Like something that makes people more honest when near it or something to that effect? That'd be neat whether it's right or not.
Now that's an interesting idea. Something that prevents someone it is used on from lying? Or that lets you detect lies? Or something similar? For the NPC aspects of the game, something like that (with limited usages or whatever) could be really good...
maybe stuff that affects your luck, with hidden stats so you never know if it's working as intended
Also a definite possibility. However, I think I want things which the player has much more of a choice over where/when/how to use, not so much background stuff. If there are passive effects, I do want it to be a visible one. I think. Maybe. However, if there just a few very specific RNG aspects an item altered (like only a few contexts), then I think something like that might be viable. I've had a few ideas already, but they're all very much in the pondering stage...
Now this week's update, which you can also read at
http://www.ultimaratioregum.co.uk/game/2013/07/02/permadeath-and-world-generation/First, 0.3 update, second, general URR discussion. This week I’ve been focusing on finishing off everything except bugs and small features, and that’s going well. All the secrets and the basic inventory are fully implemented, ziggurats work perfectly, and I’ve done a lot of work on generating some rather nice door graphics. For example:
(I am aware there should be vines trailing inwards – working on it). This coming fortnight I’m rushing around the country like a mad person gathering data for my PhD thesis and giving a talk about roguelikes at an academic conference (which I will try and either record of convert to some form viewable here), but by the end of this fortnight I’d like all graphics finished off, one slight movement issue with blocks, walls and the player character fixed, then I can move onto bug fixing. The requirements for the next release are really coalescing in my mind now as well, so I’ll probably post about those in the near future. Whilst this is all going on, the body of today’s entry is about longer-term plans, specifically about permadeath.
Permadeath provides many of the things I love in roguelikes and roguelike-likes (I’ll just call them all “RLs” for this discussion, so that’s everything from Nethack to FTL). A high level of challenge; a huge amount of tension at risky moments that few non-permadeath games can emulate; and a genuine feeling of progress and accomplishment when you reach new areas you’ve never reached before (particularly when they actually look aesthetically different – I am looking at you disapprovingly, Nethack, and you approvingly, Crawl). An additional factor I think shouldn’t be overlooked is game balance. Which is to say, game balance in something like Dungeon Crawl is very carefully designed
around permadeath. If you remove permadeath from Crawl the game becomes almost trivial. If you could reload and thereby reroll every floor, you’d never have to deal with any nasty unique; you could reload before consuming mutagenic corpses to farm every positive mutation in the game; you could reload floors with treasure rooms or shops until they sell what you want; and so on and so on. Game balance in any good roguelike is not just broken but utterly destroyed if you don’t have a single life you can’t reload, because it hinges on the game distributing good items, bad items, easy foes and nasty foes towards you according to whatever algorithms govern them, not according to someone endlessly rerolling until they get a great outcome.
However. I got to thinking about permadeath in URR, and realized an issue. Generating a world currently takes around a minute – once history generation is implemented, probably in the next version, it’ll take maybe 2-3 minutes to generate a world. That isn’t much by DF standards, and there will be a
lot of gameplay in that world, but it’s still a decent block of time. I originally thought the solution to this was to simply let you have new characters in the same world, as many as you want, but that won’t work. A lot more will be said on this later, but here’s the big reveal: URR is
developing a plot (lots more on this in the future, but it’s going to be very interesting, and nothing like normal medieval-story fare). A weird and obtuse one, but still a plot (which the secret items in 0.3 are a part of). Having infinite characters in one world means you, like save-scumming in Crawl, cannot fail to complete the game, if only by just trying character after character until one them gets through each challenge.
That does not appeal.
However, nor does having to generate a brand new world every time you die. Admittedly combat and death are going to be comparatively rare in URR compared to most RLs, but combat is going to be brutal and bloody, so you will lose characters, or to traps or starvation on long excursions if not to direct combat. I don’t want to discourge new players by forcing them to sit through a new world-gen every time they die rather than being able to jump back into the action,
but I don’t want the game to be made too easy by having infinite characters all contributing to succeeding in a single “campaign”. I’ve been trying to think of a solution, and I think I’ve developed one which is original, sensible, and could produce some interesting emergent risk/reward strategies.
The current idea is this. You have three “lives” in each world – when you die you can create another character twice. When your third character dies, that world is finished. Each life starts with 25% of the XP of the previous character which you can assign into any skill tree from the start, but none of the items – they are left upon the original corpse, vaguely likes a Bones file in another RL. This means when you die the first time, you don’t have to reroll a world, and can learn from your mistakes whilst keeping whatever progress you made. Also, and possibly more importantly, it could lead to interesting tactics. Once you know the game you could make one character to do one particular area, then kill them off and start a new one for the rest of the game – you might have got a specialist to solve one region, but you’ve used up a full character, and you don’t have many to spare, so that’s a risk/reward decision. Equally, losing a character not by choice could let you reassess what killed you and either create a new build to deal with the same, or explore another region with another build.
So that’s the current plan. There is no way to die in 0.3, so this isn’t implemented yet, but this is my plan. I’m firmly set on the “plot” idea as I have a lot of ideas for it (go read some Jorge Borges for some clues), and that necessitates true permadeath, but without the annoyance of endless re-rolling. I think it’s a good compromise, but I want to know what everyone else thinks. Let me know your thoughts! I should stress I have in no way settled on the three lives idea – maybe I will stick to normal one-life permadeath – but I’d like some feedback on the concept.
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Topic: Dwarf Fortress meets The Outer Wilds? "Ultima Ratio Regum", v0.10.1 out Feb 2023 (Read 634847 times)