Making a Roguelike: More Design Ideas

Let's talk about some more things we're implementing in our roguelike. Once again, I won't talk about the interface system yet but the mechanics of a good roguelike don't need much of that anyway, do they?

A lot of roguelikes require you to eat in order to survive. The classics, like Nethack do that, Rogue Survivor always puts you against the clock by having starvation threaten and force you out of hiding, one could even argue that a space-shooter roguelike like Transcendence does the same by having your ship consume fuel. The threat of starvation is a good gameplay mechanic to prevent the player from standing still too much if food is a limited resource. In our game, you die of dehydration, which is another name for the mechanic that I though was a little more realistic about what kills you first. If the game was more survival-based I'd probably have planned a hypothermia-feature as well but as it stands, the only two things in the game that kill you are lack of water and monsters.

You find sources of water in the cave. Statistically there should be some on every floor although statistics can lie and in our monster-less test-build there have been cases of death by dehydration. All the better, in a roguelike, sometimes the dice are just against you. Now on a somewhat lucky run, the finished game should take about 20 to 30 minutes to play through if everything goes well and you know what you're doing. If there are sources of water though, you could in theory just camp there. What do I as the designer do against that?

Making a Roguelike: Some General Ideas

A friend and I are in the process of making a roguelike (or rogue-like or roguealike or rogue-lite or whatever. Screw the Berlin interpretation!). I won't tell too much about the greater concept yet but let's talk about some general ideas and design decisions regarding the game.

Our game, which is barely playable right now (it does generate a cave and one can wander around in it and even pick stuff up but there is little to no adversity as of yet - dehydration is currently the only true enemy), has a simple premise: You are a person, assumedly in some medieval time, walking through the forrest/mountain at night when you fall into a hole that is the entrance to a cave-system. You need to find a way out. When you think about it, this can be a rather terrifying thought and I had the idea when visiting a cave on vacation over New Year's 2011/2012. That particular cave was discovered by a man named Baumann (after whom the cave was susequently named) who was a miner in the olden days and got lost in it after his light went out. After three days he managed to find an exit (and tell his tale) only to die of being half-starved and being lost in a cold cave for days. This, I thought, could be made into quite the game. And then I decided to add monsters and some low-key magic. So what about those monsters?

Adventures in KSP: Coming Home

So let's finish this adventure in KSP so we can get to new horizons with new parts and all that. I had recently returned from the surface of Duna and docked with the mother craft, the Troy. Now the last two hurdles would be to get back to a Kerbin orbit and then get the crew down to the surface. Alive, if possible. Here's how things went.

I had done the necessary math. Or rather, a website had done it for me. All that was left was to hope that the ship would have enough fuel to get into a stable orbit around Kerbin, if necessary with the help of atmo-breaking. My trio of Kerbals could now only look back to Duna and hope that future generations of Kerbals would keep on exploring that strange desert planet.

Looking ba-hack over my shoulder...

The weeks of interplanetary flight passed. Then the Kerbin encounter happened...

Adventures in KSP: The Duna flight

Let's finish up this adventure so we can get to the updated version of KSP. Having gone to Duna with the Troy, my interplanetary spacecraft, I was in the process of getting my lander down to the planet. Let's see how things went...

So, we are going down to Duna. I had chosen the flat mare where I had set down my first probe before and aimed the lander at the place. The low terrain would help me estimate when I was actually approaching the ground and would give the parachutes more time to work.

Down there!

This blog ain't dead!

Just to make it clear: This blog is not dead. True, I have let it go for a while, being in a new job and having less free time and all... That's about to change again. Not the job. The letting the blog rot. Here's what's going to come up over the next days and weeks:

-I have entered my One Page Dungeon in the contest of the same name. I'll explain my thoughts and design-decisions on it here soon.

-I shall finish the Duna-flight of my KSP-diary. Then, if I decide to keep writing about KSP, I'll start over from scratch as I have downloaded a newer version of the game (with electric rover-wheels! Multi-part Munbase, I am coming!)

-I'll give a review of a new RPG we're currently playing with a group of co-workers.

-I'll talk about the roguelike a friend and I are making.

cheers!

Marten

Randomizing a Location: Some Thoughts

A friend and I are working on a sort-of roguelike and I've made a randomization-system for creating a procedurally generated cave-system that's different every time one plays. This can be applied to both pen & paper RPGs and games of the video-variety.

Making an easy-to-use randomizer for a dungeon (or any other location that is separated into different rooms/sub-areas) is easy enough. Designing the whole thing so that it creates a certain type of shape or pattern that you wish to have for the game-area to have is the next step: Do you want a maze-like pattern with lots of dead-ends and crossings? Do you want a winding corridor? A sprawling necropolis of repeating chambers?

I wanted to simulate a cave-system that is somewhat natural in its genesis. Most caves are either carved by water (or lava, I guess) or fissures resulting from movements within the earth. While there are labyrinthine caves in nature, most of them are somewhat linear affairs branching off into side-caves every once. I limited my randomization-effort to four directions, as three dimensions and all that make things a bit to complicated. Then I thought up four different types of passage a player may encounter.

Adventures in KSP: Going for Duna!

I've been playing Kerbal Space Program for a while now, recording my progress in this blog. Let's head for the second big milestone in my space-program: The flight to Duna...

Creating a spacecraft able to fly to Duna, land there, and get back was going to be a big step for my space program. I decided that the month-long trip would need a crew of multiple Kerbals and a crew container to house them so they wouldn't go mad in a cramped capsule. It was going to be a multi-part spacecraft to be assembled in orbit. I decided to go for a three-section approach: A central command module with the habitat, avionics and power-supplies, a thruster-section with fuel and nuclear engines, and a lander that could parachute-land on Duna and then return back to orbit with a Kerbal on board. Getting the former and the latter into a stable orbit for assembly around Kerbin was easy, getting the heavy engine-section up there was a bit harder: It took me six attempts to get the thing up there, and that only worked because I re-routed the fuel from the thruster-section to go into the starting-stages. So the whole thing ended in orbit drained of fuel. Two Kerbals came up with the habitat/command-module and one came up in the lander. The crew was on board, all I needed to do now was to actually fuel the whole thing up...

I present: The KSC Troy. Kerbonaut spacewalking for scale.