Request for votes: Ascii Dreams Roguelike of the Year 2008

Voting is open for 'Ascii Dreams Roguelike of the Year 2008'.

How did the roguelikes qualify?

The list was taken from the roguelike releases announced on the Rogue Basin news section between January 1st and December 17th 2008 and from the list of Actively Developing Roguelikes maintained by Jeff Lait. There are a record 75 entries this year.

What about 'x'?

Make sure you announced your roguelike on Rogue Basin for next year. In particular, NetHack didn't make it in, again.

What about the 7 day roguelikes?

I decided to exclude any 7 day roguelikes that weren't announced separately.

What's the prize?

Pride. And a sexy logo. You can see the winning 2007 logo on the Dwarf Fortress links page. Logo designs for this year are welcome.

Having a competition is a dumb idea/offensive/stupid when you can't police the results.

Yep. Doesn't stop it being fun. You can vote for multiple different roguelikes. The idea here is that you will be encouraged to go out and download a roguelike that other people consider interesting, not that there is any kind of real competition element involved.

Results for 'Which Unangband School do you prefer?'

Thanks to the 29 of you who voted. I'm surprised about the lack of popularity for the Druid... The results were:

Wizard	9 (31%)
Druid	3 (10%)
Master	5 (17%)
Sorcerer	9 (31%)
Thaumaturgist	6 (20%)

You'll have another opportunity to vote shortly - it's that time of year again.

Design Re-Engineering

Valve is on the hunt again for upgrade advice - in this instance, for the Scout.

Unfortunately, I have little advice to offer here. I’m not a great scout player.*

But luckily, they’ve also recently released a patch that greatly improves playing the Engineer – by allowing the engineer to upgrade their dispensers and teleporters to level 3, with a consequent improvement in dispensing and teleporting speed. Here I am qualified to offer suggestions; the engineer is my first and foremost love and anything that allows the engi to fuss around their buildings and move around the battlefield more is an improvement in my book. So here are my engineering upgrade ideas:

The Quik-R-Ratchet: The Quik-R-Ratchet immediately (on one hit) builds any building to level 1. It allows buildings to be upgraded to level 2 at the normal pace, but cannot be used to upgrade a building to level 3.

Because running up and deploying buildings quickly is what engineers should do. It also helps two engineers work together much more efficiently, one with the Ratchet and one with the w’regular Wrench. Engineers should be encouraged to drop an annoying level 1 turret on the front line, or to move their turrets following an attack to confound the opposition.

The I-Spy-Shooter: The I-Spy-Shooter is a shotgun which immediately decloaks any spy, preventing them from cloaking for 5 seconds, and otherwise does half the damage of a normal shotgun.

There is nothing as frustrating as knowing there is a cloaked spy around, and not being able to do anything about it. You have to squat on your kit, back to the wall and pray. At least with the I-Spy, you’ve got a fighting chance. Of course, a disguise isn’t going to be stopped by this.

The Big Red Button: The BRB replaces the pistol, and allows the Engineer to teleport back to his teleport exit, provided both the exit and entrance are built and fully charged. Doing so discharges the exit, but requires the engineer stand still (in taunt mode) for several seconds to activate. ‘I said B...R...B...’

And this should allow Engineers to wander the battlefield, helping out others with their shotgun, while letting them get back to their equipment in a jiffy (provided a Spy hasn’t sapped it, of course). This may encourage engineers to build entrances in useless positions: if that is the case, it should be tweaked to teleport back to the entrance, or exit, depending on a left or right mouse click.

*I lied. At least about the advice thing. I might be able to come up with some scout solutions:

The Short Order Book: The Short Order Book replaces the pistol and can be used on any player on your team. Once you get an order from the player, by hitting them with the order book (at close range - a short taunt animation shows the scout writing up the order), the scout must collect a health and an ammunition pick up (or refill from a supply closet) to fill the order. Once the order is filled, the instant you touch a player of the same class as the order you took, you dispense them 25% of their ammunition, 25 health, 40 metal for an engineer and for a medic or spy, a 25% uber or cloaking charge. You can also part fill orders, with just either health or ammunition, but the class specific benefits will not apply.

This gives Scouts stuck behind the front line something to do, and helps speed up the game play for those teams stuck attacking or defending near their spawn point. And for once, a scout will be giving you health and ammunition instead of taking it. Understanding the game play for this is complicated, so the order book should take the form of a big checklist that gets filled in as the Scout completes the required actions:
[] Get health
[] Get ammunition
[] Give to _________

Once the scout has filled the first two steps, they automatically shout out as they move around the map e.g. 'I got an order for an engineer!'.

The Brooklyn Bridge: The Brooklyn Bridge, a fence board with a nail in it, as opposed to a regulation baseball bat, fixes any turret it hits in position until the Scout is killed, preventing the turret from turning, but still allowing it to fire in the direction it is pointing. It takes twice as long to attack with the Brooklyn as the regular bat.

Ah... the mythical anti-turret scout weapon. What rage and anger fills the Valve forums, discussing the pros and cons of various ways of the scout countering his ‘hard counter’ and the means by which he should do it. By whacking it, of course... the gun effect is far less useful than a Spy's sapper, and it is far harder to for the scout to get in position to use it, but against an undefended gun, the Bridge should provide a way past.

The Soar’n’Off Shotgun: The ‘shortie’ as it is affectionately known, does critical damage while the scout is in the air. It otherwise is incapable of criticals.

Because running around a target is more boring than running over it.

Pathfinding Redux

There is an ongoing discussion in the comments of the recent pathfinding post I did that you may want to read. Or contribute to for that matter.

The point I was making was that there can be so many complications to try to get pathfinding right, that you are probably better off coming up with a simple solution that works most of the time (such as making monsters always advance) than trying to capture all of the complexity aiming for a perfect algorithm. Your time can be more valuably spent elsewhere.

Violation of Contract

I'm about to violate a core tenant of Angband's user interface contract, and I'd like your advice.

Up until now, Unangband has followed Angband with regards to what can be in a single grid. In Angband, a single grid can hold:

1. a monster
2. either a trap or one or more objects or 'interesting' feature
3. if not an interesting feature or trap, then the grid must be a floor which is safe to walk on

This is a very important contract between the game and the player. That is, if there is an object in the grid, it is safe to walk on. You can actually use this to determine where traps are, by throwing objects around a room and see where they don't drop. More importantly, it allows you to interact with stacks of objects, by moving around the room, picking them up.

I'm in the process of implementing ranged traps. Ranged traps will have a region that they target, which triggers the trap when you move into it. This violates the above constraint, because you will end up with a grid that holds an object, and then a ranged trap where the region it targets includes the grids with the object.

I want to include the trap regions in the map display, to help the player avoid them. This leads to a second violation of the above contract: it's now possible to end up with a grid which is in the region of multiple traps. So I'm stuck with a user interface dilemma.

How do I display multiple trap regions, so that the player can most usefully determine which region is safe or unsafe, and the area effects of multiple regions? In Unangband, you can display up to 256 colours (more like 28 legible differences) and one ASCII character in each grid. There is no reverse video or stacking of multiple characters in a grid.

I want to be able to distinguish between the traps themselves, which you can disarm, and the trapped regions, which you can't disarm. The trap character is ^, and for historical reasons, I'd like to display the regions using x to indicate the trapped area - using the same colour as the particular trap type. I may have to use another character though, as x is already used for bridges of various kinds.

Suggestions welcome.

The Trap of Perfect Pathfinding

I'm firmly of the belief that there is no such thing as a perfect pathfinding algorithm. I've mentioned this during the article series on Unangband AI, but I'm working on improving traps in Unangband at the moment (a corrollory to getting druidic ongoing spell effects working), and it's very clear that in order to handle the complexity I want traps to have will overly complicate any attempt to build a 'correct' pathfinding algorithm.

I've just added the ability to avoid traps, as well as disarm them. Avoiding traps will become a more important requirement when I added ranged traps to the game (using a different implementation to NPPAngband ranged traps), but for the moment, think of it as particular trap types will not trigger if the player is in a particular state. If you are flying, you won't trigger pits or trap doors. If you are invisible, you won't trigger silent watchers. If you are in darkness, you won't trigger shafts of light. And so on.

My favourite is surreal paintings: you won't trigger these traps if you can see the painting. Which is just the kind of mess with your head weirdness that a magical scene that comes to life when you aren't looking should convey.

An important part of this concept is ensuring that the player can learn the various ways of avoiding traps. To do this, I try to make many of the trap types result in the game condition that then allows you to avoid the trap. This allows you to learn the associated way of avoiding the trap. For instance, one effect shafts of light can do is darken the room - which brings on the condition of darkness that prevents them from working. Similarly, magical symbols don't affect you if you have run out (or nearly run out) of mana. And an early magical symbol effect will be to drain you of mana.

Here's where the complication comes in: I want to make monsters avoid traps under the same scenarios as the player - to help the player learn these associations further. But this means that correct pathfinding will not only require knowing about the monster's permanent abilities, but their temporary ones. Which complicates pathfinding, because I need to model future effects. In particular, magical symbols will mean I'll need to model the monster's regeneration of mana, to determine whether they can safely cross an area filled with magical symbols (or more importantly, a single magical symbol with an area effect).

I've always had this problem, of course, because of dynamic terrain. Consider the following scenario and tell me how to design a pathfinding algorithm to handle it:

A monster runs into the room to attack the player standing in the doorway. Half way across, the player pulls a lever that floods the floor of the room with oil, then pulls out a match. Should the monster: a) keep advancing, b) retreat or c) stand still waiting for the player's next move? What other factors need to be considered?

Angband portable update

It looks like First Age Angband on the Nintendo DS is coming along strong: you'll probably want to look at the thread on the angband.oook.cz forums, which includes some good screenshots (and some terrible ones: Nick, what were you thinking?) and then head off to the download page, provided of course you have the right hardware to allow you to play homebrew games.

This comes hot on the heels of the original Rogue being ported to the iPhone. To port Angband to the iPhone will require moving or recreating the Mac port from the Carbon to Cocoa API as pointed out in this thread. Luckily, there is one Cocoa port already available.

The real challenges as Nick McConnell points out are handling the reduced screen size and alternate interface. He's handled most of the issues in FAAngband, which along with the Windows CE port is the best place to get your Angband portable gaming fix at the moment.

Game On

I just had the pleasure of attending Game On, an exhibition at the State Library of Queensland on gaming - containing if I'm not mistaken virtually every piece of hardware ever used to play computer games on, including the likes of the Magnavox and a DEC PDP-11 running Space War. While I was not able to lose myself playing as long as I wanted due to family commitments, I'm looking forward to returning in early January for a fuller exploration of the exhibits: that is unlimited cabinet and console gaming from a wide selection of arcade and home console systems.

If you're a gamer in Australia or New Zealand, you should make the trek. It's on until the 15th of February.

(I massively enjoyed the few minutes of Warning Forever, a freeware shooter featuring procedurally evolving bosses that I played - well worth a download).

Black Mesa Trailer

It's a day to get excited about a remake.

Designing a Magic System - Part Fifteen (On Hacks)

(You'll probably want to read parts one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen and fourteen first).

The school spell lists as I designed them in part fourteen are intended to be a mix of banding tradition as well as an attempt to find new ways of making magic in Unangband interesting. I've been inspired here, as much elsewhere, by the design work in Sangband and elsewhere by Leon Marrick and although aided by many, this particular series of articles is dedicated to him and the insight and inspiration he has given me and many others.

Angband is a game of resources: and each magic school has a different way of handling the resources of light, food, escape, healing, mana (spell points) and item identification which help define them. Wizards have no reliable source of food at all, and no high level healing, but can readily concentrate mana to recover it and have the most flexible range of escape spells, and both the ability to light rooms as well as to use light as an attack, and to replace their fuel based light source with a magical spell which can be indefinitely powered provided that sufficient mana is available (and that the wizard is not plunged into darkness by letting this spell run out - spells require light to be read from their respective spellbooks). The Unangband Wizard has the ability to take advantage of magical items such as wands and staffs: both with a spell (gauge magic) which readily identifies the number of charges that the item has, and a recharge magic spell to replenish these charges as they are used.

I attempted to balance the flexibility and power of the wizard escape spells by limiting them significantly for the other magical schools. Druids can only teleport to and from water or natural areas (defined as being adjacent to plants), masters only to and from darkness, thaumaturgists require a nearby source of fire, and sorcerors can only teleport temporarily, returning to the location that they teleported from after a moderate amount of time passes. This was done to allow other escape spells, such as temporary hasting, and spells which shape and change nearby terrain, such as wizard lock and warp wood, to be preferred by these classes in various ways. However, the escape spells are much less flexible, perhaps too inflexible, to be reliably used, and since escape is of critical importance to magic using classes it may mean that the wizard ends up being the preferred class choice for Unangband players.

Druids are encouraged to manipulate their surroundings and many druid spells have been made synergistic with each other: while they can only teleport near nature, they can create trees to bring nature to them in the first place, and then these trees can be used to tangleroot opponents or recover health using the tree of life spell; similarly the mana pool spell draws mana from nearby sources of water. Once opponents are entangled, it becomes much easier to affect them with slow building natural attack spells which are their forte (a yet to be implemented forte at the moment unfortunately), and the ground can be further prepared by shaping the rock by turning it to mud. Food for a druid is trivially satiated with a single spell, light is randomly scattered around them as opposed to lighting up whole rooms (which encourages more preparation to 'fill the gaps'), and item identification through a useful but obscure system of runes which hint at a particular items function.

Masters summon monsters, and while the friendly monster AI is powerful and flexible enough for monstrous combat between the master's allies and enemies, I need to give the master more granular control for when they summon multiple differing types of monsters. To encourage the master to have more investment in their minions, I've added a Find Familiar spell, which summons a unique creature that the Master can tailor over the course of their career - but if this creature dies, it is lost forever.

One thing I've enjoyed doing with various master spells is monster design: in particular the Animate Dead spell requires I come up with undead versions of various body parts and creature types. I'll say more about hacks shortly, but I've implemented this as a blend of hacks of various kinds, instead of a 'purer' convert a monster to undead function. The sorceror's Animate Object has been similarly entertaining.

Masters relish darkness instead of light, attacking with it in various ways, teleporting to and from it, and consequently have a temporary infravision spell which allows them to detect warm blooded monsters in the darkness - I should also add a Night Sight spell which provides further visual acuity at a higher level. High level healing is acquired by draining the life from living enemies (or allies), which simultaneously feeds the Master, and mana can be acquired by sacrificing hit points in return - since Masters need mana to pay off summoning debt, it could be overpowered letting this be more readily recovered. Item identification provides a general hint as to whether an item is beneficial, and what approximate effect it has.

Sorcerors are a mix of traps, charm spells, mental attacks and shape-changing: charms being more effective than the master's abilities in summoning, and shape-changing very much a work in progress. I've probably gone overboard in terms of making shape shifting unfriendly for the player to use as it forces them to discard equipment in various inventory slots. I suspect I'll move back to the Oangband/Sangband style solution of making shape-shifting just affect player attributes. Sorcerors are almost as flexible as wizards in the ways they can escape, perhaps more so, but lack a pure 'get away and stay away' single turn spell. They are superior to other classes in their item identification magics, and instead a source of sustenance, they can readily slow their metabolism to prolong the effects of food they have consumed. Sorcerors lack any ready source of light, healing or mana however, so will be forced to scrounge for other methods of illuminating the dungeon and recovering from wounds and spellcasting.

Finally thaumaturgists are attack, attack, attack, with a mainline in randomly assigned elemental types (to be implemented) and a sideline in acid and fire magics. They can usefully renew their torch flame to allow unlimited light and step into flames to teleport and escape but otherwise lack any utility spells.

After spending fifteen parts discussing various design decisions to try to come up with a consistent and systematic method, I've yet to find a solution. In particular, my answers are variations on two themes. The first is a refutation of the argument I made in part one, that 'As a game designer, [...] flavour is all important, but ultimately distracting'. Designing classes is almost all about flavour and style: do these abilities fit a consistent theme, do they complement each other, and so on? We can take on principles of good design, and the importance of the language and grammar of design will be increasingly a requirement as our games continue to increase in complexity. But ultimately, we want to present the player with interesting choices, a set of hills or valleys in the possibility space of the game, and to avoid overwhelming the player with too much choice, we have to highlight certain highs and lows, while ignoring others.

The second theme is the importance of exceptions. As a programmer, your intuition is ultimately to try to re-use your code where ever possible. But as a game designer, of the magic systems, you want to ensure that each ability uses at least some unique code path. That is, each ability in your game must in some way be a hack. It can be a small hack (fire burns, cold freezes) or a large hack (the recent implementation of a Find Familiar spell required a complete monster progression system to be interesting), but it should ensure that each ability is different, and therefore affects the game play in some unique way. Extend the ability idea as far as you can (cold freezes water, allowing you to cross rivers and block swimming monsters from attacking you) and then push yourself a little to see where it takes you. Don't obsess with trying to make the code clean and regular: it's the abilities that the player has that keep them empowered and playing, and suspension of disbelief should trump any reduction in code complexity.

Normally I finish these design articles with a set of principles, but here I only have practise. It has taken me close to 7 months to list these practises and there are many more devils in the detail that only a close inspection of the code and asking me questions will do justice to (and please, ask me on the blog rather than via email so that the questions and answers are shared for all). I'm not throwing my hands up in the air: but this type of design requires iteration and playing, and decisions, and your decisions will not be the same as mine.

(You'll want to continue reading the follow article series Designing a Magic System Redux, where I address issues, such as status effects, magic items and summoning which I haven't discussed so far).

One Fist, Two Fist, Red Fist, Blue Fist

Yah! Dystopia, my favourite Half-Life 2 mod will be coming to Steam.

NaNoWriMo

Ah - once again, I've failed to even come close to the NaNoWriMo required total. I've still found it a useful exercise, as always, and I've written far more fiction than I would have written otherwise. My problem is I still found plenty of time to blog, program and celebrate my birthday, and various other functions.

Or at least, I shouldn't think of that as a problem. I mean, that's living, write. I'll argue that we just need a southern hemisphere timed writing event, perhaps in May.

For those of you who've been following this blog, I strongly encourage you to do one of the following two things:

1. Jeff Lait has published his 2005 NaNoWriMo. You may remember him as another roguelike developer and obviously a talented author as well. So please: buy his book.
2. Alternately, you can help donate to the NaNoWriMo to keep this event running. They've failed to cover costs again. Details on donations are here.

Take care. I'll be trying again next year.