Been pushing on two initiatives last week, one of which was reimagining the role of towns in the overworld. Early builds of Dungeonmans had towns built much in the same way as dungeons: mostly random layouts with winding paths between rooms.

These towns were unique without being unique. Sure you never knew exactly where or what shape the Inn was, but it didn’t matter, you’d find it and it would be the same as every other Inn. An Inn, a Shop, some houses with pleasant peasants and the occasional Town Mayor, a portly man who’d offer you a quest to go kill Scrobolds somewhere.

The end result of all that is that towns were boring, and that won’t cut it for the Dungeonmans of today. They may never be as exciting as actual dungeons, crawling with monsters, but a new town on the horizon should make the player happy and eager to see what’s inside.

So, yeah: Towns.

Towns are focused, small locations with pleasant layouts. Using a psuedorandom location builder similar to the Crypts, towns are a few houses and shops built along some roads or nice park land. Navigation should be easy.

Towns contain a few houses and shops, and one main attraction. The houses have NPCs to say silly things, bookshelves to plunder and barrels to kick over. Wouldn’t be an RPG without that. The shops are selected from a wide variety of shop types. “Weapon Store” is a bit generic, but maybe this town has someone who focuses on cloth armor, or a collector simply obsessed with hammers. The shops are a chance to put your gold to work.

The Main Attraction is a reason to come back. The most basic example would be a tavern that serves a delicious, stat-enhancing meal. It won’t be useful for all time, but it would be of use while you’re in the area and you may want to remember it if you’re hunting in the wilds nearby. Perhaps there’s a super fancy artisan who has exceptional gear on sale for an outlandish price? Maybe there’s even crazier stuff I’m not going to talk about here? Let’s hope so.

Here’s a couple of screens showing the new art. Bobby’s environments are starting to roll in, and you can see the Crypt for the first time, as well as new and improved Academy art. Click for larger versions, though I’ll be damned if the page listens to me when I tell it to open them in a new tab.

Rather than just go over this week’s work (which was mainly systems and engine code, nothing glamorous) I wanted to talk about Consumables. Just for clarity, I’m referring to the typical array of items with limited uses that provide an interesting effect. Potions, wands, and scrolls are the most typical, but you could also count ammunition in there as well.

They’re a staple of the genre, everyone who can rub two dice together knows about potions of healing and scrolls of fireball. In roguelikes, they’re often mysterious at first. You find a potion, swirling with color, but you don’t know what it does. You can identify it with magic if you’re lucky, or you can just choke it down and hope for the best.

Over the last week I’ve been collecting opinons and having discussions with a number of roguelike fans and critics, a number of whom contributed to The Seven Day Roguelike Challenge held a couple of weeks back. What are some of the issues with consumables in games today?

The mysterious aspect is the number one feature. Potions can often be dangerous instead of helpful: sure maybe it’s a healing potion, maybe it’ll light you on fire from the inside. Unfortunately, they’re also necessary to stay alive in difficult situations. Using the right potion at the right time is a key part of surviving and winning. However, player’s attitudes towards this are mixed. It’s almost a foregone conclusion that early potions are going to be wasted if you are being safe.

Antinumeric: “If they start off unidentified then the best thing to do is frequently unintuitive (find a safe spot and chug, pray you don’t get a good potion that youd want to use later) and they are more useful if the player memorises all the different possible potions so they don’t need to drink them all.”

100 HOGS AGREE: “I have never had fun identifying items in roguelikes. I have always found it to be a massive chore and I usually end up putting off identification for as long as I possibly can (usually this time is after I have died).”

On the other hand, it’s fun stumbling across old and forgotten treasures that contain unknown power. Finding that [?Mysterious Sword?] and seeing it become a Mighty Nightsteel Blade of Suffixes + 10 is a great feeling.

Dross: “I love identifying tons of items at once, it scratches the same itch that opening sealed product in Magic does.”

doctorfrog: “Item ID is a weird thing that is both a pain, but also a somewhat enjoyable strategy puzzle that I don’t think you can take out of a good roguelike.”

Dungeonmans is going to approach this from an angle that gives the player the option of passing knowledge from one generation to the next. Upgraded locations such as the Alchemy Lab or Enchantry at the Academy can give new heroes a head start on consumable IDs, with more being revealed as the Academy grows. Players are free to decline this power as well, meaning that those who want to stick to the old ways can do so.

When a potion can bring you back from the brink of death, or cause your muscles to burst with incalculable strength, it seems wise to save them for the right moment. Such are the thoughts of many dead Dungeonmens, who let the right moment pass by unknowingly. The hoarding instinct is a strong one, but what most players don’t realize is that games are usually balanced around active use of consumables. Hanging on to them makes early fights harder, and if you hang on to them too long, you’ll outgrow their usefulness.

Roctavian: “Certainly you have to exercise some restraint and not, say, drink a potion of curing in Crawl every time you get poisoned or sick, but it’s generally far better to spend than save. ‘Dying with useful consumables in your inventory’ is practically an insult in the Crawl community.”

andrew smash: “There’s no reason to hoard your cure light wounds potions that might heal 1d6 HP or whatever to use in later fights when that amount of damage might be trivial and not worth wasting a turn over.”

What could help this? Games that employ shops give the player an opportunity to offload unwanted gear, generally allowing them to turn four or five of an item into one that they actually want. Actual Alchemy is another option, letting players mix, match, and dissolve items until they brew the thing they want– or a deadly poison.

Indecisive: “I guess the most important thing I hope for in future roguelikes is for every consumable to be useful… (and) I’d like to see consumables that aren’t the same stuff that gets pulled out for every other roguelike. Sure, they are staples because the mechanics support them the best, but damn, lets get creative!”

Antinumeric: “If I’m in combat and panic-drinking potions I don’t want to get paralysis, I want to get something that can help, but only if I use it correctly, like temporary electric skin, or flaming weapons or the ability to walk through monsters.”

It is absolutely time to step past the traditional uses of these items and into more interesting waters. Scrolls and wands are often the methods which roguelikes use to grant additional power to characters, even the tubbiest fighter in the heaviest plate armor can use a wand of speed, levitate or teleport. In Dungeonmans, though, powers like those are part of the mastery system, which means they’re available to nearly any character that’s created.

Dungeonmans has a solid collection of “staple” consumables, ones that players expect. But there are also consumables that let you do things you can do in no other way. The most challenging aspect of that sort of development is keeping at least one foot on the ground. There’s a line between creativity and novelty, usefulness and goofiness. Even in the most lighthearted of games, players tend to roll their eyes at the 20th Wand of Comedy they pull up. One option is to combine perks with drawbacks, of which there is no finer example than Morrowind’s Boots of Blinding Speed.

That’ll do for today. Many thanks to the bustling roguelike community at the Something Awful forums for joining the conversation.

Pictures! Here’s some shots of graveyard combat in action. Let’s follow Lady Crushfeld VII as she explores a ruin discovered in a shrouded forest. Get to clicking!

Surrounded! Well that didn’t take long. Zombies are closing in from the south, and a trio of Boneshooters have set up to the east, behind the iron fence. Note that while the fence blocks movement, it doesn’t block Line of Sight. The trees, however, do so. What to do? Execute a Long Jump and try to get next to those Boneshooters? Shield Rush the zombie to the Southwest in order to get distance from the ranged attackers? Or just down a cocktail of potions and start beating the crusty boneshards out of everyone with in arm’s reach while yelling really loud? These are the heavy and ponderous questions one must answer in the rich world of Dungeonmans.

This shot shows Lady Crushfeld VII clearing out some of the fallen temple areas, generally where the good treasure and stronger monsters live. Right in the corner of her vision is a Bone-Damned Apostate, ready to drop all sorts of ruinous green magic on our heroine. The zombies to the Northwest have to funnel through the single hole in the fence, so she’s got time to maybe take cover behind the statue and clear the skeletons, or just try to make an end rush and get to the Apostate before he starts breaking bad with the really unfortunate spells.

 

Here is a bold action shot, showing our heroine use Furious Assault against a Defeated Captain. Dangerous foes, the Defeated Captains can use Sound the Sundered Horn to buff the strength and speed of nearby undead, making those slow moving Zombies suddenly a great deal more threatening. Let’s nip that crap in the bud right now.

Finally, a couple of smaller shots showing off things like the Ancient Cryoscientist firing Icy Graveshards at heroes, and of course the opportunity for treasure in the Graveyards opening up old, dusty coffins and sarcophagi.

In other news, there’s been plenty of code written this week and other improvements, but I’m going to keep those in my pocked for the next Thursday update, when I don’t have as many pretty pictures 🙂 back to work!

First of all, if it’s still 28 February 2013 and between 12 and 2 PM Eastern Standard Time, stop reading this and check out artist Bobby Frye as he streams some of his sprite work on Dungeonmans. It is an incredibly more rewarding experience than reading a dusty old development update.

This week in Dungeonmans Development has been a whirlwind of bug fixing and business development, and not quite as much fun new features as I like. I’ve given myself monthly milestones and so the last week of the month is often a time to cross i’s, dot t’s, and generally clean up whatever messes I might have made while putting stuff together.

I did manage to complete the layout and generation of Caves, which actually might be better off being called Tunnels given the design. They are build to connect two points in the overworld map, you enter one side and come out the other. A good deal of exploring a cave involves winding tunnels and larger caverns, with passageways that go in many different directions. There’s a main passage from one side to the other, but it isn’t always obvious which means there will be some wrong turns along the way. Fortunately for our hero, caverns that are otherwise dead ends usually contain a camp of monsters who are lairing or just hanging out, guarding a worthy pile of treasure. Exploration will be rewarding no matter what direction the player heads off in.

What’s the big deal about two entrances? In the overworld, Mountains and Badlands provide a mazelike environment to explore, and sometimes a mountain range presents a barrier that the player is forced to go around. Caves help get around that, allow the player a shortcut to locations that might otherwise require long overworld journeys. Exploring is great fun, but it is also nice to be able to claim clear paths from one place to another when you have a destination in mind.

Other than that, I spent some time clearing out old cruft from the codebase to make it easier to write area generation functions, fixed some annoying save game bugs, and did some work into making Dungeonmans scale to any resolution. I also received some absolutely wonderful environment art for the Graveyard, once that gets wrapped up I am totally putting together some new screenshots.

Things have been moving at great speed over the last couple of weeks, and unfortunately today I don’t have a great picture show for the updated. Graveyards and Ruins are relatively young, and the content is still temporary art.

Found deep in forests, away from roads and friendly towns, Graveyards are a source of danger, treasure, and knowledge for the brave. Unlike the typical dungeon, the environment is open and enemies can come from everywhere. Gravestones and rusted iron fences can impede your path, but the clever Dungeonmans will use them to his advantage in keeping foes at bay and fighting on his terms. Even so, the ground is full of the unquiet dead, and it should be no surprise to see threats bursting up from the earth in an attempt to surround you.

These graveyards also contain various ruins: old mausoleums and small temples that have cracked and fallen with age. Here, stronger groups of foes gather, ancient guardians and soldiers who never figured out that the fight was over. The cracked columns and old statues can provide solid cover for stick-and-move type harriers, or just be a pretty backdrop for armored titans who want to chew through enemies with a two handed weapon.

Careful searching of these graveyards will reveal generous treasure as well as the possibility of even greater danger: the old crypts underneath, sealed long ago but exposed in the fighting. More dungeons!

Mechanically, what does all this mean? Well, here’s the goal for a Graveyard Ruin:

* Graveyard areas that contain organized semi-random layouts of gravestones as well as other graveyard props. The idea is to present some degree of order, even though things are old and entropy has set in.
* Graveyard areas allow for zombies to bust up through the ground from time to time. The player will have some warning about timing and position, and be allowed to react.
* Mausoleum / Ruin sections provide focused encounters with larger and more varied monster packs, though as long as the player stays on the stone they won’t have to worry about monsters breaking through the ground.
* Arrange the graveyard generally so that the best rewards and strongest encounters are far enough from the entrance to feel meaningful.

Word words words words I know. Eventually, pictures. Hopefully, over the course of development and iteration, I’ll hit that goal and make the Graveyard Ruin fights feel totally different from a regular dungeon crawl. We’ll see!

UNTIL THEN why don’t you have an awesome time crushing monsters on your tiny handheld communications device? I am happy to shill for the excellent QuestLord, a dungeon crawl set in the old ways of first person exploration and combat. Grid based maps, a charming world, and tiny pixels doing great big things. QuestLord was built with the same independent fire and spirit that fuels Dungeonmans, except flames for QuestLord were powering someone who can actually make a good game.

Seriously go look at it.