First,
link! That goes to the game's blog, where you can find download links. Looks to be around an update every month or so, so... yeah. Also the game's name was changed earlier this year -- one of you out there might recognize it better as Legend of Siegfried. There's
a forum, too, if apparently not particularly active.
Blurb:The game draws the most influence from ADOM, but it will go far beyond that. The world will be randomly generated, continents, dungeons, towns, cities, etc. There will be a single over-arching theme to the game, but there will also be random quests, as well as a selection of preset quests that will appear in some or all games. The idea is to take the great ideas of ADOM and other roguelikes and remove their limitations while improving upon them. Rather than the world and quests being completely static (and limited), they will be as dynamic as possible while still retaining their meaning and feel.
A lot of the mechanics will differ from ADOM, of course, but in the end it aims to be in the spirit of ADOM (and its predecessors), without limitations and with maximum re-playability.
What is it?It's an in development roguelike! Standard fantasy fair, mostly, but some interesting things as well. At the time of this posting, you get thrown into the world with a wizard tower and probably not much else, and after you run around and murder things for a bit you pick up a quest or two that gives a little bit of direction. Still pretty barebones in a number of areas, as fairly well befitting its state of development, but it's definitely got the sense of getting there.
Why should I care?Features
Currently implemented features:
Quests and dialogue
Basic alchemy
Autoexplore and goto
Basic magic/spell system
Score keeping, and high score list
Shops
Basic settlements and cities
Field of view and light sources
Random world generation
A small selection of items and monsters
Several dungeon environments
Character backgrounds
Character generation
Basic melee and missile combat
Basic weapon skills and a few non-combat skills, with a basic training framework
Activatable items, skills, and powers
Languages: The more advanced races speak a common tongue, but each race generally has its own specific language as well
Factions and territories, e.g., goblins in their own territory might attack creatures they would not mind in other places
Multiple damage types
Natural weapons and special effects (e.g., rats can transmit disease through their bite)
Monsters are the same type of game entity as the player, and wield weapons, use items, etc.
Random item generation
Extremely extensible property-driven event system
Advanced and descriptive messages with dynamic grammar system
Various senses (sight, hearing, etc.) for different perceivable things
Time of day, i.e., day/night cycle with varying visibility
Saving/Loading
Abstract goal-based AI for monsters and NPCs and dungeon generation
Various dungeon features (doors, decorations, etc.)
Materials and qualities for items
Many state modifiers (poison, diseases, bleeding, etc.)
Many types of terrain
Weather patterns
Customizable interface and keybindings
Item containers
Planned features:
Races
Monster and item descriptions, memory
Hundreds of items and creatures
Many different locations, dungeons, complexes, etc.
Diverse effects for different weapon types and styles
Many, many skills
Random quests, and not just basic things like "Go and Find X of Y", "Kill X of Y", etc.
Multiple game modules (i.e., the engine supports loading different modules; the main game is one of these.)
...and more...
Possibly future features:
Inter-game interaction
Easily what's attracted me to this the most immediately is the magic system. There is no mana! Spells operate off a cooldown system, but also from some other things. As well as cooldown limitations, you've also got two other magic related "resources" -- magical saturation and magical balance. The first is relatively straightforward -- it's a percentage that rises as you cast spells, up to a limit, after which you can't cast anymore (so far as I know, I haven't actually hit the cap yet, heh). The neat thing to that is that as saturation increases,
so does the strength of your spells, so you've got a system that really incentivizes using the abilities you've got.
Magical balance is an interesting limiter, and a pretty neat mechanic (even though it's perfectly viable to just kinda' ignore it, from what I've seen playing). It's basically your magical saturation in reverse -- as you cast more spells, your imbalance increases and in turn decreases your spellpower. It and saturation just about cancel out, if nothing else is being done. The trick to it is there's a way to mitigate magical imbalance, with the way being in the name. The game's magical system is based around (at least at the time of writing) three general types of spell, and if you cycle through all three, part of the imbalance cancels out -- basically, if you keep yourself in balance and vary up the sorts of spells you're using, you mitigate a fair amount of the penalties involved. It's an honestly pretty slick bit of design, both incentivizing active ability use
and rewarding variation in what you're using and combined arms, so to speak, tactics. All while having things tuned so it's not really a punishment if you
don't.
There's also a really rather neat modifier type mechanic in the game. You have a small pool (two types, at time of writing, and 8 each) of what amounts to runes you can place at a distance, which modifies the effects of many spells when cast within a certain radius of 'em. Ferex, with the basic magic missile style ability, one type spits out an extra bolt when you cast at anything within about 5 squares of the rune, and the other, well. The other
explodes when your magic missile hits anything within ~two tiles of the rune. And there's no real hard limit to how many you can have out, save the your pool of available ones, the duration they last once placed, and whether the rune-thing is consumed when triggered -- it's entirely possible (and, indeed, how your character is most likely going to manage to survive) to set up a line of the bolt duplication ones and fire volleys into a layered line of the explosive variety, slamming an enemy with swarms of magic missiles and triggered mines as they approach. This alone has made playing, even with the still fairly limited magic list, quite the blast (sometimes literally :V) -- it definitely adds a whole hell of a lot to the game, considering how to place things and cross-interact spells and triggered spell effects and whatnot.
And then there's that wizard tower. It... is a wizard tower. You have global enchantments you can toggle (only four, currently, and only one of which effects anything beyond you or your tower, but still). You can have a laboratory (necessary for alchemy, which is a kinda' neat system in itself that I'll leave to the player to check out), you can have a ingredient growing area, you can have an automatic mine. You have a grand hall, an observatory to check out the astrological signs, it's... just a straight up wizard tower, and the most wizard towery implementation of a wizard tower I've seen in... well, at the very least a roguelike, and probably just about
anywhere in the world of video gaming. Even with how bare bones it currently is.
And last but not least, the item system definitely looks to have a fair amount of potential. Conceptually fairly basic material/enchantment stuff, but they're already doing some occasional fairly neat stuff (like a material that increases damage as you repeatedly hit something in a short time period) and it's only barely starting to get fleshed out.
There's probably other stuff, too, but that's been the most immediately noticeable stuff I've ran in to, so far.
Any warnings?Well, it's currently ASCII. Pretty clean ASCII, but still ASCII if that's a problem for you.
It's... also rather difficult. I tried for a while normally, and could get pretty far if I played very carefully, but even a little bit of inattention or poor play would get my face shoved in. Even cheating hilariously (which is how I've been playing in my more recent runs, just to see more of the game) I still occasionally get brutally murdered.
And, of course, development is development. There is the occasional crash bug (current version, watch out for the white Ds -- they seem to have something going on with their crits that can cause the game to error out. You can still fight and kill them, just don't let them get in melee with you) and whatnot, and who knows what the game will look like next year or whatev'.
Related to that, the UI
is a little clunky in places. Not particularly badly so (and there's mouse interface, which ameliorates a bit of that), but working with container items (which is kinda' important, since you've get something more or less like ToME4 transmogrification chest at level 2, i.e. an autopickup feature that can mulch unwanted items for gold) can be a little rough. Couple more button presses than really needed, stuff like that.
Anyway, I've had a fair bit of fun with it over the last few days, even with so much development ahead of it, so I figured it'd be a good idea to share it and hopefully get it on some more folks' radars. If it manages to keep going and continues to develop along the path it's on now, we're definitely going to have a contender for one of the major roguelikes on our hands, imo.
Author
Topic: Numenfall: The Magic Missile Goes Kaboom (In Development Roguelike) (Read 3603 times)