The town layer

This is the persistent layer that sits on top of the Roguelike game play, added as a hub to give a sense of persistence to the user, make the game more casual friendly, and add avenues for rmt that don’t impact the Roguelike game. This post says more about my thinking behind added this extra game element. This post is focused on how the town works. I’ll do another later on how it looks.

There will be no title screen as such instead when the user starts the app they’ll come straight from the loading screen to the town view (obviously if it’s their first time there will be story/tutorial overlays). On entry there will be modal message prompting them to either continue and existing adventure or start a new one. If the player chooses to view the town there will be a persistent ‘adventure’ button.

The town view will also have navigation to get to things like global options, credits, info etc.

Currency

It uses 2 different currency types. Gold, which is created in the town and crystals(or some other unit), which will be the paid for currency, but which can also be found in the dungeon. I may also add other reagents that can only be found in the dungeon.

Areas:

There will be several different areas, all performing different functions. Areas are building that all users have and that cannot be moved. They can be upgraded though. There will also be constructs, which are buildings created by the user than can be moved/upgraded destroyed etc.

Ancient cave (will probably be called something else).
This is where the players go to play the Roguelike game. Can be upgraded to access different game mode – different difficulties, plus maybe a sprint or defense mode in the future. Probably only uses dollars. If the player doesn’t have an existing adventure then clicking the ’adventure’ button take them here, where they choose their character/equipment/mode for the adventure.

Training ground (need a new name)
The way my game and power design will go the build and abilities will be dependant on the cards the player has. When a player chooses a classall they’re actually choosing is the starting cards/equipment. They start off with a basic fighter/assassin/mage selection, then as they player more combinations can be unlocked using this building. There will also be blank slots where players can create their own starting classes. These will be expensive, and bought with the pfc. I’ll also have to be very careful when balancing it so players can’t create OP combinations (though it’s only the starting decks so in the long run it shouldn’t matter).

Blacksmith
Use this to create weapons and armor that characters start off the game with. My idea is that every time a character is sent off into the dungeon you have to equip them first. There will be bog standard weapon choices, which the user will have unlimited amounts of, but other weapons/armor combinations will have to be made beforehand. Most take money on it’s on, but some require better reagents. Again, I should emphasize that the better weapons will help the early game but will become obsolete relatively quickly.

Graveyard
The morgue where you can view your dead characters. I want to make it easy to export and share stats – I’m not doing a hugely intensive file, but enough to be interesting. You can also use it to buy monuments and crypts for characters which are contructs placed in the map.

Bar/general store
This is where a player can buy things. This will mostly be things like extra skins/consumables to take into the dungeon.

Hall of honour
This is the achievements and quests + record of winning characters and where you buy monuments to them. Monuments can be placed around the town.

Buildings:

Gold Mine:
This is a building that constantly generates small amounts of gold. The trick is that it continues to do so in real time while the game is inactive, but there is a cap on how much it can hold before it becomes full. This encourages the user to log back in frequently to collect the gold. Produciton rate and capacity cna be upgraded, with higher ranks being exponentially more expensive, encouraging rmt.
Lumber ill:
Same as gold mine but produces wood.
Steel mill:
Ditto, but creates metal.
Decorations:
Things to make your town look nicer. They don’t do anything, so I can make the nicer ones ridiculously expensive. Also I can slo them in as they are created without worrying about balance etc.
Monuments are a sub catergory of decorations. They’re built to honour fallen (or victorious!) characters. The grandeur of the momument is determined by how far the character got.

Actions

Before I get going properly building the engine I want to have a pretty good idea of what it need to be able to do.

Every turn the user can perform an action. Their choices boil down to:

• Moving.
• Attacking.
• Using an ability.
• Using an item.
• Performing an environment action.
• Making an inventory change - this means picking something up, equiping items etc.
• Wait.

Moving

Moving is fairly obvious. The characters move from one square to another adjacent square. I'm only going to do four way movement, both because I'm told it makes it easier for casuals and also because there may be at some point a (small) chance of me putting in animations and thats 4 less directions to have to create cycles for. Well 2 if I just flip the artwork.

I'm going to have pathfinding in there. I just need to decide how to implement it. I already have a reasonable A* pathfinder that works with tile based maps. It works fine for just the player character, but it has issues when there are lots of mobs, all heading towards the player. After reading this article 'The Incredible Power of Dijkstra Maps', I want to try to use Dijkstra maps, at least for the mob pathfinding anyway.

Attacking

Attacking another character without using an ability. Can be either ranged or melee. For a melee attack the attackee must be on an adjacent square, for ranged attacks they can be further away.

When a player uses an attack I want the attack to be able to not only have different types or damage, apply damage over time, have a potential to splash damage over an area, but to also trigger abilities. The properties of the attack would be stitched together from the player's equipment  status effect and stats. Each attack will have a primary damage type specific to the weapon, and this is what can crit, is use in some calculations, and has combat bonuses added to it.

Using an ability

What can abilities do?
First I have to decide on what the attacks and abilities need to be able to do. I did a rough brainstorm and this is what I came up with:

• Damage enemies, with varying types of damage (eg slashing/crushing/piercing/fire etc).
• Damage should be able to be over a duration.
• Should be able to add status effects* to characters.
• Should also be able to stun, root, fear or put character to sleep (sleep is a stun which breaks on damage) for a duration.
• Damage should be able to be delayed.
• Should be able to decide whether or not to affect the user.
• Should be able to reposition both the active character and the character it is used on. Not just knockbacks, but tactical movements.
• Should be able to target the environment, as well as characters.
• Should be able to have a radius of effect. The power of the ability should be able to change depending on the distance.
• Radius shouldn't just be circles.
• Abilities should be able to trigger follow on effects. This is nice as it's potentially a way of mixing basic abilities together to make different exotic ones. This could be used to do the delayed damage/effects that I want too.
• Should be resistible depending on the resistances of the target and the power of the ability, or not resistible.

Using an item.

Using an item can be viewed the same way as using an ability, except that the item is used from the player's inventory/equipment. There will be some abilities that are only available through equipment, like town portal (if I have them), teleport etc.

Performing an environment action.

This means things like opening doors and chests or pulling levers.

Making an inventory change.

This means picking something up, dropping things, equipping items etc. I am tempted to make dropping items free.

Waiting.

Do no action for a turn. The most frequent use of this is in games where the characters regenerate their health over time, so an injured player can wait a time until their health returns.

*Status effects

A status effect is an effect that can be applied to a character. It lasts for a duration and affects the character. I want status effects to be able to:

• Affect stats. This can be by percentage or absolute.
• Do damage or heal over time.
• Do additional damage on hit/being hit, either for or against the character with the effect. These could just be abilities.
• Trigger abilities on hit, being hit, ability use or move. These can have a percentage chance.
• Trigger ability on end.

Adding Farmville elements to me my game

Or Scope creep crope sceep.

I've been downloading and playing a whole load of mobile games, one of which is a Farmville lite type game called Little Dragons. It's a nice little tamagochi type game where you you have to hatch and then take care of a load of cute cartoon dragons, with great production values and a disastrously bad monetisation system (I may be wrong about, I have no stats to back this up). It has a system where you have multiple habitats that contain dragons, and each dragon is constantly generating gold, whether you're actually playing or not. The habitats have a limit on how much gold they can hold, then they're full up and the dragons stop producing. As I said, this carries on in real time, even if you're not playing, so what it does is encourage you to open up the game every few hours, just to check on your dragons and collect the gold.

It works incredibly well with a mobile game because most people have their mobiles with them most of the time, and it's very easy to succumb to the urge to just open it up, make a few clicks and have a quick play. I want to leverage this impulse for my game, to make the players feel an itch to boot it up and take a quick look every few hours, even if they're not playing a long session.

Since it's so difficult to actually charge for an app I also want to add at least some form of micro payments to the game. I don't want to compromise the main game so I was thinking about adding an extra layer to the game which I could then charge for. It makes sense and I think will work well for this layer to be the farmville style crack that will keep the users coming back to my game all through the day.

What I'm planning is for the player to have a town that is the base for all of their characters to strike off into the dungeon. My basic thinking is:

• The town will have several different areas/buildings that can be used to create items and consumables that can be used in the game.
• A training building where you can build upgrades that can be given to you characters on creation.
• An embassy to unlock new classes/races.
• There will be an actual graveyard for dead characters - I'd love to let the player upgrade gravestones into extravagant statues and tombs.
• Square of honour, with statues and monuments to successful characters.
• Production buildings that generate resources, that will need to be harvested. Probably wil be mine, farm and lumber forest. Each will be upgradable.
• Make it a rule that the items created won't be too powerful. They'll be the kind of thing that can make the early game easier but will be obsolete by the time the players gets to mid-late game. This means is hopefully won't compromise the main game for the hardcore players while providing a way to make the early game easier for the casual players, who may like this game layer more anyway.
• This layer will be completely separate to the actual game so if I shit my britches I can discard it without breaking or having to rethink too much the main game.
• I was already planning on creating a web version of the game to drive traffic to the mobile versions, and this gives me something extra to use to differentiate the separate versions without crippling the web version to the point that it's not fun.

The big, scary drawback to the idea is that this farmville layer could almost be viewed as a standalone game on it's own. It's a big job added onto and already huge job. The balancing will be difficult to get right, it needs lots of extra assets and plugging it into a micro payments system is going to require a crap load of testing, not to mention just learning to use the apis in the first place.

On the other hand it's something extra to make what I'm doing something more than just another tired Roguelike clone. It also adds some permanence to the game - something that survives even if you characters don't, and as it adds move avenues for micro payments it adds more chance that I may actually make some money from the game. I'm already mentally planning what I'm going to do.

I'm a whore

I should have predicted this, but I was recently offered a contract extension to my current job until Christmas, and despite promising myself that I would take off the end of the year to work on my game I accepted. It's really, really hard to turn down guaranteed money. I've also accepted another job at the beginning of the year so the earliest I'm going to be able to start on it properly is probably Feb/March next year.

Sigh.

I'm trying to look on the bright side though  - it will give me that much more time to iron out exactly what I'm trying to do and to get my ideas crystallised. Hopefully this means when I do finally get on it I'll be able to hit the ground running and get it done that much quicker for it.

Lottery abilities

This is a follow on form my post on removing random from combat. In that I said I wanted to remove most random chance from my games basic combat. I also said I wanted to keep some positive random events that help the player and give them a 'wow' factor. I call these lottery abilities, and by this I mean abilities that have a low random chance to fire, but that are very powerful when they do. The most common ones I've seen are dodge, critical hit and counterattack.

Critical strike

A crit is where an attack causes extra damage, usually double. The first I became aware of it was way back playing D&D and rolling a natural 20, but it's in a huge number of games and it's very popular. There's just something hugely satisfying about getting the aforementioned CRITICAL STRIKE and decimating your opponent. It's also easy to produce cool visual and  audio effects to go with it. In some game is only applies to melee attacks, not to ranged or magic, to give melee attacks a boost. There can also be spells or abilites that give you an increased or guaranteed critical chance.

Dodge

Dodge is simply where a character completely evade another character’s attack. It’s present in a huge number of rpgs and roguelikes. Usually whether the attack is dodged or not it worked out by rolling the old random number dice depending on the attacker’s skills and the defenders skill levels. Sometimes it will be taken off of things like dexterity or agility, sometimes there’s a direct ‘dodge’ or ‘dodge reduction’ stat.

The fact that dodging completely negates an attack makes it hugely powerful. Care needs to be taken because if a character has too much dodge it can be completely game breaking.

It also has an additional problem in that it's difficult to make it exciting, in effect it's an action not taking place. You can't really have the cool blood splatter CRITICAL STRIKE excitement when all you're effectively saying is 'nothing happened'. A critical strike can end the fight but all a dodge does is prolong it, abait in your favour.

Counterattack

A chance that an attack will immediately trigger an attack out of turn in revenge from the character who was attacked. This can be cool when it works but can also be confusing. Again it can be hugely powerful and almost game breaking in excess.

The problem with these abilities

These abilities can completely change an encounter when they go off. This can feel great when it happens in your favour, but on the other hand it feels horrible and unfair when it you're on the receiving end, so care needs to be taken. They can easily break pvp games, but luckily in a pve game the npcs don't mind you dodging all their attacks then critting them for half their health with a counterattack.

There's also the argument that too much random ruins fights and takes the skill out of them. Players can play a slow game just hoping for a lucky crit instead of playing tactically, then get frustrated when the crit doesn't happen or goes against them.

What to do about them

• Soften the effects by having gradations. It's quite common for games with critical strike to have ways to either increase the damage a critical strike does or to reduce the additional damage an enemy crit does. This leads to more predictable damage incoming with less likelihood of the player losing because of an unlucky spike. This is especially important in a game with permadeath. Dodge can also have an idea of only dodging portions of the attack – glancing blows.
• You could also add extra stats that directly counter these abilities, reducing an enemy’s chance to dodge your attack or crit or counter you. 
• Remove the lottery element and just have them as status effects that give an effect for a duration – for example a skill that means you a have a very high chance to dodge the next X attack.
• Make it so the enemies can't do them to you, or at the least do some very infrequently.
• Make sure the chances to trigger the attacks stay very low. Once you get a high enough chance that you can reliably expect one of these effects to go off in a fight they stop being lottery effect. If the player is think 'shit I was so unlucky not to get a crit in that fight' I know the chances are too high.

Really basic level generation

Level generation is, in my opinion, one of, if not the most important element of a Roguelike. Different methods of level generation produce levels that feel very different, ranging from box stamping to more organic tunnelling methods. To take advantage of this I want my game to use several different methods to generate the level, giving different areas different feeling that go with their theme.

This is my first, very basic attempt at level generation. All it does is stamp boxes into a grid map randomly, with no logic. It then tries to create corridors to connect up all of the room, simply by tunnelling through from one box until it reaches another. After that it cycles through the tile and creates doors in places where there are two tile between walls.

It doesn't do the interesting things yet, like place mob, item, treasure etc. Also I'm planning on using a tile editor programme to create a load of bespoke rooms with interesting layout which will then be randomly place. Still, I'm quietly happy with it so far and I'm hoping I can add to it and make something that can create genuinely cool dungeon layouts..

Give it a play, though be warned that it's all brute force computing, completely non optimized, so if you choose a huge map with lots of small boxes it may take a long time to finish. (the text on the top left is actually a button)

Why I'm cutting random out of my game's combat.

Roguelikes are built on the good old random numbers generator. It runs from the level generation all the way to the combat and loot. The levels are randomly generated, the monsters are randomly spawned and then when you fight them the damage and whether you hit or miss is often worked out by the equivalent of rolling a dice.

My view is that some of the randomness is really cool, and it's a large part of what make Roguelikes so interesting. It means every game is different and you'll never have the same encounter twice and it can add uncertainty to combat. I just think that for casual gamers it can be a negative experience especially when the dice roll against them several time in a row.

To give some examples:

• In DCSS (Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup) every time you cast a spell you have a chance of spell failure, which you can reduce by increasing your skill levels or increase by wearing armour. It's obviously calculated using a random number generator. I had a slightly promising venom mage and he had a spell called Mephistic cloud, which produces a cloud of gas that confuses and damages enemies in an area. Due to it's difficulty and my skill level it had a failure rate of about 10%, so nine times out of ten I should have been able to cast correctly. Except the very nature of random numbers means that you'll always have spells where they go against you. In this case I came up against a group of orcs bunched up. It should have been fairly easy to have confused them then taken them out one by one with a different spell, except instead I miscast Mephistic cloud 3 times in a row. It meant they managed to reach me and a fighting retreat led to my death. What are the chances of that? 0.1%, in case you were wondering.
• In Dungeons of Dredmor you can enchant your items on an square called the anvil of Krong. There's a 70% chance of a positive enchantment and 30% of a negative curse. I had a game where I had my items cursed 4 times in a row, making what was a fantastic item useless. You actually get an achievement for just 3 times.

In both cases it felt like my whole run was ruined by forces beyond my control. This isn't a fun experience and I think it's something that could really put off a casual player, or even someone who's simply new to the game. Don't get me wrong, I play table top games and I've lost them based on rolls of the dice. It's just it's one thing rolling triple ones in Risk and having a laugh with your friends at your bad luck. It's a whole other thing playing a single player game against a computer where you can't see the dice so you have a sneaking thought that maybe the computer just took offence at something you did in your last run.

This is why I'm removing most negative random effects from my games combat, and from the game in general

I still want there to be some randomness, so you players don't always know how an encounter will play out before it's happened, I'm just going to mostly keep it to cool 'lottery' abilities that help the player, with only a few minor negative effects that can happen against them. This means no spell failure, no missing your attack 5 times in a row, no enemies resisting you spells completely. I want the players to know that if they try something it will either work or not, and if it does how much effect it can have. If an enemy has a high resistance you'll just do less damage to them, but it will be broadly predictable with no wild fluctuations of fortune.

It also needs to be recognised that players remember the times where the dice went against them as 'the game screwed me', whilst when the rolls go in their favour they either take it for granted or think it's cool. I'm still going to keep some random stuff that work in the favour of the player, just not the other way round. The npcs aren't going to ragequit after the player crits them twice in a row whilst dodging their attack. Thie same can't be said of the other way around.