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Author Topic: Little Shepherd - crafting dung.crawl/roguelike (now with a word about design)  (Read 12998 times)

BlindKitty

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Re: Shepherd The Game - crafting dungeon crawl/roguelike
« Reply #30 on: November 19, 2013, 03:21:26 pm »

Just a little update - data editor (well, creator, for now; XML file handling is a task for next time) is up with a few features. I can now make materials and monsters with much higher efficiency. What is more, I've rebuild the item recipes, and now I'm implementing the changes. The items should make more sense now (as soon as the materials are brought up to date, at least), the speed of opponents will play a much bigger role, and with a few more things implemented, it should be enough for the time being as far as changes go. Which means that I will be able to add more weapons, shields and armours, as well as more materials, creating more diverse feeling - and move to next major version, which is 0.6, rather soon. :)
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n9103

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Re: Shepherd The Game - crafting dungeon crawl/roguelike
« Reply #31 on: November 19, 2013, 03:52:10 pm »

Looking forward to next release.
Was curious about the speed issue though. There's no clear indicator what stat(s) affect speed. One would assume Agility and Dex, with Agility probably being more influential.
However, I didn't seem to notice a speed difference If I focused more on Strength or Dex/Agil, and that strong attacks usually provoked a 2nd attack either way, and quick attacks never gave a 2nd attack, with a provoked 2nd attack being less common, but still occurring.
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BlindKitty

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Re: Shepherd The Game - crafting dungeon crawl/roguelike
« Reply #32 on: November 20, 2013, 02:11:14 am »

Well, the speed so far has been extremely limited - only thing that affected it were the attack chosen (with quick attack taking 900 milliseconds and strong attack taking a 1000; keep in mind that monster right now choose their attacks completely randomly). I've mostly put it in to test the battle-clock, which keeps track on who should get the bonus turn. It was worth it, as I spotted one very, very serious bug soon after implementation - the bonus turn changed the state of the PlayerTurn variable (which basically means that it wasn't bonus at all, it just was another turn; I'm not sure now if it's been debugged before putting current version up... Damn, I really hope that it was. :P). The system in new release will be much more complex, but Dex/Agi still won't have a part in it (this may or may not change soon) - player will have a base speed of 1000, possibly reduced by armour, and the weapon will have attack time (depending on its weight, with additional penalties from shield's weight); the attack will have a coefficient of speed, reducing or increasing the attack time of a weapon (so quick attack will take only 90% of the time of the normal attack). In the future, there will be Talents that increase player's speed (there is an idea of a skill doing the same lurking in the background), and accessibility of those will depend on Agility and Dexterity of a player. But right now Agi and Dex have a big part in skill values, and I don't really want to put even more weight on them.

In the next week, I will put up a few design doc snippets here, but right now I have too much on my head in work - I'm working on the game slowly, and I don't really want to take even more time off of that to rewriting my design docs to be something human-readable. ^^"
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BlindKitty

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Re: Shepherd The Game - crafting dungeon crawl/roguelike
« Reply #33 on: November 20, 2013, 03:16:58 pm »

And the version 0.5.7.2 is up and running on my SkyDrive (with still the same link). The old, pretty stable version is lurking in the folder, too, but that's mostly considered legacy version. A couple of new things in this version:

1. Speed is properly implemented now. You have your own speed, and weapons have the attack time; it can't be viewed right now, but it is mostly intuitive, as in heavier weapons take longer to swing them around. Also, heavier armour makes you slower. I'm not sure if it will be noticeable, and I will implement the changes in the character sheet/item view soon enough, but it's here and it's working.
2. Recipes and materials has been reworked and should offer much more diverse and interesting experience now. Weapons differ in speed, shields in defence bonuses and weight (heavier shields make weapon attacks somewhat slower, keep that in mind) and armour beside giving you protection, as always, is also hampering your speed and attack and defence stats (as shown in brackets after armour value).
3. Data maker is in motion, too.

This version require some cosmetic touches still, especially item viewer and improved character sheet; those will be implemented pretty soon. I will also try to squash any bugs noticed and take care of other minor issues soon, to move on for next version - 0.6 - with actual exploration of underground mazes.
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Mephansteras

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Re: Shepherd The Game - crafting dungeon crawl/roguelike
« Reply #34 on: November 20, 2013, 04:21:18 pm »

Which skills actually have a use at this point?

Two weapon fighting, for instance, isn't useful if you can't wield more than one weapon at a time.
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n9103

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Re: Shepherd The Game - crafting dungeon crawl/roguelike
« Reply #35 on: November 21, 2013, 12:07:06 am »

Sounds like you wanted only one party or the other to have a bonus attack?
I can confirm that that's not the current case, as using the crazy attack results in both sides getting extra attacks most of the time.

Is Crazy faster than Quick, but less accurate? Is there a damage modifier?
Doesn't seem like the accuracy penalty is high enough, as my 25/15/5/5/5/15/5/5 brawler did fine spamming crazy attacks, with far less misses than hits.  (I almost always put most of the initial points into Str at this point, with most the rest into Con and one other testing skill.)
If you'd prefer there weren't such min/maxxed builds, then you should either put caps on maximum initial levels, or give the player higher starting levels, but less discretionary points. (If it doesn't bother you, then feel free to leave as is. My Idiotic Fighters will thank you :)))

I think Str increases damage as well, but I'm not certain. I know Con increases HP.
Beyond those two points, I'm almost certain that all Attribs are skill-boosting only so far. (if that.)
Can confirm that I hit comparably often with both 5 Dex and 20 Dex.

Other Bugs:
Victory text prints over lines already printed, resulting in difficult to decipher text at times.

Approaching Wall of Text status, so calling it a night here.
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BlindKitty

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Re: Shepherd The Game - crafting dungeon crawl/roguelike
« Reply #36 on: November 21, 2013, 01:34:11 am »

Still not much free time for me, so a rightful design doc is still out there, but I will try to say a few words to help avoid testing useless builds right now. :)

As far as the attributes go, only first four are really useful right now; that's because other four are planned mostly for the time when magic system will be in place. They have some use in skill raising, but not much, really; also, most of them will have other, specific uses (there will be gold to farm, talent trees to unlock, magic crystals used for enchanting items and so on - and all that will be depended on one attribute or another). Right now only attributes with actual non-skill-raising uses are Strength (it adds damage bonus, from 0 to it's value; so if you have 25 points of Str, you are going to deal between 0 and 25 additional points of damage with each hit) and Constitution (Hit Points are calculated using Constitution * 5 + Vitality; note that Vitality uses Constitution as one of defining Attributes, along with Willpower and Strength - a little more about skills further down the post). Agility and Dexterity don't give any direct bonuses - but they have a large part in defining skills. That downplays those stats a little now, as they have a large part in not - yet used skills, unfortunately. The problem is, there will be four categories of skills in all (55 of them total), and all comparatively useful; all the balancing calculations are done with that in mind, as I have the full layout already, and implementation only gives you one category of 20 skills, of which about half isn't even used now. This makes some min/maxed builds valid now, but it will make them much, much worse further down the road. Also, enemies on first five level (up the standard goblin) are deliberately under-par, to decrease the lethality for potential new players a bit.

As for the skills; each skill level is calculated from three attributes (some of those may be the same attribute; that is, the piercing weapons value is Dex + Dex + Agi), and it may be further increased by free points on each level. Most importantly, every time you increase the attribute all the skills associated with it increase, too, to reflect the new value of the attribute. With many skills associated with each attribute, attribute levelling is more widespread, while skill levelling is more specialised.
Weapon skills (first ten) make it easier to hit an enemy. Seven of those are in use - archery, crossbowmanship and throwing are not, as corresponding weapons haven't been implemented yet (it will take a while, probably). Right now, you have 50% chance of hitting the enemy that has the same skill value as you; every point higher gives you another 1%. This behaviour was super-easy to implement, as it only requires adding and comparing values, but it is going to change soon. I have a function in mind to place there, but I need to find analytical representation to put in into code. Planned behaviour is: 0 difference - 50% chance; 30 points difference - 75% chance; 100 points difference - 95% chance; and more difference will slowly increase that chance so it never actually hits 100%, this value being the asymptote of the function in question.
Armour skills are not in use now. Those will be mostly required to wear more advanced forms of armour and possibly reduce some penalties; there will be also talent trees with requirements in those (leading to better utilizing armour). I'm not yet sure how to go about requirements, so it also might be a while before those come in use.
Parrying, Blocking and Dodge are defence skills, helping to avoid being hit. They don't differ, as of now, but they will. Most importantly, not every skill can be used against any attack (you cannot parry an arrow, and you cannot dodge an area attack, generally speaking); parrying can also damage your weapon, blocking on the other hand will damage your shield; also, powerful enough attacks may pass through shield (which is why shields have armour scores). Those are all in use now.
Ambidexterity is not in use now, but I'm planning to implement it very soon, as it's intended behaviour is limiting penalties for fighting with items equipped - it will reduce penalties for shield bearing for now, and in future it will reduce penalties for another weapon or accessory in left hand. You can reduce the need for it by using one-handed weapon with other hand free, or by using two-handed weaponry. As soon as it shows up, of course.
Two-weapon fighting will reduce penalties for using two weapons at once. It will be a while before this is implemented - a lot of other things wait for their turn, and this is not a priority.
Vitality finally increases hit point. It's purely passive, it is not tested right now; in the future, it might play a part in thing like poison and disease, but it has not been decided yet. But the hit points part is working right now; you might keep that in mind for the meat-shieldy types.

Quote
Is Crazy faster than Quick, but less accurate? Is there a damage modifier?

Well, normal attack bears no bonus; quick is faster, gives you a small penalty to damage and defence, and no penalty or bonus to hit. Crazy attack is actually less accurate, leaves you at a huge disadvantage in defence (wait till the 9-level goblin brute to see the real difference ;) ), is a tiny little bit faster than normal and offers a large bonus to damage. Cautious is slower, less damaging and less accurate, but gives you _bonus_ to defence. Strong is... Well, stronger, but gives minor penalties to attack and defence. It's also slower. If you are interested in exact values, data.xml offers them (tags should be clear enough). Keep in mind that enemy also randomizes his attacks, and it is not rare to see a rat attack you with crazy attack, getting his hit chance below zero (it will get better once I get to some rudimentary AI, but it is also some time ahead; changing the to-hit function should help a little with this, too).

Quote
Sounds like you wanted only one party or the other to have a bonus attack? I can confirm that that's not the current case, as using the crazy attack results in both sides getting extra attacks most of the time.

Before, you had to have at least a 1000 milliseconds of advantage to get a bonus attack; right now the game randomizes the number between 0 and 1000 and test if it is smaller than time advantage to see if someone gets the bonus turn. It's not working as well as I would like it to, so the next version will randomize a number between 0 and 1,000,000 and use a square root of this as the dice roll. It will lead to bonus turns being much more rare.

Quote
Victory text prints over lines already printed, resulting in difficult to decipher text at times.

I'll add it to the to-do list as take look at this soon. Thanks for the remainder - I've noticed it myself, but like many eye-candy features, I tend to forget this when I start actually tinkering with code. ^^"
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BlindKitty

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Just to mention that I have not vanished from the face of the Earth. ;) I'm working on polishing the 0.5 version before putting it online, and I have bumped a few times along the way, both because of the spaghetti logic I've set as a trap to my future self, and because of this pesky real life that keeps coming in my way. But most of what you mentioned as problematic is already repaired, I've finally figured out how to print most of the important information about items where it can be easily accessed (it was a little problematic, because attack time of a weapon has a constant part and variable part; variable part is dependent on player's strength and weight of the item - and I didn't want to make players calculate the values for each item themselves, so I needed to move some of the logic around...) and I'm actually getting ready to put this up; I actually think it works much better now. :)
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BlindKitty

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Sorry for multi-posting, but it's good cause - I've finally nailed the bug that made bonus-turn-chains appear out of the blue, or worse, after someone died. It was stupidly obvious (of course) - I've forgot to add 'return' keyword and the checkForBonusTurn method went on after player's bonus turn to... monster's bonus turn. It was not pretty. But now it should work as intended, as in: only one bonus turn per normal turn. If you notice more of them happening, give me a heads-up. There is theoretically a chance to increase your speed so much that you will be getting a bonus turn every turn, but it is almost impossible, so I will return to address this later. :)
More expanded list of changes:
 - prices has been adjusted (mostly by increasing the pricing of weapons and shields, so armour doesn't seem quite so ridiculously overpriced now)
 - looting now should occur before levelling; this gives you the possibility to take new items into account when levelling
 - victory text should be now much clearer; amount of printing things over other things should be reduced ;)
 - items should be much better described in their names, making them easier to compare when equipping (but not when buying - the buy screen is going to get dropped very soon, so I left it alone)
    -> Weapon is now described by (Damage) [AttackBonus] AT:Attack time {please note: it is in 'milliactions' and it depends on weapon characteristics, weight and user's strength; character speed has a unit of milliaction per second}
    -> Shields are now described by (Armour) [DefenceBonus] ATP: Attack time penalty {Attack Time Penalty is increase in attack time of a wielded weapon, and depends on shield's weight and user's strength}
    -> Armour is now described by (HardArmour/SoftArmour) [AttackPenalty, DefencePenalty] SP:Speed penalty {Hard armour is the armour of the metal parts, and soft armour is the armour of leather parts - heavier armours has generally higher chance of getting hit in hard armour; also keep in mind that every armour has a bigger or smaller percentage of no armour, representing eyes, joints and similar places where you are not protected - all the penalties are deducted from corresponding characteristics: in particular, Speed Penalty is deducted from characters' Speed and is currently only way of changing it}

There is also one additional item set (Spearman - not too creative, I know), and I'm planning on adding couple more with version 0.6.
Some of you might have noticed the change in thread name, too - it's because in the first post, there is now a spoiler'd design document about Attributes and Skills. Might be worth a look if you are interested in inner workings of the game. Next design doc coming will be fighting system explained, but it might be a while before I finish it up, so don't lose sleep over it. ;)
I surely hope this time I haven't missed anything game-crashing, as probably version 0.6 will be rather bug-infested at start, with all the new things I will be adding.
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BlindKitty

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I'll make use of this post to avoid cluttering the thread... Too much. So I'm now working on exploration part, but it is going slowly. Because of the non-programming issues, so called real life. But I'm currently getting back on track and hopefully will move with more goal in mind now; I'm actually planning to rework the front end, as in writing text on screen, because with new data it's getting more and more problematic to keep track on what's on screen and what's not. Plan is to make it easier to me to manage what is player actually sees without adding too much overhead when programming it. If it will be going slow, I will put it for later time, because I would like to show you some new additions with room-floor system rather sooner than later (but those are still very much work in progress, too).
« Last Edit: December 02, 2013, 02:27:25 pm by BlindKitty »
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BlindKitty

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Despite my teeth trying to hamper my progress (I've got dentist appointment tomorrow...) I've managed to do a few nice things - first of all, I've put down some groundwork for the exploration part. The game already generates a dungeon (as some kind of safe harbour, like a town, is in plans for the future), floors in it and rooms in the floor; right now, only a battle can occur in room, and they are linear, but those two things are going to get changed, soon. Second thing is getting the Output class to work, which allows me to organize writing info on screen a little better. It's rather simple now, and not even everything is already done, but as mentioned before, I don't want to get bogged down in that, so rest of the work on it is put on hold. It blends rather well with Console methods, so it should be that much of a problem. :) And finally, I think I have conceived a system of tags, that will allow me to generate flavoured floors (like Goblin stronghold or Old necropolis) with relative ease and tie items dropped by monsters to those monsters, not just their level. But this is for the future - right now, I'm putting a few new screenshots and getting back to slowly working on the traps, treasure chests and shops. :)

Spoiler: Screenshots (click to show/hide)
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Mephansteras

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Looking good! :)
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BlindKitty

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Good news, everyone!
First of all, I have survived my teeth trying to kill me (and it turns out, they are pretty healthy after all), and was able to get back to work.
Second, there is a new version (0.6.1.4) available online (link in the first post, as usual) for you to test!
Managed to get one somewhat important thing to work (I don't count quitting the game, which got horribly broken after version 0.6 rolled in, but was also repaired meanwhile; because obviously no-one would ever want to quit my glorious, glorious game, right? ;) ) - interconnected, non-linear, two-way routes between them rooms. You can now choose your path (warning - you might need a pen and some paper to sketch a simple map to save yourself a little time; feature allowing your character to recall anything resembling a map should be done in the future, but it isn't in yet), travel through multiple floors, and meet enemies generated depending on floor they spawn, not your own level. So you could venture deeper underground to face tougher foes, if you wish so. They don't respawn, but there should be around twelve enemies per floor on average, so enough and even more than enough to gain levels quickly enough to keep in pace with them.

I think it is slowly getting a feel of becoming more of an alpha than a tech demo it was so far. And I'm bloody proud over it. :)

(Possibly screenshots tomorrow! Keep tuned!)
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Mephansteras

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Not sure how exactly you'd do this, but it'd be hilarious if your Memory/Int stat effected how accurately your character remembered the map.
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BlindKitty

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That's actually quite fun idea! I've just got rid of Memory actually (more on that later), but I have two skills that I'm not really sure about among misc skills (anatomy and stealth) - I will think about changing one of those to cartography. Failing cartography test would allow you to only remember exits and stairs up/down (to avoid frustration), and succeeding in cartography test would grant you more information about the room - if there is something left there, wheter or not it has been explored by you, and maybe even hints about hidden doors (as in: hey, it looks like there should be an additional room there on my map!). Certainly going to think about that!

As for the progress report: I've implemented Treasure class (very simple right now; I will need to move skill testing to another static class, to allow me to use the same logic for all tests - right now all the testing logic is hidden in Battle class, because it is only used when fighting). I've much improved item equipping - unequipping logic (which should be very useful later on, when implementing more item types and body parts). I've added FreeTime class, allowing you to spend a moment in empty room and change your equipment or save the game. When the crafting will get there, it will allow you to spend time crafting, too - and maybe other things. Right now I think saving is most important, as you can't save during duel.
Another important thing, that will not affect you all that much now, but will have heavy repercussions, is Attribute/Skill update. Memory and Charisma got dropped in favour of Perception and Magicality (that last name is somewhat temporary, as it sounds rather silly) - those should make a little more sense. Especially Perception was lacking, and now it is used in Archery, Crossbowmanship, Throwing, Two Weapon Fighting and Shields. Magicality is only used in magic and misc skills, which are not yet implemented. I've also recalculated amount of Attributes as skill bases, so they are pretty balanced right now (of course, if you take into account fact that there are still only 20 skills of 60 total).

Next on agenda: Trap class and Shop class; Skill testing migration to new class; misc skill implementation (lockpicking, trap disarming, and haggling among others).

Stay tuned! :)
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