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[JoshuaFH]

I'm considering to make every race playable by killing it at least once.  Should be interesting to start as a rat or something; extreme dexterity, resistance to poison, sneaking bonus, intelligent, can pass grates,... Once you get your little paws on a ring of fireball you'd be in for a very interesting adventure.

Unlock things by killing them? Sorta like the monster classes in Disgaea?

[Granite26]

Good way to 'save' levels...

[The Moonlit Knight]

I'm considering to make every race playable by killing it at least once.

I love this kinda thing. Playing games as the little minor characters/enemies you see hanging around has always appealed to my curiosity. And a bit of obsessive-compulsiveness. It would definitely be interesting to see how one's play style changes with different creatures, something I think everyone has seen in DF. (Playing as a dragon? Simple. Burn everything.)

And in the same post, my little (huge, massively complicated) roguelike idea:

I've always liked simulation games and I think roguelikes are well-suited for being sims; for what they lack in graphics, they make it up in sheer depth and complexity. You could say that DF, at times, is less a game than a fantasy world simulator. One type of sim I've always wanted to see is a post-apocalyptic one. For such an obvious idea that's appeared in countless books, there haven't been many games on the subject.

My idea centers around three phases of gameplay:
1) The apocalypse. You must firstly survive the apocalypse itself in whatever form it takes, avoiding the spectacular destruction and afterward adapting to the crumbling world. Find fellow survivors to join you for protection, scavenge for supplies, fend off the greedy and the desperate.
2) Ensuring survival. By some means or another, find a certain means of survival; wander as a group of nomadic scavengers (or bandits), build a community (be it a camp in a forest or a stronghold among skyscrapers) or join someone else's. All groups and communities will have their own personality; no generic, universal small-town-with-ambiguous-elder-figure.
3) The new world. As communities form into societies and the lines of the world are re-drawn, there come new struggles. Despots seek to expand their reach, marauding bandits grow in number, opposing ideals cause conflict even when survival is uncertain. At this point, the player may be of enough renown to have influence on the world, inspiring others to make use of his/her ideals and creations (I'd rather like for there to be a lot of customization, from classes to vehicles) but also becoming a target for any unswayed enemies.

All of which is looking downright impossibly ambitious as I'm only a beginning programmer, but I can't get the idea out of my head so maybe it'll happen someday.

[Sowelu]

As for the "realistic dungeon with a purpose" thing, check out Incursion for an example of that gone horribly wrong.  It's a really nice try and it might get better...but right now, it has some vague concepts of "regions you might find in a dungeon", puts them in big squares, and sticks them together.  I mean individually they look awesome, since each area type has its own level generator...big caverns, twisty kobold warrens, magical research laboratories...but they just don't make any remote kind of sense as a whole, so it just looks weird.  Okay, why do I need to go through the Room of Elements and cross lava and fog in order to get to the bedrooms?!

ParanoiaRL

Oh wow.  Want.  That would be really cool in a DoomRL style game...IE, a roguelike that lasts about an hour on average, and takes two or three hours to win, tops.  And the class system would be really hardcore awesome, with mutant powers and secret societies...on...uh, the mutant commie traitors that you are shooting...

(Even more fun if the player is heavily encouraged to play 'random' somehow...)

Elemental Plane of Dungeon

OH GOD, DO WANT.  That sounds like a lot of fun story-wise.  My only concern would be equipment balance, since it sounds like you're mostly finding stuff then bringing it back home...all you need is one high level guy, and you're set for life.  Plus it kinda encourages farming.  Needs more goals, though I can think of so many awesome ideas to do.  Especially if there's a time delay between each character, so the world has time to grow and change, new people born and dying.  Eventually factions splitting off, forming new towns lower down, those towns dying out...


Those are two of the best roguelike ideas I've ever seen, ever.  ParanoiaRL in particular I think is worth pursuing.  If you can cram enough raw content into the game--tons of areas and sector types, tons of missions, etc--that would be an absolute blast.  I only request that you base it on Paranoia V.2 or V.5, since XP blows enormous chunks.

The core gameplay, if well-designed, should be simple enough for reasonably easy development even...  Think I'm going to PM you...

[Granite26]

Oh, I intentially dumped those here, in that I don't like them enough to ever warrant writing them.

Paranoia:  You'd almost HAVE to make it random, with a 'chance' (wink wink nudge nudge) that you'd end up with a mutant power or member of a secret society.  It'd be a little harder to balance into combat RPG abilities, though.

for the dungeon game, I was thinking something like a year would pass (so you'd actually need to win a certain amount to not lose the whole town), and what's available in town would be purchaseable.  So, say you brought back a +5 sword.  You'd be able to buy it with your next character, and there's a chance that future characters would start with a +1 sword rather than a +0 sword.

I'm not sure how to make it 'winnable'.  Maybe level 1000 has the boss that summoned you and killing him (which involves building elevators, stabilizing parts of the dungeon, and feeding the populous for X years while you go deeper, getting the XP and equipment to do so).

Also, don't forget that having a base means defending a base.

[Ampersand]

Why not something like The Sims in roguelike format? It would be a lot like Dwarf Fort with a much simpler construction mechanic, though. But I think a lot of what made The Sims limited was the need for sensible animations.

[Sowelu]

I think Paranoia would play like a stealth game and partly like a really linear mission-based one (except that it's not linear).  You might even have a concept of 'days' where you go back to your bunk every so often, and they go and fix the world somewhat by the time you wake up...that way you can blow massive holes in everything ever, crash tube cars into things, get new R&D, etc.  Just complete each mission by the third day and the Computer won't kill you!  New horrible surprises every day!

Still I do think that you'd need issues like "Well, today there's a group of Vultures performing calisthenics in the main corridor leading where you want to go, and there's some berserk robots over there", so there's actual problems that need to be overcome instead of just wandering monsters.  OTOH, it just wouldn't be the same if you put in social problems without the ability to solve them socially.

Toying with the idea of the Computer attaching troubleshooters to your lone character sometimes, so you have to not get them killed, and have to do what they say...like, you need to take this pill every so often, or they'll report you.

Starting to become an issue of "How can we dumb down Paranoia into a computer game" though, which is a shame...but it's sometimes better to simplify it too much, than to simplify it not enough.

[Granite26]

good ideas.

Also:  6 clones

A demo mode might be just a maze with the layout of the maze changing as you change colors.

[Rhodan]

As for the "realistic dungeon with a purpose" thing, check out Incursion for an example of that gone horribly wrong.  It's a really nice try and it might get better...but right now, it has some vague concepts of "regions you might find in a dungeon", puts them in big squares, and sticks them together.  I mean individually they look awesome, since each area type has its own level generator...big caverns, twisty kobold warrens, magical research laboratories...but they just don't make any remote kind of sense as a whole, so it just looks weird.  Okay, why do I need to go through the Room of Elements and cross lava and fog in order to get to the bedrooms?!

Yeh, I thought of incursion when I was pondering on how to do this.  I liked the detailed areas, but they didn't form a nice whole.  A castle setting would solve that.  A large enough castle would surely have multiple kitchens, barracks, smaller libraries and other rooms strewn about.  Especially if it's a castle inhabited by a whole community. (of monsters, but still)  By keeping the frequency and types of rooms grouped together logically, the player would find himself in an interesting and believable environment.
On the lower levels you'd find tons of guard rooms, armouries, kitchens, pantries, small chapels, sleeping quarters and so on, with some more expensive rooms grouped around the Throne room or something.
Higher up, you'd start to encounter small libraries, alchemy labs, bedrooms, storage rooms, dining rooms and so on.  There'd be less guards, but they'd be better trained and there'd always be some recruits rushing up the stairs as backup.
Even higher up you'd have ballrooms, great dining rooms, master bedrooms, Elite Guards, museums, arboretums, aviaries, larger chapels, great libraries,...  This is where more powerful monsters will hang out, no just guards.  Libraries mean spellcasters, arboretums and aviaries mean ents and giant skeletal eagles...
Not to mention the towers where outside flying monsters would rush in through the windows to get you, with guards coming up and down the stairs.  And a boss at the top.
The other way down you'd have the dungeons filled with rats, bats and undead or rampaging tortured monsters.  And experimental torture chambers with lethal traps and stuff.
Further down would just be caves with increasing difficulty all the way down, in case you want a real challenge.

A few of the rooms would be just empty or collapsed or turned into a lair of sorts.  And there'd be secret passages all over to make up for locked hallways doors.

[The Moonlit Knight]

Figured I might drop this into the discussion on ParanoiaRL: http://www.squidi.net/three/entry.php?id=40

I definitely like the idea of ParanoiaRL. I'd like to see a game with a bit of "political intrigue" (i.e. constant accusations and backstabbing) although that might be a bit hard to code in the context of a roguelike, having these NPCs wandering around doing suspicious things and watching out for anything you're doing. If nothing else, shooting mutant Communists is awesome.

Why not something like The Sims in roguelike format?

The Sims, to be honest, gets boring as hell really quickly in my opinion. Sims 2 was all right as it gave you some clear goals and some things to do besides zooming through the days on 10x speed. But you're right, it might be interesting to have a life simulation roguelike. Without having to worry about graphics, the game could be expanded quite a bit; the question is how to expand it so it doesn't get real repetitive real fast.

[Granite26]

Yeah, no, I was mostly focussing on the 'coded levels let you get places, but rather than a blue key, it's a blue corridor' and all of it randomly built maze, with a little bit of humor layered onto the typical rogue-ness  (plus, you know, no guarantee the game is winnable without 'cheating'),  The politics and intrigue start to make it not a (roguelike) game anymore.

[Sowelu]

Fun fact, The Sims 3 had graphics tied to the gameplay pretty late in the dev cycle.  It was nearly roguelikeish in graphics earlier on; they tried pretty hard to make graphics not be the limiting factor.  So the underlying simulation is pretty strong there (supposedly).

[Servant Corps]

I play Urbz, which was Sims but with a semblence of storyline.

I didn't like it at all.

[Tilla]

The Sims, to be honest, gets boring as hell really quickly in my opinion. Sims 2 was all right as it gave you some clear goals and some things to do besides zooming through the days on 10x speed. But you're right, it might be interesting to have a life simulation roguelike. Without having to worry about graphics, the game could be expanded quite a bit; the question is how to expand it so it doesn't get real repetitive real fast.

The Sims 3 looks like it'll have more to do all day, although nighttime is still going to be fast-forward time I'd imagine you can now travel with the characters to work and so forth, as the town in the game is one area, with no massive loadscreens between. I am cautiously optimistic.

I've been thinking about a life simulation roguelike myself quite a bit, there are far too RPGs and the like done in a modern setting. Unfortunately, I'm not much of a programmer so it will likely get nowhere for me.

[Sowelu]

I'm considering to make every race playable by killing it at least once.  Should be interesting to start as a rat or something; extreme dexterity, resistance to poison, sneaking bonus, intelligent, can pass grates,... Once you get your little paws on a ring of fireball you'd be in for a very interesting adventure.

Unlock things by killing them? Sorta like the monster classes in Disgaea?

For a while, and long before discovering DF, I wanted to make a roguelike with storylines but radically randomized worlds.  And the more games you played and the more different things you played as, the more of those random settings you could control...IE, after you've met a werewolf, you can require that your next random world will have them; after other stuff, you can require that they are the 'good' faction in your world, and playable...etc.