General Category > Bionic Dues

Requesting ideas: "bugs" for Bionic Dues robots.

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x4000:
Okay, so this is a fun one. :)

Basically, we are working on implementing quite a few robots that all have various "bugs" that cause them to do something wonky (and usually funny) periodically.  But also which have tactical value.  Aside from just the regular stats, weapons, and other characteristics of each bot, the bugs it has are what make it feel really unique.

To be honest we've mostly been focused elsewhere other than bugs (loot, procedural dungeon generation, mission variety, and on and on), so we're only now really getting heavily into the bugs.  Off the top of my head, the ones we have so far are:

- Periodic miss change: dumbots always miss their first shot, then every other shot after that.
- Low ammo: a few bots fire just a shot or two, then are out of commission for a while.
- Periodic random fire: the blunderbots fire their rockets in a random the first time, then every other time after that.  This often does massive teamkill, but can also just as well hit you.
- Slowness: the murderbot has a 50% chance of not acting every other turn (this is key for you to be able to keep ahead of it, as it's invincible and super deadly)
- Double-agent: the razorbot attacks everybody.
- Hilarious charge: the batbot runs either toward you or away, every other turn, and tries to low-range fire at you.
- Snuggler: bombbot can't really attack you, it just sidles right up to you... and is super explosive... and often gets in your way so you have to shoot it.
- Forgetful: every other turn, moves in a random direction.

Those are, of course, just the bugs.  There are also a lot of things that enemies do that are not negative to themselves:

- Various AOE patterns.
- Various ranges and other damage characteristics and all that.  Armor, what have you.
- Buffing nearby bots
- Double moves per turn, but uses one to shoot cover to open the room up.
- Stealth so invisible on sensors, and invisible in general until within low sight range.
- Etc.

I'm open to suggestions on both fronts.  There are several more brainstorming sessions in the future for Josh and Keith and I, and we tend to come up with this sort of thing pretty quickly.  But many heads are better than one, and so I wanted to toss this out to the community to get an even wider field of ideas; I'm sure the game will benefit from that. :)

Thanks!

Coppermantis:
Does the AOE do friendly fire? If not, there could be a bug that makes it so that it does.

Static Field: Add a miss chance or other debuff to nearby bots

Feedback: Damage done to this bot is applied in a reduced form to its nearby allies

x4000:
AOE does indeed do friendly fire (so do missed shots; those shots actually go somewhere and may hit something, friend or foe).  In general, full friendly fire is on (including you hitting yourself with rockets).

Nice on the static field and feedback!

Breach:
Oil slick/leak: the oil cans on one of the bot leaks and creates an oil slick. This is a couple of tiles (maybe 2x2, something like that) and has the effect of disabling bots on it for a turn (slipping over) and propelling any bot that tries to move across it to the opposite end of the slick from where they entered the 'slick zone'.

Lights out: a bot sends out a pulse on a specific frequency that shorts out the lights. If your bot doesn't have nightvision (potential equipment choice if that's feasible?) then range is halved/reduced by a third for one turn. Could also apply to fellow enemy bots.

Hologram projector: one of the bots produces a hologram of another bot in the area. It might be another enemy one or it might be one of your bots! If it is the latter, enemy bots will attempt to attack the hologram instead of your real bot.

Barricade master: one of the bots obtains an uncanny ability to build a sturdy barricade composed purely of scrap metal in an extremely short amount of time. This barricade blocks shots but is destructable (to prevent any instances of levels getting permanently blocked - unless ammo is limited of course).

Not sure if those are on the right lines but just a few ideas :)

x4000:
Some of those are fairly intensive to code, but I do like the creativity in them.  I'm looking mainly for a mix of behavioral and stat-related stuff, whereas those are more like "spells" in a non-robot roguelike sense.  The spell ideas are super interesting actually, and feel free to suggest them because you never know.  We are looking into various additional things of that scope between now and 1.0, and so it's good to have a list of ideas.  We aren't going to try and go crazy with that sort of thing, though, because we feel like the design is already really solid and tacking on too much stuff of that nature is just going to harm our ability to polish in the meantime.

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