|
The Adventurer is best played like the Hunter but moreso, and you don't start with anything to throw. Pick up and keep a bow (even the crappy weight 1 bow) just to influence the game to spawn more arrows for you. The five things that will keep the Adventurer alive are dashing, jumping, max climbing, max swimming, and the stamina regen to abuse all of those forever. Once you get past the early game (avoid the final room in dungeons, the lizards will kill you) you have more escape options as a permanent part of your class than most runs find as drops. Chased by a dragon? Climb two spaces into the mountain and then kill it while it's helpless. Two enemies getting close to cornering you? Jump until you have enough space to dash. Or later on just jump forever. The Adventurer will never win a stand up fight without incredible gear, but you never have to get into a stand up fight, and you have the inventory space to carry every drat consumable or situational weapon you might want. The biggest tip for Force Users I can remember is that your spells gain the damage multipliers of your equipped weapon. Trade out your starting staff for an axe when you can and melt your way through walls, chests, skeletons, and golems. Unequip your axe when you need to nuke lizards and minotaurs from the other side of walls and chests. Early game you need to strike a balance between turning food into experience and keeping enough food to survive an ambush. Aside from that, keep your detection spells up continuously in dangerous situations. And eventually continuously regardless of danger. Paralyze is your Demon Lord counter. Oh, and once you think bombs start spawning open chests from 2 tiles away.
|
#
¿
Sep 22, 2014 16:00
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 17:10 |
|
|
TooMuchAbstraction posted:Yeah, goblins can be jerks. The only safe ways to kill them are either to chase them into a corner and then use a weapon that can hit them without requiring you to stand adjacent to them (since then they'll hit you), or to lure them into stepping next to you by ramming your face into a corner or otherwise passing time without turning to face them. Note that grey goblins can only be safely killed with the lure method if you have an attack that does at least 2 damage. Grey goblins suffer knock-back from every weapon, so you can safely kill them with the starter dagger. You just need to pass another turn after you hit them once.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 7, 2014 18:26
|
|
|
Evil Mastermind posted:Has anyone here played Heroes of a Broken Land? It does look really interesting but there doesn't seem to be a lot of info about it. I found it to be fun up until the mid-game when the last remaining bits of resource management are buried under endless piles of gold and store-bought potions. I still play it, but rarely stick with the same save past level 10 heroes or so. The demo should let you know pretty conclusively whether you'll enjoy the game or not. The only thing that doesn't show in the demo is that gold rewards shoot way up after level 6 and you can afford to drown your MP problems in potions, if you don't just get the advanced classes with MP regeneration.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 11, 2014 03:27
|
|
|
TooMuchAbstraction posted:Okay, can you think of a way to mesh FPSen with Procedural Death Labyrinths that wouldn't suck? I would start and end with a horde mode shooter. Hell, Warframe already checks many of the boxes (it's notably missing perma-death and some semblance of turns) and it's a (terrible) game that people have 1000s of hours in. Randomly generated levels are there, made of handcrafted rooms linked together. Random elite enemies and character progression are present. It's tuned for a F2P experience rather than a rogue-like one, but I think the system in play is similar to what you'd get the best results from. Going from an ARPG (I'm thinking original Diablo as the inspiration) to a top-down shooter isn't hard. Basically if you balanced the game Diablo around the Rogue or Sorcerer class instead of the Warrior you'd have it. So then the question becomes, "What does switching to a first person perspective bring to the table?" As I see it there's basically three options. First person perspectives can provide a particular flavor of immersion. First person shooters can take advantage of a third axis in ways that top-down shooters struggle with. Finally, first person perspectives allow for longer sight-lines. Trying to build the assets for an immersive first person experience while satisfying rogue-like standards of level generation seems like a really good way to overreach how much developer time you can spend on the project. Going beyond nice graphics to immersive is a step that many AAA games try and fail. As well, I think the people who experience rogue-likes as immersive would not get that experience that in a first-person game, no matter how well the game was made. Making good use of the Y-axis is comparatively easier. At times it's as simple as large enemies towering over the battlefield, so the player can shoot them even behind a mob of chaff enemies. Flying enemies are another fairly simple option with a consequence, as flying allows all the enemies to see and attack the player without getting in each others' way. If you're using pre-built rooms in your level generation you can make use of the Y-axis there, without making your level generation algorithm any more complex. Longer sight lines will pretty naturally be used unless you're consciously trying to avoid it. Top down shooters have a really bad tendency of your viewable area fighting you as much as the enemies do. Because shots from offscreen are such bullshit, almost every fight has to take place within the size your monitor can display at once. You could get better use of this by allowing your generator to vary your arena sizes (or make pre-built arenas of various sizes). Speaking of arenas, horde shooters succeed or fail based on enemy design and wave design. While corridor shooters depend primarily on level design. Wave design is a comparatively simpler task, and a solid algorithm for wave design would make for a more reasonable target. Provide small drips of health and ammo between waves, and a larger payout upon completion of the arena. The player should have some ability to "tap out," forfeiting future rewards from that arena when it's getting to be too much. There's still a major component of rogue-like appeal missing. A bog standard horde shooter provides the player with many tactical considerations, but rogue-likes also have a strategic layer. At a minimum the player should have a choice between multiple arenas to travel to after completing one. The player should have or be able to acquire some (maybe not all) information on each of the arenas in terms of expected enemies, how much of the reward is payed out during the waves compared to the end, how large the total reward is, what size the arena is, and any other twists in store. The player should feel like they're making a choice, not picking a card to flip over.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 26, 2015 05:53
|
|
|
ToxicFrog posted:So what makes a good item? That's actually surprisingly hard to pin down. To be fair, your entire post already assumes the game is going to generate piles of poo poo and then the design goal is to find out what's useful. Instead of throwing a hundred loot drops at the wall in hopes that enough of them stick to create a functional equip set a game could, instead, just generate a functional equipment set for the player. Ask a couple questions on character generation about what kinds of loot the player would like to see and there we go. Hell, ask those same questions every X equipment pieces that drop. Now, something will be lost when you change loot generation like that. A game is about whatever you spend time doing, after all. But the flip side is that by cutting equipment sifting you make room for the game to be about something else.
|
|
#
¿
May 3, 2015 01:25
|
|
|
victrix posted:It's like the designers saw how it was done elsewhere and went 'well that works!' and just c/p and be done with it, without looking at the nitty gritty and seeing cracks in the systems. Yeah. RPGs are a genre that treats 40 year old hobbyist solutions as gospel. I mean, that it mostly works is a pretty strong testament to the rigorous play-testing that the original RPG received before the growth of the genre. And it's also a strong testament for niche genres to always have a place and be self-perpetuating. But, 40 years of game iteration and design and we're still counting gold pieces in every game to buy incremental equipment upgrades? Not even FPSes have stagnated that much.
|
|
#
¿
May 4, 2015 00:05
|
|
|
Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:The first guy to come up with the idea that you should be able to sell items should be drawn and quartered. So many games, ruined. A few things to deflect your anger from Dave Arneson or possibly Gary Gygax. When you're literally pioneering the entire concept of RPGs by creating something new out of wargames it's pretty forgivable to settle on "money works like it does in real life." Second, given the nature of tabletop gaming he probably made the call with about 5 seconds of thought when a player asked if they could sell a spare piece of equipment. And lastly, the idea to make sure your players had the gear appropriate for the challenges they faced was just one of many quality of life features that were so obvious to them they didn't think it had to be explained. Blame all the other designers in the last 40 years who copy the mechanics of the games they've played without ever asking why a feature or system exists. But in general agreement, money based wealth systems in games are terrible and selling items is even worse. It's really a shame that RPG designers (especially the hobbyists who make rogue-likes) aren't willing to experiment with the sacred, 40-year-old rules of the genre.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 4, 2015 22:47
|
|
|
victrix posted:The ideal would be keeping the interesting equipment decisions, but removing all the garbage, both in terms of loot and in terms of ui clusterfucks (of which there are many and myriad failures spread across the entire spectrum of games from Z to AAA). I'd say modern tabletop design has found the solution to this, but the games I'm thinking of aren't really modern anymore and currently the big name tabletops are in their "40 years ago was perfect!" phase. Basically, if players are given the control to populate the random loot table the games doesn't have to roll on it nearly as often to provide equipment the player is actually interested in. This opens up the possibility for builds that are defined both by skills selected and niche items chosen (even in games with finite loot rolls, like Necrodancer). It also lets players actually experience the "what ifs" that get pondered when the player is looking through the item list. In Necrodancer, what if I combined the Boots of Leaping (move 2 squares), a Ring of Courage (move 1 square when you kill enemies), and a Cat of Nine Tails (attack enemies as you move past)? The answer is probably unplayable, but what if it's not? EDIT: Although it reintroduces the problem(?) of finding a way to force players out of their comfort zones in build choice. It's not a one-size-fits-all solution, but none exist because some people really do enjoy every mechanic ever used. Even the most tedious example of spreadsheet management has a supporter somewhere. TheBlandName fucked around with this message at 16:17 on Jun 5, 2015 |
|
#
¿
Jun 5, 2015 16:11
|
|
|
Pladdicus posted:Most glaringly it seems to posit these things are like sliders in opposition. A game is about what the player spends time doing. The G/N/S division was for tabletop games, where the players have to spend time applying every rule. As such, yeah those things are in opposition in the context the theory was developed. Basically everything useful about the theory could be summed up in one example. An evil mastermind steals a couple cows to power their evil ritual, what happens? From a gamist perspective the mastermind will be foiled before they have their ritual set up, because the players probably don't suffer as many set backs as the DM imagined in a worst case scenario. From a narrativist perspective the mastermind is foiled right before the ritual is completed, or perhaps the mastermind completes it as the players arrive in time to witness it. From a simulationist perspective the mastermind completes their ritual with no interference by the players, because cows disappear all the time and there's nothing to suggest this batch is special. Don't adhere to rules that create a different outcome than what your particular gaming group enjoyed. (In practice this often meant a fair bit of narrativist fudging because 80% of the time your players create an awesome new plot hook out of something you didn't think about, but anyone who admitted to FILTHY NARRATIVIST FAKE-GAMING was shamed out of certain online communities.)
|
|
#
¿
Jun 24, 2015 00:14
|
|
|
DACK FAYDEN posted:Playing WASTED. It's fun, but the hitboxes (on both enemies and the PC) seem wonky in ways that aren't just gun accuracy - think tripping the traps with sight lasers vs jumping over them - and also I have absolutely no idea how I'm supposed to clear even the first dungeon. Enemy damage and health and armor all ramp up and I feel like my offensive options and armor options are both instantly outclassed on floor 7. What am I missing? Armor is the god stat*, and some level of SHOOT is required to keep all the bullet guns from being peashooters. The best armor set available in cooler 1 is probably the Denim pants, the Leather Jacket, and the Terminator shades. With a cannibal style drink you'll hit 4 armor and 4 SHOOT, which should keep the handguns bouncing off you and even take the sting out of most of the rifles that spawn in cooler 1. You can probably branch away from an armor/SHOOT build in later coolers if you wanted to, but you just don't have the weapon options to do anything else in cooler 1. Keep all the rifle ammo you find in preparation for floor 7. You want to have the armor piercing power of rifles on your side for killing the mutants. DACK FAYDEN posted:First 3 floors only has one drink I care about (Lightweight Lager, which gives +move speed and a trivial knockback penalty) but I've been taking dives to 6 and drinking out a few times and then typically open a locked door on the way and die to out-of-depth... whatever the swole guys are called. Seems like there's a lot of actually not-garbage drinks on 6. But yeah, I'm getting a "Cannibal Style" before every dive. Wish I could spend TP on a gun that was better, but I'll get there, I'm sure. Knockback resistance is actually really important because you can't use air control or even fire while you're being knocked back, so I feel like the Lightweight Lager is a mistake. I know that opening the locked doors is a mistake because they can spawn enemies stronger than level 10 will generate but without dropping any better loot. *Armor is not guaranteed to save you in later coolers, where energy weapons and rifles are more common on earlier floors.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 24, 2017 08:35
|
|
|
Heat Signature is like the end-game portion of a roguelike where you can get yourself out of any possible situation if you just use your consumables correctly, except it only takes 10 minutes to get to that point from a new character. It's not going to be the interesting portion of the game for everyone. And honestly the situations start repeating themselves more often than in most roguelikes.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 26, 2017 23:04
|
|
|
This is probably taught in game design classes by now. But I wouldn't know.Tuxedo Catfish posted:There's a moderately easy solution: don't have power scaling, at least in the raw numbers sense. RPGs bend over backwards to include a mechanic that does nothing except awkwardly gate you away from and towards certain content, but you could do this in much less problematic ways if people weren't so attached to numbers going up. Tunneling too much on raw numbers, levels, and stats going up is going to miss the general case of the problem. Consumables, unused pickups that can be backtracked to, and even the health remaining can all contribute to the same problem. It's the snowball effect for games that disallow grinding, and it's the incentive to grind or overlevel in games that do allow grinding. In particular, there's a lot to be learned from non-RPG genres about how to lessen the problem, and how to fall headfirst into it even though you don't have power scaling. This facet of gameplay can be analyzed (very simply and abstractly) through four values*. One is the flow of resources into or out of the player's stockpile (HP, better gear, consumables both carried and safely backtracked to). The second is size of the player's stockpile of resources. And the last two are the developer's expectations of the first two values. Let's call these four values actual income, the actual stockpile, expected income, and the expected stockpile. Runaway snowballing and drawn out death spirals occur when there's a mismatch between actual income and the expected income. If the player is mechanically too good, mechanically too bad, is using an overlooked powerful tactic, is overlooking an expected tactic, is unlucky, or probably more things that I haven't brainstormed at the moment the experience of playing the game will warp from what's intended. On the other hand, mismatches between the actual stockpile and the expected stockpile cause both anti-climaxes and frustration. A player who has stockpiled twice as many resources as expected can afford to be reckless. Most games with non-zero incomes allow for player skill to affect the actual income, and in so doing the actual and expected stockpiles start to differ. Games with leveling also allow the actual stockpile to affect actual income, which compounds the problem, unless dealt with. In a grindy game a level 3 bump attacker expends less HP killing a kobold than a level 1 character, but collects the same amount of gold to buy the same number of healing potions. In a "don't look back" game a level 8 character will lose more health clearing a room than the level 10 character the designer expected would be there. Not having levels would eliminate some of the complexity, but the player going back and grinding kobolds is still accumulating more healing potions than expected. A player who's skipping all the treasure rooms because they don't have the supplies to kill the guards will need help breaking out of that cycle. How do you deal with these separate problems? And I'm actually interested in hearing some other suggestions. My favorite approach is capping the stockpile and frequently refilling it. And I mean actually game-play constraining caps and not those that exist as end-game exercises or programming constraints. The cap can change as the game goes on. The introduction doesn't need to have the same limits as the finale. The drawback of this approach is that it requires extensive play-testing to figure out how generous to be with resources, which is usually only a sweet spot for a small cross-section of player skill levels. An actual (often improperly and overused) example is the estus flask of Dark Souls. Aside from the grindable humanities, I mean. Capped healing, at an actually meaningfully small level. Couldn't be cheesed by camping a bonfire. Bonfires were frequent. The drawback of limited skill appeal was mitigated slightly by allowing players having trouble with a particular section of the map to increase their stockpile cap through the kindling mechanic. *Well, you only need four if you're assuming the devs are accurate in their expectations. If they aren't (because it's real life) than there's another two values (that we can't solve for) for what the game actually demands. Simple example would be a damaging corridor that a dev expects you need 30 HP to cross, but a bug makes you take double damage so you actually need 60 HP to cross. And of course if your players aren't perfectly rational (they never are) you have another two values for how much of their income and stockpile they're actually willing to use (elixers do them no good if they sit in the inventory "just in case"). But for exploring many design concepts you only need the easy to think about four values I started with.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 17, 2017 22:53
|
|
|
Tuxedo Catfish posted:You already covered some of this, but just to be doubly sure: Yes, but the model can still be used to analyze games without that strategic layer. Consider Super Mario Bros, but with an infinite lives cheat to further simplify the example. Super Mario Bros, even without lives, has a resource income in the form of the super shrooms and fire flowers. If you can keep your extra hit all the way to one of the Koopas, the Koopa fight itself is trivialized because you can just run straight through him. At the same time, the cap on your stockpile is pretty small because your principle obstacle is bottomless pits, which do not care if you shoot a dozen fireballs into them. As a result Super Mario Bros is resistant to the snowball effect, and by balancing around the assumption of small Mario it doesn't have a death spiral. If this respawning Mario could eat ten mushrooms for ten extra hits and kept them even after falling into pits the game would have a much rougher edge. Yes to your third paragraph. Although many games in non-RPG genres have the answer of zero, no non-regenerating resources, or no resources from outside the boss arena required. Tuxedo Catfish posted:Furthermore, it's not actually possible to find a perfect happy medium, because players of differing skill at the tactical level will require different amounts of resource to compensate for imperfections in their play, ranging from the guy who could win the fight with the bare minimum to the guy who needs the maximum amount just to stand a chance. Yes. It's not possible to find a perfect happy medium. Developers and designers have to pick a skill level to balance around (or the iterative process of play-testing will pick one for them). At the absolute most accessible, they can spend additional dev time to produce multiple well balanced difficulty settings. Since the skill level of your opposing team is a de facto difficulty setting in multiplayer games the principle is a little looser. Tuxedo Catfish posted:And on top of that, the top-level resource game can obfuscate the process of learning the tactical game because if you're too far ahead in the one, you don't get real negative feedback when you screw up in the other -- you're still winning, so you must be doing it right, right? Now, the reverse side of this is that it can also be good for the health of a game if multiple skills contribute to your overall ability to win -- this permits the existence of "styles" of play and broadens your audience -- but there's always a cost here, and I personally tend to prefer games that narrow their focus. True only when your resource income/expense is tied to a different skill than the tactical game. A shooter where all the health and ammo is hidden in secret rooms would have this problem, but a shooter with all the ammo and health in plain view would not. As an intuitive guess, the more skills the game is trying to engage the worse the game will be at accurately conveying why you're failing.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 18, 2017 00:06
|
|
|
genericnick posted:Thanks. Any suggestions on ship type to go for (colony, warship)? Never do colony ships once you've unlocked the artifacts from them. Colony ships have the most threatening mix of modules, enemies, enemy density, and layout. Scrap yard ships have hazard systems, shuffle systems, and saw drones which are three strikes against them. Research ships give no money. Those are the three ship types to avoid if you can. (Would seriously take a stealth ship over a scrap yard.) genericnick posted:Great. Now someone tell me how not to suck at it. You're over-spending on ammo and max health, and you're under-spending on repair kits. I don't even need to know what skill level you are or how you usually load out, because it's always true. Have 1 more max health than your repair kits heal, and fill your equipment slots with repair kits*. Then use them because there's no refunds, only buybacks at some insulting fraction of the price you paid. The only active or passive item that's better than a repair kit is the Hazard Coating. Weapons default to 200% ammo, you can halve how much you bring. Lots of weapons aren't worth the purchase price** because they give so little bang for your buck. Energy weapons, cannons, and projectors are especially bad about this, but there's at least one stinker in every weapon type. Also, tech unlocks aren't tiered by campaign progress. Just because you unlocked a weapon on the second last ship doesn't mean it's better than something you picked up on the first ship (or started with, for a couple of the suits). So write down or remember which guns were actually good. The map is your friend. Speed isn't about rushing past enemies, it's about being efficient in your route. You take damage, spend time, and spend ammo by clearing out sections of the ship. So the less new*** area you spend going from place to place the less damage you take and the less ammo you spend. This also makes you fast, which means you get more $$$. Always know where you're going, and check your map for the best route before you go somewhere new. The game pauses in the map and the autowaypoint system can be stupid so take the time to plan your next move. *Don't do this with the rook because 51 total HP is twice what you should get used to having and crazy expensive. **They can be good fun in rogue mode, though. For about a minute before you're out of ammo. ***If the ship has active factory modules traveling through old, empty areas is still dealing damage and costing ammo, because even if you're not killing the factory drones right now you'll still have to fight (some of) them.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 17, 2017 22:57
|
|
|
vorebane posted:I maaay have trapped myself with the Weevil by teleporting into a confined space that counted as outside the ship, so I morphed to spacewalk form one time. That was the worst bug fix. E: I guess technically it was an exploit fix, not a bug.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 25, 2017 06:45
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 17:10 |
|
|
Cataclysm might qualify? You get to start with an essentially finished build, and early game is about prioritizing and completing manageable tasks while under some degree of threat. The forever midgame is just endless busy work as you try to fortify your character against all the abnormally powerful enemies you might wander into without any warning. I guess that's not so much a good early game as a ruined midgame and nonexistent endgame, though. One Way Heroics? You start with a sizable, non-refillable stock of (weightless) high-end consumables and a small selection of low-end, common consumables. Then you need to weigh how much you're going to push combats (with diminishing returns) versus conserving resources for a dry spell, and carrying capacity is always a significant consideration.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 20, 2018 16:54
|
|