Familiar (Drone) Brainstorming

[Logorouge]

To follow the discussion that started in the Zeph thread, here's a place to discuss ideas for new familiars that could be added to the game. A little more of the utility type and a little less of the attack/defense type. (But anything is good to mention anyway) I'll start by listing a few of the more obvious ones:


-XP boosting drone
-Healing drone
-Drone that might drop a minor item on room clear (missile, health, money, etc)
-Secret revealing drone (useful?)
-Lockpicking drone
-Battery drone (small energy recharge when near empty)
-Antitrap drone (autodisable generator)
-Moneymaking drone (too much money making methods already?)

[Draco18s]

Healing Drone would have to be balanced carefully, but if it was in line with the existing healing mechanics (1 hp per N kills) it would fit right in (pending check on how the N kills are tracked currently).

"Loot" drone that drops missiles, etc. would be kinda neat.  It couldn't drop health items very often (see above), but getting the occasional missile or credit would be handy.

Secret detector drone I would pick up for those occasions where I've only got 2 missiles left and want to save them for Important Things.  Typically in such times I'd rather use them to get a health shard than open a secret room.  So knowing "oh that block is a switch" would help me conserve ammo.

Lockpicking drone amuses me.

Moneymaking you're spot on with, there's a ton of currency boosters already, and that's after the balance pass to reduce income and increase prices.

[Atlar]

Sounds like some pretty cool drone ideas.

I'd merge "secret revealing drone" and "lockpicking drone" to something like thief or recon drone. So it would highlight the secret switches and also tell you which items are in locked containers and/or shops. Keycard droprate would have to be adjusted for it to make sense though. Atm they are very abundant in later levels. Maybe it could also assign threat lvls to rooms if the floor is mapped...

Battery drone could work like bullet cancel drone in that it gives you like 30 energy every 20sec.

Same goes for "healing" and what I would call support drone. They could drop a health item (healing) or a random item (support) every minute or so. Maybe those could be paired with a bigger bullet block radius.

Some more ideas in the vein of bullet cancel drone:
-Death drone: Shoots a super powerful, piercing and aimed shot every 30sec
-Toxic drone: Spawns a pile of damaging toxic waste every 10sec
-Unstable drone: Explodes every xx sec for nice aoe dmg
-Cryo drone: Radiates cold every xx sec for medium aoe dmg and slow effect
-Tesla drone: Overloads surrounding enemies every xx sec for low aoe dmg and inhibites those enemies from shooting
-Trap drone: Places an exploding mine every xx sec
-Trap drone MKII: Places an exploding mine with slow effect every xx sec
-Trap drone MKIII:  Places an exploding mine with shooting inhibition effect every xx sec

And some more:
-Bully drone: Able to destroy shootables and mines on touch, also damages enemies on touch
-Trail drone MKII: Leaves behind a trail of enemy slowing... ice
-Daddy drone: Makes your attack drones more powerful -> higher dmg, lower recovery rate for offensive drone abilities, maybe inreased radii for drone abilities
-Mommy drone: Makes your defensive drones more powerful -> lower recovery rate for defensive drone abilities, maybe increased radii for drone abilities (shield, bullet cancel)

o/

[Logorouge]

I'd merge "secret revealing drone" and "lockpicking drone" to something like thief or recon drone. So it would highlight the secret switches and also tell you which items are in locked containers and/or shops.

I like this recon drone idea, being able to peek inside containers before using a key. I don't know if the content of the containers is decided before they're opened though.

The parent drones are also pretty cool, requiring the player to invest a bit to get the benefit.

Battery drone could work like bullet cancel drone in that it gives you like 30 energy every 20sec.

Same goes for "healing" and what I would call support drone. They could drop a health item (healing) or a random item (support) every minute or so.

The problem with making time-based utility drones is that in this game, 30 energy every 20sec = infinite energy by waiting in a corner.  Although boring, if waiting is rewarded many players will end up doing just that, which would be bad. I believe it's the same reason why SR doesn't have health regeneration.

[Atlar]

Hm, you have a point but I think energy drone could still work that way. There are are other items that are much more effective at energy recovery (that sac item especially) and full energy is no "get out of jail card" anyway. Its also not uncommon  to not have a safe spot  in a room. So what you say only applies to certain rooms and imo ppl would only use it to get back to full if the situation is dire if recovery time of the ability is long enough. Think it would be cool for those situations also to finish of THAT nasty enemy with an energy recovered railgun shot just before you die...
For the healing and support drones its more of a problem though... could be exploited to farm unlimited health/missiles/money. So those could give xx chance to drop an item on room entry.

And two more ideas:
-party drone(!): recolors your bullets to rainbow and has a  random drone effect
-mystery deone: low price, random high tier drone but has xx chance to be one of the following:
decoy: just floats around
needle drone: pricks you with a needle on every room entry for 2 dmg
slow drone: slows your own shots when they pass through it

[Misery]

The problem with making time-based utility drones is that in this game, 30 energy every 20sec = infinite energy by waiting in a corner.  Although boring, if waiting is rewarded many players will end up doing just that, which would be bad. I believe it's the same reason why SR doesn't have health regeneration.

Yep.  That's why I've shot that idea down every time it's come up.  There's already enough games that encourage the player to sit behind a stupid corner half the time; not happening here. Goes completely against the sort of fast pacing that this genre is supposed to have.  So... yeah.  No regen.

[windlesszephyr]

I wonder if it'd be possible to code a drone that functions like the bullet blockers, except once it absorbs x amount of bullets or damage or whatever, it explodes or something? I mean, if that were a thing it'd have to be super expensive to buy, and I assume would have a very small hitbox, but it could be rewarding if used right.

Along that same vein, what about a bullet reflection drone? Something that reverses the directions of intercepted bullets.

[ptarth]

Some feedback for the ideas.

• It has been argued that drones should need their virtual presence to have an effect. In other words, if a system attached to a player (aka a module) would do the same thing, then it probably shouldn't be a drone.
• I can sympathize with the argument. Drones are visually distracting, if the drone doesn't do anything and can be integrated into a non-visual player effect, then it may be for the best.
• Passive time based drones are also being avoided because it encourages the player to go afk while the effects stack (i.e., drop a missile every 30 seconds). And I see this has already been discussed to death.

• secret revealing drone & variants - can't really be done within the engine as is.
• Shot disabling - Potentially not that useful against regular enemies (they are too easy to kill) and overpowered against bosses. Really hard to balance this one.
• Offense drones - Some good ideas there. Misery & Pepisolo wants more non-offense drones though.
• Drone boosting Drones is an interesting idea. A new effect target type may need to be defined, but that should work. Would also work to have combination piece drones (collect all 5 for a prize!)
• bullet blocker - I like this. Using the drone is a little minigame where you try to get your drone to block X shots. On the down side this would also promote slow down play, especially with enemies having infinite shots. Perhaps the effect is a short term buff (e.g., 10-20 second damage/dodge boost).
• bullet reflection - Same impact as the bullet absorbers. We'd have to jury rig something to do the ricochet. Not sure its worth the time investment.
• RNG drone - Not a big fan of these. It promotes a try-fail-restart/ try-succeed-continue gameplay loop.

[Draco18s]

Two ideas smashed together in my head:
is it possible to make a done intercept shots and reflect them as allied shots? That is, change the owner, etc so you can hit enemies with their own shots. Obviously the damage would have to get boosted/altered, but that isn't important to the player.

[ptarth]

You can make them reflect, as hostile to everything shots, but given the different damage scales the player and enemies are on, combined with the volume of shots enmies produce, makes it very difficult to balance.

[Pepisolo]

-Drone that might drop a minor item on room clear (missile, health, money, etc)

Something like this might be possible. We actually have the art for a walking armory type familiar.

-Secret revealing drone (useful?)
-Lockpicking drone
-Antitrap drone (autodisable generator)

These all sound pretty good, but seem like ideas that aren't immediately possible in the engine. I'd love an anti-trap drone, one that destroyed lasers and floating mines.

-Death drone: Shoots a super powerful, piercing and aimed shot every 30sec
-Toxic drone: Spawns a pile of damaging toxic waste every 10sec
-Unstable drone: Explodes every xx sec for nice aoe dmg
-Cryo drone: Radiates cold every xx sec for medium aoe dmg and slow effect
-Tesla drone: Overloads surrounding enemies every xx sec for low aoe dmg and inhibites those enemies from shooting
-Trap drone: Places an exploding mine every xx sec
-Trap drone MKII: Places an exploding mine with slow effect every xx sec
-Trap drone MKIII:  Places an exploding mine with shooting inhibition effect every xx sec

And some more:
-Bully drone: Able to destroy shootables and mines on touch, also damages enemies on touch
-Trail drone MKII: Leaves behind a trail of enemy slowing... ice
-Daddy drone: Makes your attack drones more powerful -> higher dmg, lower recovery rate for offensive drone abilities, maybe inreased radii for drone abilities
-Mommy drone: Makes your defensive drones more powerful -> lower recovery rate for defensive drone abilities, maybe increased radii for drone abilities (shield, bullet cancel)

Lots of cool idea here. Kamikaze drone should make an appearance at some point, which would be similar to the Unstable Drone. Ice trail drone should be easy enough to do, I think Ptarth had this same idea, too. I might try to get that in for next build, actually. Mommy and Daddy drones sound cool. Thanks so far, guys. We'll definitely use this pool of ideas as inspiration when making any new familiars. The more cool ideas the better.

[Toranth]

Super-ball drone?  It just orbits around you, until you shoot it - then it 'powers up' and goes flying across the room, bouncing off of things and doing damage to enemies it impacts.  After a second or two, it powers down, and drifts back to orbiting passively again.

[Draco18s]

You can make them reflect, as hostile to everything shots,

Only "hostile to all" not player allied? That's...odd.

but given the different damage scales the player and enemies are on, combined with the volume of shots enmies produce, makes it very difficult to balance.

Assuming they can be made player-allied, the "easiest" solution to that is just modify their damage to be "whatever the drone's damage is."  e.g. whatever the drone's shot damage would be if it fired shots, do that.

If they can't be made player-allied, then have the drone intercept the shot, then fire off a shot of its own.  A little less cool, but functional.