TOME 1.0! - and other Roguelikes.

[Echo35]

Ah, but where is the emacs of roguelikes?

Well, I mean, ToME and Falcon's Eye have graphics...

But do they have a butterfly-based command?

It used to be said that emacs could do everything but brew coffee.  Apparently it was said too loudly.

Some people at my old college wrote a shell script to vend soda from a Coke machine.

[keith.lamothe]

Some people at my old college wrote a shell script to vend soda from a Coke machine.

Is that "old" as in "I once went there" or "old" as in "before there was a crater there"?

[Echo35]

Some people at my old college wrote a shell script to vend soda from a Coke machine.

Is that "old" as in "I once went there" or "old" as in "before there was a crater there"?

The former.

[madcow]

Don't starve has had an official release. I'm finding it quite awesome. I think my record has been nearly 2 weeks surviving, and that was when early on I decided to just make a bunch of random items to see what they did and not really even planning to survive.  Surprisingly, I didn't find any silk, which I've found to be fairly important to making some of the equipment.  I'm still rather a beginner to the game all things considered though.

I tried to stay as spoiler free there, as a lot of the fun is in toying around with things and seeing what happens.

I think my biggest wish (and peeve wih the game) for the game though is if they had an option to bypass he say 1 grind which is honestly just boring. Start with some random resources, part of the map cleared, the resources in that cleared map area, and on day 2 or 3.  Those first few days (once you've played it a few times) are really not fun and just consists on clicking on everything to build up starter resources.

[LordSloth]

Dungeon Crawl tournament begins in ten minutes! Play Dungeon Crawl online, meet interesting people, die to their ghosts!

[zespri]

Somewhere in another thread that I  can't be bothered to find right now, I bitched about how I feel about "loosing is fun" crap and being unable to save the game progress. If I play roguelikes, say FTL I keep the latest gamesave (that the games insisting on overwriting for no good reason) and I restore it to be able to try again when I make a mistake. Making me do this manually outside of the game in my opinion is simply bad design.

This is one of the reasons I'm not rushing to play "Don't Starve" that many people rave about. It's a game with no winning condition, even worse, you WILL lose eventually it's just the matter of how long. I see no fun in it.

The reason I started typing this post is that I came across this interesting thread http://www.fantasystrike.com/forums/index.php?threads/why-i-hate-the-term-permadeath.7836/
While I don't agree with Sirlin on many other things this one I happen to agree with him on: Permadeath in computer games is just... silly.

**Disclaimer: Since we are on Arcen forum, I'd like to point out that all the above does not apply to any games produced by Arcen. I love the guys and I'm willing to excuse them for many things because they do so many more other things right.**

[Hearteater]

To me, perma-death only makes sense in a random game.  If each game is different, perma-death challenges you to solve the problem without making a single fatal mistake.  Non-fatal mistakes need to be recovered from.  The mindset it places the player in is very different from a standard die-and-reload game.  The emotional reward for success is also significantly greater.  I believe perma-death games are good at teaching people how to adapt and overcome mistakes, as well as to overcome the negative emotions we all feel when we make mistakes.

Perma-death in fixed-content games though is silly.

[Mánagarmr]

Permadeath is a game mechanic some people like, some not. It can be both frustrating and extremely rewarding. When you finally beat a game that has permadeath, it usually feels like a real achivement. That said, permadeath simply doesn't work in a game such as Bioshock, for instance.

It's meant for randomly generated games such as FTL, Rogue, DoomRL etc. It's a specific genre and they are created and balanced around the fact that you have permadeath. You can, very often, rather easily get around the permadeath mechanic and cheat it. But this should really only be made if you are testing things. Because when you start cheating the game the sense of achivement, and thus the point of the game, is lost. When I started cheating in FTL was when I stopped playing. (Granted, I've finished it several times on normal, but I couldn't be arsed to unlock all the ships.)

I dunno, to me it's a game mechanic like any other. It has a point and appeals to a certain type of player. Just like regenerating health. Some like it, some don't.

[Mánagarmr]

To me, perma-death only makes sense in a random game.  If each game is different, perma-death challenges you to solve the problem without making a single fatal mistake.  Non-fatal mistakes need to be recovered from.  The mindset it places the player in is very different from a standard die-and-reload game.  The emotional reward for success is also significantly greater.  I believe perma-death games are good at teaching people how to adapt and overcome mistakes, as well as to overcome the negative emotions we all feel when we make mistakes.

Perma-death in fixed-content games though is silly.

Also what he said.

[keith.lamothe]

Permadeath has its place.  Some people really don't like it.  Some people have their absolute-most-enjoyable moments of gaming in a hardcore-permadeath setting.  For me (and others, I suspect) it's actually therapeutic, not in the sense of "calming" (directly), but in the sense of helping me deal with my aversion to risk and recovering from (rather than erasing/"quitting out of") mistakes.

Normally when a feature provokes such strong positive and negative reactions a good design is to just make it optional.  In the end, many games with permadeath do that.  But even there you actually lose part of the effect of the feature: people like me who benefit (both in terms of game enjoyment, and in terms of personal development) from the experience of playing with permanent-consequences but are still uncomfortable with it will go "the path of least resistance" and disable the hardcore option.

I think I enjoyed FTL substantially more due to the fact that it did not have that option, for instance.  I mean, sure, I could have gotten around it via the file system, but that wasn't readily-at-hand enough for me to give in and do it.  Whereas if it had just had a "hardcore?" toggle in game setup I would have just disabled it there.

I like to say that the "people problems" (i.e. psychology) of game development are far less tractable than the actual technical challenges.  This is one of those cases.


All the above said, one thing I would like to see explored more is "permanent consequences" without "permanent game over".  I'm fine with accepting the consequence of "ok, that character's dead, you failed, etc etc" but I think it would be more enjoyable if I could maintain continuity with the previous experience.  Dwarf Fortress and other games do go that route, but I think there's more to be explored there.

[madcow]

One feature I think I would like to see in games with permadeath is to start the game a few levels in it. It's often fun to build up a new character that's true. But sometimes it can feel a bit like a grind to go through the early levels which can tend to have the samey tactics to them.

It would be so cool if you could start a few levels in, with -random- gear or skills.

For instance if in Don't Starve you had a random assortment of resources, gathering the first day of resources in that game is rather tedious I find. As there's no tactic and its just walk around clicking EVERYTHING.

Or in a roguelike, if it started you on the 3rd dungeon level or something with -random- skills, and random equipment. It wouldn't be a way to power level through the early portions as you won't have control over what you had, but it would cut out that tedious early building phase.

Edit: Also agree that permadeath on fixed games is bad, it really needs the randomness. Also on games that get lengthy it would be bad. Roguelikes work with it, because each game is relatively short. Trying to play some epic RPG like Witcher or Dragon's Age with permadeath would be... painful

That said, I think it -can- work in strategy games which can tend to be long, so long as there's points for recovery and it feels fair(ish).

[Mánagarmr]

As far as games with permanent consequences for failiure, I love those. Games like Mass Effect (where characters can die, albeit you really have to screw up to do this, and the impact is rather small) or Deus Ex: Human Revolution. I love the little details as that, as it makes it less of a game and more of an experience.

A common thing in games are time limits. "Hurry up!" the game tells you, but you can actually stand there twiddling your thumbs because the game is waiting for you. Imagine my surprise when the hostages were already dead when I finally got to my objective. Becuase I had been faffing about exploring. It wasn't something that prevented me from continuing the game, but it was a permanent thing and I felt bad. Such things are awesome!

[Mick]

Time limits are things I wish games had more of. I didn't like how in Skyrim every quest will just pause itself and wait for me to wander around for months. It makes it feel like much less of a dynamic open world that they are going for. Time should be a resource you have to spend wisely.

[madcow]

As far as games with permanent consequences for failiure, I love those. Games like Mass Effect (where characters can die, albeit you really have to screw up to do this, and the impact is rather small) or Deus Ex: Human Revolution. I love the little details as that, as it makes it less of a game and more of an experience.

A common thing in games are time limits. "Hurry up!" the game tells you, but you can actually stand there twiddling your thumbs because the game is waiting for you. Imagine my surprise when the hostages were already dead when I finally got to my objective. Becuase I had been faffing about exploring. It wasn't something that prevented me from continuing the game, but it was a permanent thing and I felt bad. Such things are awesome!

I should clarify what I meant about permadeath in epic games. Permanent consequences but still letting you finishing the game (call it partial successes? You can keep playing, but things are screwed up) are awesome. If an epic game had roguelike perma-death, where you die and it deletes your save file - that would suck. But companions dying (so long as it doesn't make the story less interesting/prevents you from beating the game) is great.  I don't mind less than optimal endings due to me messing up a game. I don't mind throwing away a game that's only a few hours long. Throwing away a 10+ hour game is something else entirely

[keith.lamothe]

Time limits are things I wish games had more of. I didn't like how in Skyrim every quest will just pause itself and wait for me to wander around for months. It makes it feel like much less of a dynamic open world that they are going for. Time should be a resource you have to spend wisely.

I'm a bit of a broken record on this, but: Din's Curse and Drox Operative!  DC makes it a bit more personal because when the stuff hits the fan it's all aimed at your one poor town.  Drox has advantages in other ways because it's a broader scope thing with multiple factions, so you may not care quite so much about each particular world that dies but the impact of you using your time wisely are in some ways grander in scale (at least, looked at from a particular way; in some cases you may just feel that circumstances ran away from you).