Elderlore

Source: If Error Throw New Brick

One of the unwritten design guides I've followed in magecrawl has been to not ask the player for choices they can't answer before the game starts. The first time I launch a game and am ambushed by something like this (care of Crawl Stone Soup):


I get overwhelmed with choices. What the difference between fighers and gladiators? What is the difference fire/ice/air/earth elementalists? These choices are ones that are difficult to make before playing (multiple) times.

The reason this came up during my initial balancing effort is that I realized balancing some options were difficult. For example, how much should the heavy armor skill be? I didn't want to start the player with equipment they couldn't use, so by default they'd have to scavenge for at least part of a set before taking the option would make sense. It'd need to be powerful enough that it'd be worth going to all that trouble, but not so broken as that'd be the only logical choice.

Letting the player choose to use armor/heavy armor before the game makes some sense, as I could start them with a set of said armor at the beginning of the game. I've decided to try to take some of the nice features of crawl's system and pair them down to something more reasonable:


Opinions? These starting backgrounds would provide the initial equipment and preselect some skills in the skill tree. However, there's nothing to prevent a Templar from selecting skills from a tree and become a ranged attacker, beyond the penalty from using heavy armor.

Source: Rogue Wombat

This thread at the FreeBasic forums managed to elude my watchful eye, as I don’t often open the Beginners forum.  However, Rick Clark (rdc), the champion of FB Roguelikes, has managed to build an impressive online tutorial walking through the creation of a Roguelike game.  I’ll be reading through his posts and can commend what I’ve seen thus far to you:

http://www.freebasic.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=15821

Source: Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup

Calling all avid crawlers! The calendar rolls once more towards August, and August means the annual Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup Tournament! It will begin at midnight, August 1st (UTC), and continue through until midnight, September 1st (UTC). All Stone Soup version 0.7.0 games started during this period of time, on both crawl.akrasiac.org and crawl.develz.org, will count [...]

Source: Kaduria

So, I finally made the base class of game objects abstract by making Get_Weight() and Get_Material() abstract. There was no problem in instance issues, because the class was already used like an abstract one. But I was surprised how many member functions of Get_Weight and Get_Material were missing from derived classes. Usually it's ok, because you just return some generic value for weight and material, but in this case the values were not good. You need the proper values from each object type. It was really good change, because at the same time I wrote missing data for some object types and now weight and material have correct (mostly) values for each object type.

The third essential value is size, but I have still problems to create a generic enough size table for objects. I decided to go with abstract sizes like small, huge, etc. instead of metric sizes. This was simply because it's incredibly time consuming and difficult to get (or imagine) proper metric sizes for objects. I can also use the size as least important factor in physics calculations, because I guess that's what it is in real life also.

I really need to compose myself and get the fundamental object data ready for action.

Source: Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup

The 0.7 release of Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup is here, complete with elephants, tile awesomeness, and fully recharged electric eels. Edit: 0.7.1 is now out with a fix for a severe bug affecting ziggurats and other Lua-triggered features such as bazaars. Please update to 0.7.1 if you’ve already downloaded the 0.7.0 release. All 0.7.1 release files are [...]

Source: If Error Throw New Brick

(Potential bloggers out there, don't write new entries when you are tired or else you might blast everyone's RSS reader with blatant misspellings like my last post)

So as I mentioned, balancing roguelikes is hard since doing so involves balancing multiple variables (with a significant amount of randomness thrown in). In an effort to motivate myself into finishing this work, I'm writing up a quick post on my decisions and strategy.

The first variable I focused on was damage output. I decided on a "base" damage an average attack should do, 10d3. For those not initiated in the "d" notation, 10d3 refers to rolling 10 dice with three sides, and summing them all up. 10d3 produces a range of 10-30, with 20 being the center average.

I chose d3s since they produce a nice range with some variability but don't have extreme variability. 5d6, for example, produces a range of 6-30, which is somewhat close to 10d3's range. However the possible "burst" of a good roll means five times the low roll or twice the average for 5d6, compared to three times the low roll or 1.5 times the average in 10d3.

Once I had the damage set, I needed to guess how many hit points monsters and players should have. I started with a guess that the average combat should last five to six rounds, which with twenty points being the average round means 100-120 hit points. For the player, I split these up in health, stamina, and bonuses from the average set of equipment I'd guess one would have.

The next variable is the rate of growth as the game progresses. Magecrawl doesn't have "levels" per say, but I assign an internal level to monsters and items. Each "level" of monster and equipment is currently scheduled to increase in damage and/or stamina by about 25%. This doesn't exactly work, I realized as I wrote the previous paragraph, since the player receives a majority of their hp from their initial stamina and health. Increasing damage monsters do by 50% while increases the stamina bonus of equipment by 50% doesn't even out. Still more to hammer out apparently...

Now that I have some guesses of numbers, I coded them in and forced the map generator to produce only a single type of monster. I'm planning on playing a good number of games, tweaking the numbers so that I can "win" a decent percentage of the time but not always. Once I have that single pairing balanced, I'll continue with others until I have a good feel on the numbers that are fun....

Source: Unangband: The Unnamed Angband

I've released a debug build of the Windows version for those people experiencing the crash on level up bug which I've not been able to duplicate.

You can download this debug build from here and update the bug details here if you experience the crash with this build.

This also includes a fix for the invulnerable familiar bug discussed here.