Items, locked chests, etc

[Logorouge]

Thanks for going through my wall-of-text feedback. Much appreciated.

So, I propose 50%.

And I thought I was being bold by proposing 30%. :P
My % was merely to make it on par with Major Coinage, but it does make sense for it to be a fair bit better, since you still need to save credits to get any benefit.

[Draco18s]

So, I propose 50%.

And I thought I was being bold by proposing 30%.
My % was merely to make it on par with Major Coinage, but it does make sense for it to be a fair bit better, since you still need to save credits to get any benefit.

He did the math. And the math at 50% (despite being hyperbolic) was not unreasonable.

[Logorouge]

He did the math. And the math at 50% (despite being hyperbolic) was not unreasonable.

Even though the way I phrased my previous post might suggest otherwise, I completely agree.

[Draco18s]

He did the math. And the math at 50% (despite being hyperbolic) was not unreasonable.

Even though the way I phrased my previous post might suggest otherwise, I completely agree.

I was just agreeing too.

[Misery]

Yeah, these could do with working differently, I think. How about going back to Isaac style, but the wall would appear slightly cracked, thus making them easier to find?

They'd still be too easy in that case.  Visual cues usually don't work out too well with this sort of thing.  Which, of course, is why it's such a total pain.  Isaac is really the only one of these games to have ever gotten this right, or at least mostly right.  Usually secret rooms are all sorts of wonky in most roguelikes of any sort.  They're often either way too easy, like here, or stupidly hard to find, like Gungeon (where if they aren't in a treasure room, you're probably never finding them).

[Draco18s]

Reminds me of Tower of Druaga where the "puzzles" for finding the chests (chests being 110% required to actually beat the game) were arcane and every floor was different.  And there were no clues about what the puzzle was.  They could be literally anything from "break your pickaxe" (the pickaxe being the only item that lets you break walls, and the outer wall is unbreakable, if used its maximum times it breaks forever, and the outer wall insta-breaks it) to "stand still for 30 seconds" to "walk into the north outer wall for 7 seconds" to "wait until the timer turns red, then kill every monster on the floor" to "walk over the (locked) exit before killing any monsters."

You literally needed a walk-through guide in order to play.

[Misery]

....wow.  Even I wouldn't be THAT cruel.

Yeah, let's not do something like that one.

[z99-_]

If Isaac got it right, how did Isaac do it exactly?

[Misery]

If Isaac got it right, how did Isaac do it exactly?

In Isaac the rooms are secret, but you can use your head to determine likely locations based on the map.  So you don't exactly have to go around just bombing EVERY wall to find one.  Normal secret rooms have one type of generation (will always have 3 rooms bordering them), and super secret rooms will always only have one room bordering them and will tend to be somewhere near the boss room.  There's more to it than just that, but that's the basics of how they generate.  And it's easy to know where your bombs need to go when blasting a wall to check for one.

Because of this, they're absolutely viable to find, yet you definitely aren't just going to find them every single floor.  Sometimes you just cant quite locate them; maybe you don't have enough bombs, or maybe you have some but the number of potential spots you're seeing on the map isn't worth the possible wasting of those bombs, or whatever.  The main point is that you don't end up in said rooms on EVERY floor.  Right now, in this game, you'll pretty much always open up one on every floor, and without even trying.

[Draco18s]

....wow.  Even I wouldn't be THAT cruel.

Tower of Druaga dates back to the arcade box days. The game was designed to eat quarters.

[z99-_]

What about linking them to the miniboss rooms? Have one of the sides be bombable (without any other outward indications) to reveal the door. With a normal miniboss room, there are 4 door locations, with 2 leading to other rooms. This would leave 2 locations open to having the secret room. At the beginning when there is only 1 miniboss per floor, it would be rather easy to find the right location, but on higher floors with multiple minibosses it becomes somewhat harder, providing a nice natural difficulty increase. At the same time, the increased variability of missile ammo on earlier floors due to having generally less rooms makes sure that getting to the secret room isn't always a no brainer.

It also provides players an additional reason to enter miniboss rooms when they might not otherwise. For instance, I sometimes avoid miniboss rooms until the end to make sure I'm as strong as possible and I don't have any problems dealing with whatever's inside; but if I were really struggling, I could see myself deciding to go for the miniboss  in the hopes of getting a good secret room item.

[Logorouge]

Could be fun to think of a few sets of rules for those rooms generation so shooting missiles at walls becomes a valid method despite the later floors size, but it would be nice to know upfront how restricted we are as far as rule-making goes.

Are sacrifice and free stuff secret rooms generated under different rules currently?
Can you specify which type/size of room can get a neighboring secret room?
Can you do the Isaac-style 2-3 adjacent rooms requirement (or the opposite)?

[Draco18s]

I'm now tempted to come up with a series of rules, which when stated, are very easy to follow and go "I found the room" but which would be very difficult to discover.

Not in a "walk into the outer wall for 7 seconds" type, but in a "[under some condition], find the southern-most room and use a missile on a wall" kind of way.  The condition would be something the player would be able to be aware of (e.g. "Floor 3") but not necessarily readily apparent (e.g. "If playing as white gloss Floor 3, else Floor 4 [for this rule]").

[z99-_]

And the complexity of the ruleset could vary based on difficulty!

[Logorouge]

The most straightforward rule set I can think of for bombable secret rooms:

-Secret rooms must be adjacent to a 1x1 non-special room and nothing else.

Easy to understand, easy to remember. Plus that kind of rule will naturally scale in difficulty on later floors due to their increasing size.