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RyokoTK posted:Repair systems (and failsafes, for that matter) work backwards from the last system you destroyed. So, hit your priority target first, then move toward the repairs, hitting as many less-critical systems (like doors, turrets, flak, etc) along the way. That will buy you a couple crucial extra minutes. Yeah, I know, but ships with two high-level repair systems repair stuff fast and it can be hard to maintain the momentum you need. I think you get something like 15-20 seconds before they finish repairs? I had one frustrating run where, with great effort, I managed to take out one repair module, but then I got cornered by high-level drones and by the time I'd fought my way free it'd been fixed.  But still, Cryptark is a good game.
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Feb 28, 2018 17:08
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I remember not liking Captain's Edition, but it's been so long since I played that I can't really remember why. Except that I do remember it incentivizing investing in your ship's engines even more strongly than regular FTL does. If I recall correctly, depending on your engine level, you can spend extra fuel between sectors to get a head-start on the Rebels (delaying their advance across the sector), which gives you more time to milk the sector, which puts you more ahead of the game, which lets you upgrade your engines more and get even more of a head start, etc. Also I was peeved that rescuing slaves and putting them to work in your ship was a potential mutiny trigger. As I recall, the final boss in Captain's Edition is always the hard-mode final boss. Kill all but one crew member, let them try and fail to keep the flagship operational while you pick it apart around them.
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Feb 28, 2018 23:06
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zirconmusic posted:** Full disclosure my motivation to do it now was this video by Mark Brown on game accessibility (worth a watch) Thanks for linking that video, I agree, it had some good insights.
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Mar 15, 2018 15:46
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The purpose of achievements is to tell the player "hey, you achieved something!". It activates that reward center in the brain for a few seconds when the cheevo popup flashes. I'd argue that's the only fundamental purpose of achievements. Using them as a competition to see if you got those cheevos your friends didn't, or as a way for the developer to get some metrics on how people play the game, that's all fine, and plenty of people do it, but I don't think they're fundamental in the same way. And if you want to use cheevos that way, then you can't hand them out as freely as you can if you just want to tell the player "Hey, good job! You did a thing!" One of the things I never really noticed about a lot of games until I played Celeste is that they gloat when you fail. Big "YOU DIED" text pops up, or sad music plays, or enemies taunt you, or you explode in a shower of blood and giblets, etc. and the goal is to make you feel bad for having screwed up. Many games also call out their easier difficulties as being somehow a sign of weakness, like the people who have to use them somehow aren't real gamers. Using labels like "wuss" or "wimp", the pink bow in IWBTG, and locking out game content / achievements are all aspects of this. Meanwhile, Celeste does a fantastic job of encouraging you in the face of difficulty. Failures have minimal ceremony -- a half-second animation, a fade, and you're back at the start of the room. If you feel the need to punish yourself, that's fine, but the game's not going to do it for you. I can 100% get behind that, and I think it's telling that out of the challenge platformers I've played, and I've played a few, Celeste was the first one where I never got angry at the game. Meanwhile, successes are rewarded as they normally are -- through story, game content, new areas to explore, new music, etc. Even just succeeding at a room that's killed you fifty times in the last ten minutes, that's one hell of a reward in itself. There's no need for an adversarial relationship between the game and the player, and I'd wager most games would be improved if they presented themselves as wanting the player to succeed, rather than (as is more typical) seemingly wanting the player to fail.
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Mar 15, 2018 17:42
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I don't really get what's so bad about just having an "achieved goal" cheevo, which you get regardless of which game mode you were in.
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Mar 15, 2018 19:36
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:The unique style of gameplay they offer is pretty much defined by difficulty and their attitude towards the player's efforts, though. (An attitude that could be interpreted as "spite" although I'd say it's a little more nuanced than that.) This is firmly in "what is a roguelike" territory. For you they're about difficulty and that's totally fine, but it's not the only reason someone might want to play a roguelike. I play plenty of roguelikes that I have already demonstrated systems mastery of, just because I like working my way through iterations of the same basic puzzle. Kinda like how people do Sudoku puzzles or solve Rubiks cubes -- once you've solved a few, you probably aren't really struggling with how to achieve victory, it's just a matter of going through the motions. Sometimes those roguelikes are easy, sometimes they're hard, sometimes they're content-lite, sometimes they're more fleshed-out. In fact, I daresay I rack up far more hours on "solved" roguelikes than I do on ones that I haven't solved, because frankly a lot of entries in the genre are obtuse and/or tedious.
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Mar 15, 2018 20:32
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Lutha Mahtin posted:it was designed very badly. iirc, putting points into certain meta systems would scale up the game difficulty, while putting points into other systems did not. this was not explained to the player and I don't think you could roll back or turn off the meta unlocks after you turned them on, unless you nuked your save file This was only true in the sense that some classes were flatly better than others (e.g. Dragon was godawful) and thus unlocking the bad classes meant you were less likely to have good characters to choose from at the start of the game. The character-independent difficulty (power and number of enemies, mostly) only scales up when you beat the game.
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Mar 24, 2018 01:44
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Different controls make more sense for different kinds of games. Mario-style games have relatively sparse and predictable environments: few enemies, and those enemies move/attack in straightforward ways. Having relatively heavily-committed actions helps maintain a reasonable level of challenge. As your environments get more chaotic, you need to give the player more tools to cope with unexpected things happening. That can be done with e.g. a dodge roll that can be used to interrupt other actions, but it can also be done by just making the controls more responsive. I'm not a good enough game designer to say why you should do one of those over the other, but Rogue Legacy clearly chose the latter approach -- it has a dash move but IIRC that's for fast movement more than it is for dodging.
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Mar 27, 2018 21:52
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Let me guess: that works for everything except the player?
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Apr 1, 2018 20:14
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Artifacts are really rare though, unless you count the rings that have fixed stats. It's common for a hero to find no artifacts in their entire career.
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Apr 12, 2018 04:50
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I've been playing Caveblazers, a 2D platformer roguelike. Pretty standard setup: start at the top of a dungeon, proceed down through multiple levels with periodic bosses until a final boss. The controls and environment are forgiving compared to, say, Spelunky -- there's no falling damage, the character has a relatively large health pool, and traps are limited to obvious spikes. Instead, most of the focus is on fighting, with a fairly wide range of enemies to deal with. The player has a basic melee combo and a bow with unlimited arrows, and there's lots of gear to find during each run that give you various stat mods or different weapon behaviors. Controls are fine, environments are pretty samey but whatever. Metaprogression is limited to cosmetics and unlocking different starting perks, which are mostly sidegrades. There's a few issues, though. First is the bosses, which are pretty much all of the form of "wait for the boss to randomly decide to do the action that leaves them vulnerable, hit them, then get in some damage while they're stunned". In other words, boss fights are mostly spent waiting for the opportunity to progress the fight. They all take way too long too, and I believe that the only difference between an early-game boss and a late-game boss is the boss's health pool (all bosses except the last one are randomly selected). I had one boss take eight cycles to die, which is just not reasonable. Word of advice to game developers: let the player dictate the pace of the fight by how daring they're willing to be. Don't have bosses spend most of their time hovering out of melee range and/or with some bullshit 90% damage reduction effect in place. Second, weapons and effects that give you +health on kills are far and away the best option in the game. Health recovery is normally extremely scarce -- there's the occasional dropped food item, and extraordinarily expensive healing shrines, and that's pretty much it. But if you luck into the sword that gives +3 health on kill and the +2/kill blessing, then that ceases to be an issue (outside of the aforementioned boss fights, since there's only one thing to kill there). +health weapons nominally do less damage than other weapons, but not enough to make a meaningful difference. Third, the game does that "there's a bunch of different potions that you can differentiate by color and don't know what they do until you drink them." There's something like a dozen potions, they're all equally rare, and an awful lot of them are bad. Consequently there seems to be almost no incentive to experiment with them; the chances of getting a stat-increasing potion, or a potion that gives you more health, is far lower than the ones that reduce your stats and hurt/burn/poison you. Game mechanics should not be set up to punish the player for interacting with them. Fourth, the writing, what little there is of it. There's no motivation given for the protagonist, which is fine. The rest of the writing consists of a grumpy old man at the entrance who keeps telling you to gently caress off, and the final boss, who is a generic barbarian warlord type who has captured a bunch of women in rag bikinis, put them in cages, and forced them to have his kids. Which is...uh, kinda sapping my interest in playing the game to be honest. I don't expect games to have good writing, but the game took a hard left turn into some pretty skeevy territory and I'd really rather just not interact with it any more. So I think I'll follow the old man's advice.
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Apr 12, 2018 17:59
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Johnny Joestar posted:sounds like i'd rather just play more spelunky instead Spelunky is really a different genre, since it's far more about traversal skills while Caveblazers is more about combat and loot progression. The comparison to Risk of Rain is more apt, though I was never able to get far in Risk of Rain myself.
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Apr 12, 2018 18:31
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MicRogue is pretty fun.
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Apr 12, 2018 22:01
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PMush Perfect posted:Yourself included? No, nor your party members. Everyone else though, yeah absolutely. Have fun wandering through a game world that's been reduced to a ghost town!
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Apr 24, 2018 18:25
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The biggest difference between Ziggurat and Immortal Redneck, for me, is that in Immortal Redneck I can point to what I did wrong, both in micro (should have zigged when I zagged) and macro (I should have kept my old gun), whereas Ziggurat I remember constantly thinking "well great, I'm dying because the game decided to throw Some Bullshit at me." It's entirely possible I was doing things wrong in Ziggurat too, but I couldn't tell, and that made the game feel arbitrary and unfair. Well, that and the suckiness of most of the guns. Immortal Redneck has vastly better gunfeel.
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Apr 24, 2018 21:30
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GrandpaPants posted:Does Immortal Redneck have enemies spawning in rooms behind you without much notification because that killed Ziggurat for me. The Dragon Age 2 school of encounter design loving blows. No, a room once cleared stays cleared (at least, in the part of the game I've played so far; I haven't beaten the first pyramid).
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Apr 25, 2018 15:34
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I played the hell out of it like a year ago, and managed to beat the available content maybe once in that time. Where "beat" means "beat a boss that's intentionally too difficult for where it is in the game, and then the game explicitly tells you "that was supposed to kill you, welp, have fun 'cause there's nothing new from here on"". From what I recall, there's lots of ways to make fatal accidents, and a lot of tools you can potentially make use of in terms of gear, spells, consumables, and miscellaneous dungeon traps and effects. You can throw potions at enemies to ID them, eat a bunch of green slimes to get super-bouncy powers, make popcorn (very useful for healing) by putting corn kernels near torches, get dismembered and bleed out, and a bunch of other stuff I've forgotten. There's a surprisingly large number of NetHack-style item interactions in the game, is basically what I'm getting at. But since it's an action game instead of a traditional top-down turn-based game, the interactions feel a lot more natural -- you don't need to remember the #dip command or whatever, you just drop your bottle into a pond and now you have a potion of water (not that I know of any use for them, but you can do it!).
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May 2, 2018 17:40
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OutOfPrint posted:I'd love to see a game really take it back to its rogue-like origins and have a D&D style, high fantasy tactical FPS rogue-lite. Wizard handles comms and explosives, fighter leads the charge, rogue picks locks and sneaks, cleric is a medic, maps and missions like "go into the Tower Zaxxor and neutralize the necromancer" replacing "go into the military base and neutralize the commander." Hell, that could be a pure strategy rogue-like. I swear I remember seeing someone working on a game that was tactical squad-based turn-based strategy where all the characters were wizards with tactical staffs, robes with built-in night-vision goggles, and so on. Basically slapping tacticool together with D&D.
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May 4, 2018 17:22
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Sproggiwood and MicRogue.
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May 8, 2018 17:25
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megane posted:"Combinatorial explosion" Yep. Let's say you have 6 traits that each have 10 variants and they're all independent (so, like, having a skinny neck doesn't preclude you from having a fat head). That'd mean you have 10^6 = 1 million possible variants out of 60 different bits of art. Are they meaningfully different? Probably not. If we're talking goblin faces, you have, like, hair color, eye color, skin color, left/right eye shape (independent for each eye 'cause gently caress it, why not?), nose shape, mouth shape, neck width, left/right ear shape...that's 10 different traits. You'd need on average 12 variations per trait to get to 4 trillion heads (log_10(4 trillion) ~= 12), requiring a total of 120 bits of art.
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May 14, 2018 21:29
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Kanos posted:Whoa, hold up, I was thinking of buying Immortal Redneck. There are just random pickups that you can't see what they do until you grab them that might just gently caress you over horribly? That would be a pretty huge deal breaker. If I'm going to gently caress myself over with a pickup in a roguelike I want the game to warn me that I'm about to do so, or at least provide a commensurate bonus to compensate me for potentially loving myself(cursed items in Wizard of Legend, for example). Just don't grab scrolls and you'll be immune to all bad scrolls. Most of 'em are good though. And the one that forces you to use only one weapon also turbocharges that weapon so it's not necessarily bad. It does mean that you don't get much variety for the rest of that run though.
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May 22, 2018 05:20
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I feel like I've made this point a half-dozen times in this thread, but since we're on this topic again, it's instructive to look at how Binding of Isaac handles rewarding perfect play. If you perfect a floor, you get a Satan room, where you're allowed to trade away your health for powerups. Consequently the players that suck will have higher max health and lower player power, which means they'll spend more time practicing against the enemies they're having trouble with and will probably die before making it to the post-Mom levels, where power is so much more important. But they may still well be strong enough to beat Mom and get some unlocks, so they won't feel like poo poo. Meanwhile, the skilled players will be able to get items that let them breeze through the early game, at the cost of having a lower margin of error. For an unskilled player, taking a Satan item (assuming they can reach Satan at all) can be a legitimately difficult choice, because they're still making a lot of unforced errors (walking into spikes, walking into enemies, failing to dodge predictable attacks, etc.). So they won't necessarily feel like they're missing out on something important when they fail to perfect a boss/floor. Really the big downside is that skilled players sometimes feel robbed when they don't get useful stuff from Satan. But they're skilled, and it takes like five minutes to replay the first few floors if you know what you're doing, so there's no big loss there.
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Jun 23, 2018 02:14
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If you're bad enough at the game to be taking damage regularly and actually making use of red hearts, then losing red hearts for soul/black hearts can be a bad trade. Maybe not with Abaddon because you get so dang many of them, but there's definitely a period in the first 5-10 hours of play where "armor" just isn't that useful because it's gone in a flash. We just all forget about those first few hours because they're eclipsed by the remaining 90+ hours of gameplay.
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Jun 23, 2018 03:19
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I am digging all the Samus avatars lately. Is there a particular reason for them beyond "the world needs more Metroid"?
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Jul 2, 2018 03:45
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EDIT: ^ Sil is cool but only an Angband variant by heritage; its gameplay is almost nothing like any other *band.Unimpressed posted:What's the best ways to get into angband? IE which variant and is there a good guide to get you started past the first couple of floors? Vanilla Angband is perfectly fine for getting started; I'd hazard a guess that it's the most approachable for a newbie. For getting started, roll a Half-Troll Warrior, max STR/DEX at chargen, grab a dagger, and faceroll through enemies. That should get you down to dungeon level 15 at least. Current Vanilla is very reliant on ID-by-use; the only identification options for consumables are to use them or sell them*. Most consumables are safe to use; there's a few gotchas but they're all early and pretty mild IIRC. Equipment can be identified by wielding it in a context where its abilities are relevant. Once you learn an equipment property, you learn its "rune" and can recognize it on all future items, so you only have to identify e.g. Resist Fire once, and eventually you should be able to recognize every item completely on first glance. There's also scrolls of Identify Rune. If you want more details, I did a screenshot LP of an older version of Vanilla (including starting with a Half-Troll Warrior), and there's a guy named fizzix that does video LPs. * Vanilla also has a "no-selling" option where selling items only identifies them and does not give you any money. In compensation, money drops in the dungeon are increased. This is the best goddamn idea ever and it retroactively makes me pissed off at every other game where you're expected to hoard a bunch of shiny magical useless crap and constantly optimize the value density of your backpack. In Vanilla you can forget about all that and just carry poo poo you'll actually use. I don't want to be a hoarder in videogames, why do so many of them reward that behavior?
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Jul 6, 2018 03:32
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Happylisk posted:Will dungeonmans ever get any more content or is development complete? madjack periodically makes updates, but it's a complete game really.
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Jul 6, 2018 16:11
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temple posted:general question: when you view spoilers for roguelikes? do you always play blind or have some trigger for reading up on the game? Most games I play, I'll take at least a few stabs at them without reading spoilers, but if I start struggling or especially if I get a victory (of any level of completeness that isn't "congrats you walked out of the dungeon without accomplishing your objective, good job"), then I'll start reading spoilers. Sometimes the game is pretty obviously about figuring out how the game works, so spoilers would be "cheating" in a sense. Nongunz is the most blatant modern example of that that I can think of. And sometimes the game has enough flair that I don't want to be spoiled on whatever Cool poo poo it's hiding; Nuclear Throne is an example of that, at least for me.
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Jul 7, 2018 07:01
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Yami Fenrir posted:I felt like the classes were way too small in scope - I didn't like too much how I pretty much always had to multiclass even with the base stat points. I pretty much took up necromancy in every single build I've made because the Hateglaciers or what their names were were ridiculously good and no matter the build you can use an extra target. The starting classes aren't so much classes as they are preallocated stat points. That's why one of them is just "here's the stat points we would've spent for you, remember to spend them before you go into a dungeon." You're expected to invest in whatever skills you want, and pretty much the only lock-in is which set of armor skills you go with since you can't mix-and-match those. In other words, you're supposed to assemble a horrific Frankenstein multiclassed twink. That's the Dungeonmans theme, to the extent that it has one.
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Jul 8, 2018 15:37
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Sacrificial Toast posted:Basically every time I die in Sythetik it's because I can't manage to clear a safe zone out of the spawn point in a level. Not having anywhere to retreat to when all the nearby enemies come running as soon as you fire a shot is really rough. This sounds like Teleglitch, where absolutely the most dangerous part of any level is the very beginning. I've arrived at a new level and pushed out all of two rooms before I'm being assaulted by multiple squids and welders with scientists backing them up. Considering that your usual best bet for ranged combat is to snipe enemies as they come around a corner, not being able to run can be a death sentence. (This also means that the beginning of the level is when you equip your high-capacity but ammo-spendy weapons like the drum machinegun and SMG, while for the rest of the level, where combat is less frenetic, you can use lower-spend weapons more)
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Jul 10, 2018 22:01
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resistentialism posted:Someone make a roguelike where you get combo points for not backtracking. You want Fidel: Dungeon Rescue, the game where you can't backtrack (or cross your trail).
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Jul 10, 2018 22:40
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John Lee posted:With the Eye of Horus prominently in the logo. With fabulous makeup of course.
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Jul 11, 2018 17:57
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There's no important unlocks, no. Beating levels with each class just gets you more money.
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Jul 12, 2018 22:04
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I've played games that were hard but fair, games that were hard and unfair and very open about it, and games that were "lol we don't know how to design so we'll just call it hard". It's unfortunately hard ( ) to tell the difference between the first and last category based just on trailers and feature lists.(You can generally recognize the second category because the trailer will include a death reel)
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Jul 13, 2018 20:19
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JawnV6 posted:FTL's difficulty options are surprisingly good. iirc, it's something simple like Normal being the baseline enemies and rewards, easy being rewards from the next sector and enemies from the previous, hard flips them. I spent a while on Easy before bumping up to Normal and still feeling comfortable, then I see streamers doing 50 no-pause Hard streaks. FTL's pretty good, yeah. But I do wish there was an intermediary between Easy and Normal which was, like, the Normal ships with the Easy rewards. Easy's now basically trivial for me, but Normal is still stressful enough that I don't generally enjoy it.
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Jul 14, 2018 00:50
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:I don't trust games that implement difficulty levels as a bunch of separate mutators. It's basically telling the player to play designer, and while that can work very well in a sandbox, it's at odds with the ethos of games you play to overcome a difficult and balanced challenge. That's why you have sanely-labeled presets. You can even hold off on unlocking the more detailed mutators until the player has played a few games, or pop up a dialog saying "hey, we give you access to these things because we know some players want them, but we designed the game to be most fun for most players when played with one of the presets." Celeste (not a roguelike, but surely one of the best-designed hard games) does the latter, more or less.
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Jul 15, 2018 02:58
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Klaus Kinski posted:Roguelite is pretty much just shorthand for some sort of persistent advancement system. That's honestly not the connotations I have with the term. I tend to associate it with games that aren't turn-based, for whatever reason. Not to argue about what a term means, especially when it basically explicitly says "I'm only taking some of the aspects from this other, also not-well-defined term". I just find the difference in interpretation interesting. Like, would you consider the daily seeded run of a roguelite game to still be roguelite? Those typically start you with everything unlocked and don't themselves count towards advancement in persistent unlocks.
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Jul 15, 2018 15:27
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dis astranagant posted:Dungeonmans kinda does that. The classes are just presets and there's one that gives you all the starting equipment + enough unallocated skill points to make your own class. Dungeonmans gives you access to the entire skill tree on every character; Dredmor has you pick a subset of the skill tree for each character. So there's a conscious decision at the start of each game of what you're going to be able to be good at and what you aren't; you can't fall into going e.g. Light "Armor" every game because it's what's you're comfortable with, which is absolutely a thing that happens to me in Dungeonmans.
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Jul 16, 2018 15:29
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The metaprogression turns off a lot of purists, who feel that the game should be designed so that you always enter as a level-1 nothing and gain the power you need to succeed during the run, instead of between runs. If you try to do a "no-deaths clear" of Rogue Legacy, you're going to be spending like 15 horrible minutes chipping away at the slime boss while one highly-random action by the boss can one-shot you. The game really intends for you to die many times and gradually build up more power. The level generation is also not great; they just paste together a bunch of prefabricated rooms and scatter enemies about without a whole lot of thought, and you start seeing repeats pretty quickly. I don't remember seeing complaints about the controls before, though. I never really had any issue with them. EDIT: ^^^ the best roguelite platformer would be Spelunky, no question.
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Jul 16, 2018 22:49
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Lutha Mahtin posted:Doesn't the "castle" upgrade tree in Rogue Legacy increase the difficulty of the game for each point you put in it, to balance out you getting stronger? I swear that this was how it worked way back when, but I'm searching the Web with every combination of words I can think of and I can't turn anything up about this. Was it patched out? I think you're thinking of New Game+, which you can iterate as many times as you like until the only viable playstyle is to abuse invulnerability abilities to stealth to the bosses and then shank them because they scale less aggressively than the lesser enemies.
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Jul 17, 2018 04:09
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The irritating thing about Dredmor is that the boss used to be a relative pushover. A crossbow and a few Eldritch Bolts, or mass-stacking other sources of damage-over-time, was pretty much all you needed. Then they decided to amp his resistances out the wazoo so now you need large amounts of extremely focused (single-shot) damage if you want any of it to get through his resists. Even back in the day though, there was always the possibility if you tried to melee him that he'd dodge your attack, counterattack you, get a critical hit on the counterattack, then on his turn attack you and get another critical hit. Very few characters could survive that, so meleeing him has always been at least somewhat suicidal.
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Jul 18, 2018 23:09
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