Yakoob on 27/1/2013 at 06:16
AS you guy know I announced my Postmortem game recently, and today for the very first time I let someone else play it, while I set next to them silently with a notepad and pen, and watched...
An hour later, I had two full pages of very valuable notes! So glad I did this because it showed some important confusions/unclear elements about game flow/ui/etc. that could lead to potentially missing content. Easy to fix and obvious in retrospect, but you tend to not notice it when you're used to your own design.
Overall feedback has been very positive, and the playthrough took longer than I expected (even with some missing content!) Even got a few giggles out of the more sarcastic and tongue-in-cheek dialogue options :) Best motivational quote: "You created all this background world yourself? Wow!" Also said friend was late for her next meeting cause she lost track of time playing (wee!)
Very happy and excited to fix up the issues and finally unleash it to the interested testers/crew :D
Volitions Advocate on 27/1/2013 at 06:19
I certainly not arguing against your point fafhrd, I'm just saying that heading to the deviant art forums might not get any results.
SubJeff on 27/1/2013 at 12:07
There must be some royalty free stuff you can alter/filter to get the right cards Faf. It'll be a damn shame if the game isn't as popular as it could be because of the art.
Yakoob - You have mail.
Ulukai on 27/1/2013 at 16:59
Quote Posted by Subjective Effect
Is it a set of conditional algorithms? I'm planning on creating a bunch for semi-random enemy generation in something I'm working on in Unity.
Pretty much. The corridor algorithm also uses recursion to effectively explore the space available to it.
SubJeff on 27/1/2013 at 18:29
The game I'm playing with uses time to generate enemies. Within each minute there can only be a total of X enemies, so that means you either face a few tough ones, a lot of weak ones, or a mixture. I'm trying to stop their being extremes and also implement special enemies at specific times. I'd like to spawn the specials in time with music but alas I have none yet.
demagogue on 28/1/2013 at 05:22
My game is turning out to be pretty GTA-like. It's an open free-roam city with different neighborhoods. So I'm spawning AI based on the character of the neighborhood. The poorer it is, the higher % of bandits or sans-culottes you can expect, or any other kind of AI (if you're near a big church, more clergy, etc)... And then very similar to what you just mentioned, a set number spawned at any given time. You're not just shooting all AI, though, I want you to also be able to do things like stump for them to vote for you (which really means tweaking the statistics of the apartment block) or to work for you RTS-style (to join your 'army' if you're a revolutionary-leader, military officer, or nobility looking for security/restoration; or to hire them for tasks. But all the RTS ideas are a goal for the far future; too much to chew now).
I'm also planning on differentiating between spawned-AI (which are mostly for pure gameplay, fighting or simple point&click interactions) and NPC-AI, which are persistent AI that are doing things like another player (buying property & running a business, running for elections and voting for political proposals in the Assembly, etc), and maybe they have an avatar, but they act "in the background" and the big interactions will probably be through GUI, Paradox Interactive-style (a portrait in a window with buttons under it to click). They're your actual competition. (I'm also leaving it open to be multiplayer, where some of these would literally be other people online.) The NPC-AI are the same people from the start of the game, though if one dies, a new one takes its place. The objective of the game is to become emperor of France, but with the NPCs all perpetually vying for the spot, you can see how it could be a game that goes on forever like Civilization if you wanted to just keep playing (even after you've "won").
Spawned-AI and NPC-AI are both set into factions that frames what they can do & how they relate to the other factions -- royalty, nobility, clergy, farmers, bourgeoisie/merchants, sans-culottes/radical workers, military, bandits... The player gets to pick which faction they want to start in, which sets the kind of job they start in & some special things they can do (and difficulty), but is otherwise free to do whatever they want, with their approval-rating by all the factions changing with their behavior. (So you can act outside your faction; it's just a risk alienating your own, like a priest can get defrocked. Then again a noble giving away their property could save their neck from a reign of terror & gain tolerance from the radicals.)
Oh, another category. I'm also debating actually having entire apartment blocks be kind of like quasi-AI... They buy food and supplies & have shops that sell services to make money; though shops can go bankrupt & people can starve (increasing the % of bandits). If you own an apartment block, then you set those options yourself and "develop" the neighborhood (& your income and influence); defaulting to a manager that runs it for you. So most of the economic gameplay would actually be clicking on an apartment block and playing through the GUI. And again there's a relationship between the apartment blocks and the spawned AI around it.
SubJeff on 28/1/2013 at 18:14
Quote Posted by icemann
Sounds alittle System Shock 2-ish in how it did its enemy spawns.
I didn't know it worked that way in SS2.
Each level lasts for a certain amount of time with specific events at certain times, some of which mark points in a level. So at the halfway mark you get a specific special enemy and then a few set seconds of respite and some fireworks, at the run up to the end of you get the same but with deliberately ramped up spawns of harder enemies. There are no bosses because the other enemies are all spawned by the boss, so in that way each level is like one continuous boss fight.
Can't wait til I can show it.
dema - what engine are you working with?
Bakerman on 28/1/2013 at 18:54
Quote Posted by Ulukai
Have been working on procedural dungeon generation for my top-down roguelike which I first posted shots of over a year ago :p
Great stuff. I've dipped into that before, but never pushed it very far. Looks like you've got room placement down really well! I try to make my stuff more functional - i.e. less loopy corridors and so on. I have no doubt you know of Roguebasin already, but (
http://roguebasin.roguelikedevelopment.org/index.php?title=Articles#Map) just in case.
Quote Posted by Fafhrd
(and Java, since you can't do one without the other)
ARG NOT THE JAVA. How's that going for you? Nice work on the game. I reckon the art is super-important to get people on-board the first time they see your game. Gameplay is what they'll stay for. Have you tried going to any meetups of IGDA or similar? You might find people there looking for projects to join, and talking to somebody face-to-face could provide a better connection. I dunno, I'm guessing here.
Ulukai on 28/1/2013 at 20:02
I didn't, so thanks - that looks like a really useful resource.
Fafhrd on 29/1/2013 at 00:24
Quote Posted by Bakerman
ARG NOT THE JAVA. How's that going for you?
Not too bad. At the level I'm working at it's not all that different from the Intro C++ class that I took back in the day. And there's a lot of stuff that you can handle just through XML on Android, so it's pretty easy overall.
