out of doing this in Python, but so far I'm really impressed with how intuitive and how flexible unity is for 2D stuff these days. Not my memory of it at all, and anyone who's been on the fence about diving in should totally go for it. This is fun and a huge chunk of my design just crystallized instantly as soon as I started doing the kind of work that results in files being saved. Making stuff is good and fun. I still fully expect to abandon it inside a week, but I expected that a week ago too so special thanks to hito for the little extra push.
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Dec 14, 2016 01:55
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For the second time, isn't it? First shot had a much higher ask. Anyway, still end of semester crunch time here so this barely different from nothing and obviously not a real entry in contest part 2, I just want hito to know that the followup did succeed in getting me from actually nothing to, like, two steps past nothing accomplished. Unity tutorial in progress!  Lots of grand ideas that are starting to look much simpler and more elegant than I'd expected which has me feeling pretty jazzed about this whole thing, but I'm sure will be balanced soon by some simple ideas that turn out to be completely impossible and eat my computer. If only days were, like, an extra seven hours long.
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Dec 15, 2016 05:57
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I cannot even imagine how hosed the difficulty in Deathstate must seem if you don't know about the dodge. Anyway, thanks for posting about the update! I never did finish that no damage run so this seems like a good excuse to smash my face into the wall a few more times.
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Dec 22, 2016 02:56
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Please tell me android is happening in parallel, I would love to never get work done again.
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Dec 22, 2016 19:00
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Oenis posted:All the screenshots that've been posted in the steam thread looked very "meme"-y It's not. I mean it's full of goofy poo poo, but very little of it is reliant on reference to other media. It's more like on my last run I found a witch and traded half a dozen cans of food for her cat because cats are really good at mauling zombies. This is not an attempt at a joke, it's just a normal consequence of the game's content and mechanics.
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Dec 30, 2016 18:52
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John Lee posted:Yeah, it's pretty cool, but also kind of worrying. He's said before that URR will be quite hard (which is fine), and that he never plays any game on anything but the hardest difficulty and doesn't know why anyone would, which is less fine. What you're describing are clear design flaws in ToME and Fire Emblem, though. I mean I'm not gonna beat up on people who don't always go for the hardest difficulty, but I'm with him in not really understanding the appeal the vast majority of the time. If a game is only balanced on the settings that aren't pushing you, that's not very impressive balance. Obviously I'm not psychic so I could be wrong about him, but I am extremely confident in claiming that nobody who holds a world record in multiple shmups is the sort of person who thinks the interesting part of an RPG is figuring out which 99% of the design you're supposed to ignore. So if part of the URR skill tree ends up being completely worthless, point it out and I bet he fixes it.
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Jan 6, 2017 00:54
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ToxicFrog posted:The hardest difficulty in ToME isn't meant to "push you"; like Nightmare! in DoomRL (or Doom itself, for that matter), it's meant to be a not-even-pretending-to-be-fair challenge mode that only a handful of players will ever beat. In that context it's entirely reasonable for not all builds or even all character classes to be viable. Yeah it's absolutely reasonable insofar as balance is an incredibly difficult thing, especially if you want to accommodate a wide variety of players. It's not a good thing, though, and my point is that if we're talking about a designer who shares this perspective I think it is extremely unlikely that he's going to shrug at half of his skill tree being useless and say it's too hard to fix it or the point of the game is discovering which skills are traps.
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Jan 6, 2017 02:12
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