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[Kyzrati]

2018 7DRL Postmortem, Part 3: Spending Too Long on Map Generation and Content
[Cross-posted from the devblog here--follow link for better formatting and light-on-dark style.]

Picking up where we left off at the end of Part 2, about the early days working on the core interface and mechanics...


Map Generation
I spent an entire day just working on map generation. At the end of that day my desk looked like this:

My desk after reasoning through various POLYBOT-7 map layout needs.

All the maps use my tunneling algorithm from Cogmind, albeit with different parameters. Slot Modules (the way to get new parts slots) are actually among those parameters, existing as prefabs that are deliberately placed in certain locations relative to map entrances/exits.

Sample 100x100 map layout, annotated. The player enters from one of the red dots and has to exit from another. This particular layout has four distributed slot module rooms rather than the usual three, and POLYBOT-7 has a lot more hidden doors and corridors than Cogmind. There are also very few large rooms.

I was particularly worried about screwing this phase up because a good set of maps takes a long time to create and there'd be no time to redo this later. While designing the layouts I based a lot of my assumptions on what I knew from exploring Cogmind maps, combined with plans for how POLYBOT-7's content was going to change everything (the next step in the process, which I'll cover later). Honestly I didn't have to spend so much time on map generation and everything would've been fine, but I wanted more variety to maximize replayability while also keeping it challenging. Map size and layout are understandably crucial to balance, and I'd decided it would be appropriate to increase map size at each depth, meaning multiple different layouts were needed for every floor. So this took a while.

Testing layout generation for the 80x80 map (second floor).

Testing layout generation for the 100x100 map (third floor).

Testing generation for one layout style (each floor has multiple styles) of the 125x125 map (fourth floor).

It was during mapgen work that I made a huge change to the game's direction: permanent upgrades. Rather than Cogmind's evolution-based system where you simply have to reach an exit to regain core integrity and get stat boosts, the player collects random upgrade modules that provide permanent benefits like damage resistance, extra energy/matter capacity, greater accuracy or sight range, etc. This is a mechanic I really wanted to explore in P7, but it had originally been relegated to the "probably no time for that" list in the design doc. Little did I know, come the middle of the week I'd be forced to draw on this idea to balance the design.

When it came down to it, under the new mechanics map entrances and exits were very difficult to place in the same way I did for Cogmind, since P7 maps needed to be smaller, but all stat upgrades being local to a floor would mean that I no longer have to spread out the exits! Players can locate exits quickly and that's fine, because they'll still want to explore for more upgrades as long as they reasonably can without losing too much in the process, which is where the real challenge lies.

What's more, obtaining these upgrades would require attacking Dispatchers (the primary source of enemies scattered across the floor), helping focus on the combat-oriented nature of the game--risk fighting for upgrades, or leave early. Collecting permanent upgrades is also simply a fun thing to do in games, despite being almost totally absent from Cogmind, so it'd be nice to experiment with that in a Cogmind-like setting.

In Cogmind, stealth/speed-based strategies emerge naturally from the mechanics because you can simply attempt to avoid (or outrun) enemies while locating exits, but that's not possible here and now the POLYBOT-7 mechanics do so much more to reinforce combat as the main approach. Focus! Unfortunately it also meant that there would now be even more work to do when it came to content: making all the upgrades :P


Content
While I had a pretty good schedule worked out for 7DRL, fortunately that schedule also had a couple extra days built in for "balance and fun stuff," because as it turned out I needed to reallocate all that to more pressing matters with regard to content in the middle of the week xD. My original plan was to focus mostly on giving POLYBOT-7 lots of unique mechanics while retaining many of the same items as Cogmind. But for a number of reasons that felt inappropriate, both thematically and mechanically. A better approach would be to add a whole bunch of new content as well... so I ended up crazily working through that unplanned bit mid-week. Towards the last couple days it was looking bleak and I thought I might not even finish! Apparently I ended up finding enough shortcuts to take, while just working really really fast :P

New content or not, everything had to be reworked for the new map view size. Cogmind shows up to a 50x50 area of the current map at once, and all its mechanics and content are designed assuming those dimensions. Frequently spotting, or being able to shoot (or be shot by), enemies who are off the edge of the map view and require scrolling in order to see/shoot is poor design, so it should be avoided at all costs. At the same time, having items and systems that can take maximum advantage of the available viewing area is also desirable, so you can see how central that view area is to a design.

To try to retain as much balance as possible without excessive work and testing, the simplest way to approach existing data is to take any range-related numbers and drop them by 40%, to mirror the 50-to-30 change. This was the first adjustment, to literally copy weapon range data into a spreadsheet, multiply it all by 0.6, then copy the results back :P

But the 40% reduction would also have a significant indirect effect on firing time. Earlier for the propulsion system rewrite I set the desired base movement speed to be slightly faster than once per turn, and calculated that in practice (based on total loadout mass) players would generally require anywhere from 0.75 to 2.5 turns to move one space--this was intended to keep players from moving too fast relative to the smaller map sizes. And in relation to that, again to retain a familiar balance based on experience with Cogmind, the next goal here would be to choose a firing time cost that gave enemies approximately the same number of opportunities to shoot at a fast or slow moving player as seen in Cogmind. The numbers came out as 3 turns to fire one weapon, 4.5 turns to fire a volley of two. Later testing showed that these seemed to work fine, so they weren't tweaked at all.

The few notes used to calculate movement speeds and relative volley times, sketched out during the mapgen process to ensure the map sizes would be reasonable for the target movement rates.

The item work of course involved a lot more than just ranges:

• All (110) Cogmind propulsion items were removed and replaced with 46 new ones (although some of the names were reused, all the stats were reworked).
• The range of power sources was simplified, removing 23 of them as well as adding a new set of 9 which most of the enemies use (instead of the regular power sources).
• 14 upgrade modules were created (at least the behavior code for half of these was available from Cogmind, and the other half was pretty quick to add using a similar model).
• Utilities were reworked to remove most of those with purely non-combat effects, and simplify the remaining ones to use a more basic naming scheme. In all, P7 has 182 fewer utilities than Cogmind.
• Weapon names and progression were similarly simplified, in addition to adding 21 new weapons, most intended for use by enemies. Lots of Cogmind weapons (nearly 200) were removed, and as mentioned before, this process avoided keeping most weapons that used slower animations. One exception was the micro-nuke, the awesomeness of which many think is underemphasized in Cogmind, so I used POLYBOT-7 as a chance to give it the spotlight and make it the best launcher :D. A number of Cogmind weapons were also significantly altered to convert them into better versions of earlier weapons, and had their animations changed to match their new group, albeit recolored.
• Overall, POLYBOT-7 has only 412 items compared to Cogmind's 900.

Once items were done it was then time to put together robots, which are mostly defined by their items. All robots were built from scratch, but in most cases used Cogmind robots as reference templates to guide their design. The general idea is that enemy robots use inferior parts, so while the player can attach and use anything, it's often best to avoid salvaged parts when possible (but the challenge comes when there's a lot of salvage lying around and it fills any empty slots for you automatically! This somewhat discourages the "safe" tactic of fighting in doorways). Their power sources also come with no energy storage capacity, so the idea here is that if you rely solely on other bots for power you'll have less reserves for supporting flexible builds.

I also gave some robots items they don't really take advantage of but that the player might want, as a reliable way to acquire them. This is a design strategy used a lot more often in Cogmind than with P7, but there were a few cases it's helpful. For example Aimbots carry Structural Scanners so that players have frequent access to a way to detect hidden doors--remember there are a lot more of these in POLYBOT-7! (Also thematically it does kinda make sense that Aimbots, which can attack targets through walls, might have these :P).

Complete robot data!

Once robots were completed (see how all this progresses in a nicely orderly fashion? :D), it was finally time for Dispatchers, the focal point of much of the combat and therefore gameplay experience, including the difficulty! Dispatchers are basically Cogmind Garrisons but with different behavior (activating based on player proximity, timed dispatch of squads until destruction, and dropping modules once disabled), but being a focus of the challenge they ended up requiring a lot of balance work, especially in terms of how far away they might trigger, and how many bots they release. This is something I revisited a few times over the final couple days. Their bots do not, however always directly attack the player! That would be pretty boring, so some of them may stay to defend the Dispatcher, and others will head to the area where the Dispatcher was triggered from, but technically never seek out the player directly like some squads in Cogmind might.

With content more or less finished, I moved on to overall map balance. This is where I'd spend time repeatedly loading random maps and looking at them in a zoomed out view to examine distribution of items, patrols, sentries, Dispatchers, etc. and tweak a lot of spawning numbers/ratios as necessary to create something close to what looked like a balanced experience.

Examining content across a section of map, including patrol paths (the colored lines).

POLYBOT-7 was meant to be a pretty short experience, only five floors, but aside from unique map layouts I figured another relatively inexpensive way to increase replayability for those who are really into it (and play well) would be to offer a "New Game+" after winning. A number of difficulty-related variables could simply be tweaked by the number of times the player had won, and why stop at a single NG+? I decided to add up to five consecutive New Game modes, each harder than the last. Tweakable factors:

• Number of patrols initially on a map
• Patrol size
• Range at which Dispatchers are triggered
• Number of robots dispatched per group
• Weighting for types of robots dispatched
• Chance that a dispatch will be accompanied by a supporting Blastbot (uses missiles) or Forcebot (protects allies with force field)
• Interval between dispatches (this was implemented but I didn't see a need to tweak it so it remains static: 100 turns)
• Salvage rate from destroyed robots

Other non-gameplay-related changes for NG+ runs:

• Each has a unique name: "Alpha," "Beta," and so on
• Each have their own wall color
• The score multiplier increases with each mode, giving massive bonus points for all actions that earn points to begin with, even if a win isn't achieved

To simplify the overall execution, I made it so that losing any NG+ run causes the player to perma-lose the streak and have to start over from the beginning with a "regular run." Basically roguelike permadeath but for New Game win streaks. This isn't the best design, but I was in a hurry! In hindsight it would be better to have a loss push the player back to the previous NG+ mode (assuming they've won more than one consecutive run already) so that not quite so much progress is lost.

Note: Sure enough one of Cogmind's top players has already won P7's final final final NG+++++ mode to achieve ultimate victory :D

Coming next is Part 4: Finishing Touches!

[sambojin]

Hehe, thanks for showing up sambojin

I WON, believe it or not . My first serious POLYBOT-7 run and took it to a win... Maybe next time I'll stream it we can check out New Game+ mode

Edit: Uploaded the stream to YouTube here.

A tale for the ages. Rougelike developer beats his own game! A "totally" balanced one, with heaps of iterations to make it so.

But free! Kinda like Cogmind, but free!

Everyone should grab a copy of this. It's awesome.
(oh, and Cogmind is like this but better! So grab a copy of that too )

[Robsoie]

Looks like floor 3 is still my complete nemesis, as it's always on that same floor that the numerous enemy bots are managing to destroy my best parts, so when i'm running into more bots, my poor robot only have super weak pea shooters left

So far my best attempt

Code: [Select]



                                           Mod-                Dispa-  Easy
Version   Date    Score   Location  Slots  ules  Parts  Kills  tchers  Mode  Seed
7DRL v1   180327  5960    Alpha D   11     13    76     50     6       -     ActuatorDefenseExoskeleton
In my attempts to get back to parts left behind (or trying to refill matter from now degraded parts), i often run into bots despite those zones were previously cleared. Are bots spawning in already explored areas / faraway dispatcher can teleport them in such zone ?

[Kyzrati]

The difficulty does ramp up fast

Are bots spawning in already explored areas / faraway dispatcher can teleport them in such zone ?

There are just patrols wandering around, and more enter the map occasionally (though later leave again, too), so you're just running into those. Be sure to take out any Dispatchers that become activated though, otherwise they can start filling the local area with bots. (But their bots won't wander the map like patrols--they just hang around the Dispatcher and the location it was triggered from.)

[Robsoie]

I was thinking about the possibility of hidden doors i may have not noticed , are bots patrolling able to use them ?

and more enter the map occasionally (though later leave again, too)

How do more bots enter the map ? are they just spawning on a random location or are they coming from a specific type of corridor/room ?

[Kyzrati]

They spawn in at (and leave from) exits, nothing hidden about it you can see them do this (without being noticed) if you have better vision than they do.

Patrols and all enemies use hidden doors, though, yeah. This is the same behavior as in Cogmind--they're basically ways for the enemy to ambush you, although they can be quite beneficial if you find them as well (usually via Structural Scanner).

[Robsoie]

Ah interesting, finding bots in previously cleared area could function as some hidden door detector for the player then.
Anyways the game is very fun, i just hope i'll finally get to floor 4 one day

[Kyzrati]

Not just that, you can hear the hidden doors opening and closing (they sound different from regular doors), and you can also *see* them being opened/closed outside your FOV via the blue sound effect visualization . Lots of little potential tactics you can improve on, so I'm sure you'll make it eventually!

[Kyzrati]

2018 7DRL Postmortem, Part 4: Finishing Touches
[Cross-posted from the devblog here--follow link for better formatting and light-on-dark style.]

Picking up where we left off at the end of Part 3, an in-depth look at the map generation and content work...


The Last Minute
With all my planned balance time eaten up by adding content, there wasn't much left for... "proper" balance. There was nowhere near enough time to do all the math required, and while I would have loved to write all-new content from scratch and use formulas to balance it well for the new format, this is a 7DRL--plans need to be semi-realistic :P

That said, I'm kinda impressed/relieved with how well it turned out because there was only just enough time for some emergency band-aids, and into the final hours I was still making pretty huge improvements. It's not nearly Cogmind level of balance, but from a couple quick playthroughs I did identify the biggest issues and what was needed to quickly resolve them.

Aside from repeatedly dropping the number of robots (early counts were way too high!), I added lots of weapons across the board, basically hacking them into the normal item distribution system by forcing a minimum 15% of all individual items to spawn as weapons. This is not normally how item distribution works, but after repeatedly running out of weapons during my test runs I used Cogmind's item distribution debug output system to examine the normal likelihood of having weapons spawn and noticed that the numbers were surprisingly low on most floors.

Final (post-balance) distribution of items, both common and prototypes, by slot/type on each floor.

In the same way I enforced a minimum weapon count, every floor is also guaranteed to contain launchers (more on larger floors), because launchers are FUN and I wanted the 7DRL to be FUN :D. Besides, in POLYBOT-7 players may not always have free slots to pick up the items they find/want (and remember there's no inventory space whatsoever!), so even with a lot of fun stuff lying around, not all of it will actually be used, meaning there's more leeway to add plenty of it without making the game too easy.

More weapons and other good items were also added in the form of guaranteed prefabs, specifically "weapon rooms" and so-called "build rooms." These are rooms that contain caches of out-of-depth parts, the former purely weapons (again to make sure there were enough to play with) and the latter having a balanced variety of items across the slot spectrum such that players who find these rooms could essentially purge right there to get a decent fresh build. "Build rooms" are guaranteed to have a power source along with some propulsion, utilities, and weapons.

Special prefab rooms, labeled. Also notice how these rooms often have double doors so they're easily recognizable from the outside.

In hindsight I overdid the weapons (they're now all over the place :P), but more choices always has its advantages so may as well overdo it rather than risk underdoing it! Reaching the perfect balance there would've taken much longer than the time available. I was doing all this in the final hours, after all xD

One of the core mechanics was also changed at the last minute: the purge timer. At first it seemed like siphoning off a portion of the player's energy each turn to charge it would be strategically more interesting. This behavior would add another important consideration to any decision to purge, since the action would be followed by reduced energy production until fully charged again. But I realized this wasn't very desirable in the bigger picture, since purging already destroys random parts and can lead players into an uncertain situation, so there's no reason to kick them while they're potentially down! Instead I changed it to a simple 100-turn timer--more predictable, and also more fun.

Purge timer in action. Counting down and repeatedly attaching remaining nearby items only to purge again.

At the very very last minute I was testing the game out real quick and spotted some important QoL that was missing from the UI: the number of newly collected slots from the current floor (since there is a guaranteed number and these are a vital improvement to seek out), and even the actual letter of the current floor! Both of these are useful for assessing progress, and there was almost not quite enough room but I squeezed them in next to the turn counter.

Last-minute HUD additions: slots collected and floor ID! (Instead of numbers floors have corresponding letters: A/B/C/D/S)

Aside from their usefulness to the player, HUD indicators like this also make screenshots a lot more informative when players are sharing them, avoiding too many basic questions and giving discussions more context to work with. This is one of many advantages to Cogmind's "pretty much everything you need to know is visible on one screen" UI style, in addition to making it easier to get up to speed when continuing an unfinished run from a previous session.


The End
Although I'd finished on time in my time zone, I was working with Kacper and he needed the rest of his Sunday to finish the tileset, so I didn't submit until the next morning after I had a chance to wake up and package his tiles with the game.

It was finally finished!

Even though I was working on this project pretty much non-stop all week, it was a surprisingly refreshing week during which I didn't feel like I was on the clock for once. It's been such a long time since I did any development aside from my full-time work on Cogmind that I'd forgotten the excitement of pure development from my hobbyist days. With a commercial project everything has to be documented, polished, and hopefully built to careful futureproof specifications, whereas with POLYBOT-7 I could just let the work flow. Such a free-form "full speed ahead" approach was hard to get used to at first, but it sure felt way more productive :D

Shortly after release it was reported that you could still access the Garrison hacking interface by clicking on a Dispatcher xD. I'd removed the bump-to-hack interaction, but forgot that clicking on them is handled in a separate part of the code! Amusingly this meant players could hack open a Dispatcher, which created stairs to an oddly named floor, "G" (taking the first letter of "Garrison"), and it was technically a legitimate link to a garrison map but I had removed all the garrison data so attempting to enter would simply crash the game. I put out a fixed version real quick to avoid people walking into a black hole (not to mention the hacking interface wasn't redesigned for POLYBOT-7 anyway).

Bug-enabled hacking interface opening a theoretical exit into a Dispatcher.

Speaking of bugs, throughout development I discovered a number of them in Cogmind, and even the engine itself. Nothing major, but it's nice to have been able to clean those out, too.

I find the POLYBOT-7 concept super interesting overall, but the 7DRL only really takes a quick peek at its potential. One of the ideas that could greatly improve the fun factor, given more work, is "kit rooms." These would basically be rooms containing all the parts needed for an excellent build balanced around a particular style or weapon(s), making it likely players will want to purge on finding them to instantly turn into a killing machine. Actually the "build rooms" added at the last minute were a simple implementation of the kit room concept, but with completely randomized parts so not necessarily all that balanced. Unlike build rooms, however, kit rooms would be hidden behind secret doors, requiring scanners or lucky collateral damage to uncover. There is technically one kit room in the game, which I quickly threw together for the last floor. It's pretty cool if you can find it ;)


Reception
A good number of Cogmind players have picked up the game and are enjoying it. I heard from one even mentioning that it helped them understand Cogmind better! And it seems even non-Cogmind players have been finding it fun.

In the first 8 days so far since release there have been 437 runs (not individual players, which is somewhat less than this) and... 882 downloads. Apparently a lot of people download to consider playing later when they have a chance. (I know there were some people who downloaded multiple times because I updated, but not quite 2~3 times per person :P) It would be fun to compile the stats and leaderboards like I do for Cogmind, but I've really got to focus on the latter for now!

Although not a demo, the similarities are enough that it can serve as a sort of advertisement for Cogmind, especially as a way to get my name on itch.io, a platform I hadn't used before. (At the same time POYLBOT-7's connection with Cogmind is an indirect way to get the latter on itch.io.) It topped the Strategy category by popularity, also reaching #1 in most of the tags I set, e.g. "pixel art," "turn-based," and... "roguelike" :). It was popular enough to rank in the top 20 games on itch.io (which had just passed the 100,000-game mark at this point), and starting a day later they even featured it on their front page :)

POLYBOT-7 featured on itch.io front page.

Popularity is basically just page hits, of course, so it helped that I posted announcements on a number of sites, plus Nookrium, a decent-sized Let's Player who has tried out my other games, gave P7 a shot as well on day 1.

I've kept an eye on Cogmind sales and there's been no significant impact there, but wishlisting on Steam is up 29.4% comparing the week before and after the 7DRL release ($20 is a bit more expensive than free, plus it's "Early Access" :P).

Anyway, I'll probably just do one more release that fixes a couple tiny issues, then shelve it until another time when maybe I can revisit it for some extra polish. I'm thinking I should take on a smaller project after Cogmind, and POLYBOT-7 already seems like a fun possibility to develop in a serious capacity for 6 months...

[Kyzrati]

I put out that "final" update and wrote a bit about it on itch.io.

Spoiler: Just fooling around blowing things up :D (click to show/hide)

I'll also probably stream more of this on my Twitch channel at some point, especially after having won the base mode twice now so I'll go for NG+

[Kyzrati]

Been a while since I played--going to continue on the back of that last win and stream some POLYBOT-7 NG+ mode in about 20 minutes

Edit: Muwhaha, a win! Will probably stream the NG++ at some point and see how well that goes

[Kyzrati]

Awesome, today POYLBOT-7 apparently made a Best Free Games of 2018 list on PC Gamer

Still planning on a NG++ stream, though lately been a bit busy with Cogmind development and streaming runs of that.