From gameplay to gamedev

In next update I’m thinking to switch server back to wilderness mode (with adjusting Angband dungeon in Hobbiton). I so love dungeon-city (it’s reminds me about Moria..), but it would be fun to give players more freedom – someone wish to travel around ME, some would like to dive right after they create a new character.

All this time I thought how to solve the biggest problem os wilderness – ‘cheating’ with moving along the borders. I’ve also suggested some ideas there
http://angband.oook.cz/forum/showpost.php?p=135170&postcount=28 , and got some more thoughts, but finally it comes to my mind, how to solve it.

Problem:
If wilderness option is on, players using ‘cheating’ possibility to move along the borders to be able to change location immideatelly as soon as they noticed dangerous monster. This vulnerability in gameplay mechanics gives players non-roguelikish endless ‘escape’ option from danger and makes wilderness kinda pointless. Continue reading →

Yay! Our server now got it’s new home:

http://tangaria.com

It was my dream for a long time: to have proper, truly online roguelike gameplay without cheating, stair-scumming, everlasting and other stuff with spoil the fun and habitate people to play ‘wrong’, non-roguelikish way, so after a while they loose interest to the game. No! In my opinion, online roguelike should propose different philosophy opposite to MMORPG boredom hoarder-simulators.
Roguelike – it’s just you, your skill, your guts.. and your freedom.

Freedom from fear of death. Freedom from fear ‘to loose’. Every adventure – counts. Every death – is an achievement. Every new character – is a happiness of unique exploration experience. Continue reading →

Some discussion with PW and a fe suggestions:

Addon just removes header of window and doesn’t influence other way. But I figured out how to solve it for now – it works (to have 6 rows) only if I apply addon when I start a client and yet didn’t enter the game (stay on login screen). But if I apply addon later on – min. rows becomes 8.

So there is definitelly a bug, but as I’ve found a way to solve it (protecting .ini file and applying addon before login) – it’s not a critical one.

Continue reading →

Hooray! I’ve launched  server @ PWMAngband – online roguelike game with innovative features. To get there:

1. download the game on http://powerwyrm.monsite-orange.fr/ (choose the latest version, even if it beta)
2. unpack and run the game (mangclient.exe). If you wish to play in fullscreen mode, you can use my addon). Soon I’ll add guides about game customization.
3. choose server: tangaria.com

Server homepage: http://tangaria.com

Two more cents:
1) atm it’s in testing mode. There should be only one character per account soon (now it’s unlimited), so when this functionality would implemented – there would be a wipe.
2) you could find there some pretty unusual features, for example, the stairs are “disconnected” (so when you go downstairs, you can not run back immideatelly – you need to find stairs again) to prevent stair scumming.
3) the map of the game is based on Tolkien’s world .. be careful when traveling at night 🙂 You appear in the Hobbiton, where there is only a small newbie dungeon; experienced players should try to get to the Bree (rumors say it’s somewhere at east).
UPDATE: I turned off wilderness for now because of certain problems. Now it’s vanilla Angband dungeon-town 😀

Have questions? Join the PWMAngband discord: https://discord.gg/zBNG369

I’ve came back to play PWMAngband again after a long break and setup there the way to play fullscreen with my addon – with some tweaks it’s become possible to use very nice in-built graphic tileset as blind-friendly. So I’ve made two streams with my 1st impressions, in English:

…and second stream in Russian.

In general it was huge fun to play PWMA. PWMAngband is awesome game which definitely needs much more attention from roguelike community. It’s got loads of unique and awesome features. But also it’s got some ‘weak’ spots which I’ve noticed and wanna share to help developer to see the game with ‘fresh eye’: Continue reading →

TomeNET is pretty good balanced game and one of the main reasons of this fact is that it’s balance based on Angband (which based on Moria), so it’s rebalance history could be counted as ~40 years in total. But as TomeNET overgrown (in a good way) with a lot of features, new classes and races – it’s important to continue balance polishing.

Main idea of game balance is simple:
If players are keeping to use the same build (race, class, skills) – in most cases it means that it’s stronger than others and it should be nerfed. And vice versa – if players do not use certain build – it should be buffed. Btw, in the past TomeNET had quite interesting statistics for different races/classes, it could help in rebalancing. Continue reading →

C. Blue wrote (Thu Nov 01, 2018 12:06 am):
Currently there are no plans to extend the amount of characters
per account, also because of the amount of (free) houses.

How ‘Soloist’ could become a new mode without increasing house limits:

1) Make it not possible to buy/own houses for ‘soloist’ mode characters.
2) Give ‘soloist’ characters access to NE houses (like they got it now in pseudo-mode)

Example:
I create ‘soloist’ char. This char can not buy house. But this char could access houses of my alts at NE mode (he could come inside, drop his ‘soloist’ items and take them back).

Making ‘soloist’ truly separate game mode is good – because it would be easier to tweak different changes to this mode gameplay, eg: Continue reading →

Main problem about events @ Soloist mode that it’s ruins fair RPG character
progress. Example of player progress in TomeNET:

1) get fire res
2) enhance weapon +5/+5
3) enhance weapon +10/+10 (going from +9 to +10 is 10-15 enchant
scrolls btw)
4) enhance armour
5) get FA (you need to get it asap, at least at 15 lvl)
6) get see_inv (at 20 lvl
7) enhance weapon +11/+11 +12/+12 ..
8) get fear (for melee)
….
n) get ESP (30 lvl+) & etc

Having powerful item at lvl 1 isn’t right for ‘Soloist’ mode. People who approve this say that it’s just an alternative way to get powerful item for the same amount of time which you would get it during traditional dungeon-crawling gameplay. To prove that it’s wrong: just some more statistics from my past steams @ Soloist mode VS NE mode: Continue reading →

TomeNET in compare to other roguelike games got almost perfect user experience in terms of keyboard controls. Having ‘last’ object’ option made life so much easier and I wanna say HUGE thanks for devs for adding it. But having fixed major controls problems exposed tiny problems which we didn’t notice before.. And now when you play – you notice them all the time and they really mess gameplay enjoyement.

We could call this “3 potion’s problems”:

1) Empty bottles are not for sale.

Currently it’s not possible to get an empty bottle, except /empty another potion. It could look like a ‘tiny’ problem at 1st glance, but actually it’s quite annoying for people who using emtpy bottles to fill them from fountains. Why is it bad:

1) it’s not logical at all – why players should buy ‘useful’ potions (of resist, light wounds & etc) and then empty them to get any empty bottle. Emtpy bottles should be much more easier to get than potions itself.
2) players has to spend time by /empty bottles. I got a macro for it, but even with it’s pretty annying. Lets multiply time which _all_ players spent on this kinda-UI problem and we would get pretty a lot of time wasted.

Suggestion:
1) put ’emtpy bottles’ to ‘1’ general store
2) make price for empty bottle – 5-15 g. It would make sense. Light wounds cost 17 g; resist heat 33. Flask of oil cost 3 g, pint of fine ale 1g (you got it to inventory, so you have it kinda bottled/flasked). But we could say – ok, empty bottle for alchemy are special and should cost more than flasks for oid because they are made from ‘special’ glass.

Adding empty bottles to ‘1’ would save a lot of time and wouldn’t ‘break’ beauty of roguelike object operation – players would still use /empty command when filling potions from fountains  to purge them if it’s worthless potion.

2) Not getting slot glyph when /fill potion

Second, very annoying problem with not getting proper letter inventory slot when /fill’ing potion from fountain. Algorythm:
1) player has empty potions in inventory
2) player stands on tile with a fountain
3) player are using comman ‘/fill’
4) player got message in messages window, eg: 
You have a Clear Potion of Water {+,1}
it should be:
You have a Clear Potion of Water {+,1} (d)

By having this (d) in game messages – player could /empty (or inscribe, for throwing & etc) this potion very easily, without need to check inventory

3) ‘reordering’ inventory bug

This bug appears when player pich up item, but get wrong glyph slots in messages window, eg, you pick up item and get a message:

You have a Clear Potion of Water {+,1} (d)

But when you drink it – it appear that you drink different potion. I suppose it’s become so because of ‘reordering’ mechanism.

To solve it: maybe after inventory was reordered after player pick up potion, there should be yet another message which would show new, corrent glyph, eg, player pick up item and get this messages:

You have a Clear Potion of Water {+,1} (d)
Reorder: You have a Clear Potion of Water {+,1} (c)

Fixing this issues would make TomeNET control flawless 

I wanna to continue discussion of TomeNET’s magic system. Today I wanna talk about making _offencive_ magic spells more diverse, to give players more choice of gameplay styles.

Currently TomeNET got pretty straight-forward way of killing monsters with magic – direct damage. It could be AoE and single-target.

Also you could apply certain debuffs on monsters, but they are used in rare occasions because it’s much easier/fastest/effective to kill monsters than use most of ‘control’ spells. By ‘control’ spells I mean: sleep, blindness, confusion & etc. The only exception is using ‘control’ on archers/mages or monsters who run away. Such spells are pretty dull also because there are a lot of monsters which are resistant/immune to ‘control’ effects; that’s why most of players taking ‘Holy Defence’ school.. It’s the most popular magic  school atm – paladins, shamans, adventurers.. Actually everyone who could get this school – would take it. Why? Continue reading →

TomeNET – online roguelike game based on Tolkien lore (with some additions from other fantasy worlds). Actually you could call it MMO-roguelike: in addition to traditional roguelike features – rng level generation, permadeath, dynamic hack’n’slash experience and freedom of actions, TomeNET has MMORPG features – real-time gameplay, PvE in group, PvP, economy system (players shops and housing) and etc.

This update gives new features, such as: Continue reading →

Some impressions about early game with Death Knight @ soloist.

First of all I wanna point that I had 27 mana at lvl 27 (http://angband.oook.cz/ladder-show.php?id=22152). Please remeber it when reading comments to the spells 

In general Shadow magic is better then new, Unlife. Some impressions: Continue reading →

IDDC mode in TomeNET has GREAT gameplay mode but there are two nasty things:

1) necessity to clear all dungeon “to zero” – kill all monster to get as much exp from one level as you could. Without exploring every corner you dramatically reduce your chances to survive in compare to players who clear everything. But scouting every tile feels quite BORING sometimes, especially at the beginning.
2) necessity to cheeze items from shops at Bree, and _especially_ at dungeon towns. You have to scum shops in dungeon towns for a lot of hours to get items with resistances which you need. Cheezing shops for hours is no doubt BORING. Continue reading →