Apologies

Apologies for the lack of posting recently. I have been very busy in that strange place called Real Life. I hope to have more progress updates and to resume posting in the next few days.

Stealing Ideas from other sources...

One of the most ironic things I find about writing a Roguelike game is that the ideas for additional content never seem to stop bubbling to the surface. And that, when analysed, most of these ideas come from either other RLs, CRPGs or (especially) MMORPGs.

For example, instead of coding, I've been playing (and dying mainly) a lot of Sangband recently, and I've realised that the lack of character classes is an inspired design choice. Much has been written about classes in Roguelikes, and eventually, perhaps, I will also want to take Kharne into a classless direction. Classes are, on one hand, convenient labels/stereotypes for a character and on the other, a restrictive straightjacket preventing the character from achieving his or her true worth.

Another idea which I think might prove to add another facet to gameplay in Kharne is Reputation, which in a World of Warcraft context is:

You can gain or lose favor, otherwise known as Reputation, with many of the several different factions in Azeroth by completing certain quests or killing certain creatures. Doing so will usually unlock special rewards or new quests to accomplish.

My only concern with implementing reputation is that it can turn into a mascochistic grind very easily - there are majoring game-play balancing issues to be considered (much like Pudding Farming in fact), but a synergistic reputation system that minimises repetitiveness could add much to a RL.

Another idea, currently being discussed on r.g.r.d is that of Dungeon Morphing, dynamically changing the dungeon either independent of the player or as a response to the player's actions. Where I think this could be extremely interesting is implementing timed levels that require the player to do something in a certain period of time or else face near- or certain doom. Like in Oblivion for example.

Leaving all this side, on the development front, my current task is finishing the monster implementation, which I need to do before I can progress magic further. One of the decisions I made early in the design process has come back to bit me slightly. I've made great play (here on this blog and elsewhere) of the fact that our brave little @ is just another creature. But why does a rat, for example, need to receive the same treatment as our @ in terms of having an inventory and suchlike? And do rats really need to have Charisma stats as well as Armour and Evasion?

Progress Report #5

Slowly but surely, things are coming together. Here is a sneak preview of the new spellcasting screen:

For the sake of tradition, and ease of implementation, I've decided to forsake originality and go for the spell book approach found in many other roguelikes. There are fifteen possible schools of magic, grouped thematically, with eight spells in each. I'm also implementing basic metamagic feats, to allow a bit more flexibility with spellcasting.

In the above screenshot, our '@' has access to five schools of magic, and in the she can cast four spells from the Tome of Aether (air/wind flavoured spells) with varying degrees of probability of success and mana cost (which in turn are calculated from various stats and skills). Eventually, I hope to add some sort of miscast/mutation mechanism.

Current plans are to finish implementing at least the basic schools of magic, then start work on the monsters and serialisation. Then Kharne should see an official (v0.1) release.

The Psychology of Getting Things Done

Andrew Doull over at ASCII Dreams has a screamingly relevant (to me) post up entitled The Cost of Interruption describing the travails that Roguelike Developers are going through. I must admit part of the reason I've slowed down coding on Kharne over the last couple of weeks is the same as his:

"...With coding, if I have a longer period of time, I'm more productive. Not as in twice as productive, but probably ten times or more...The reason for this is the time required to rebuild the mental model of the program before I can generate new, productive code. This mental model doesn't have to be complete, but it does have to be correct, and I've inadvertently introduced logic bugs that have persisted for years, due to faulty assumptions about how a particular section of code works..."

"...So rather than plain procrastination, blogging and gaming has become activities where I feel productive in a short term without experiencing this mind numbing interruption cost - the interruption cost of a blog entry is just re-reading the entry I've written so far, which is a much lower barrier."

I've experienced this succinctly in the last couple of days. Monday evening I was able to get a great deal of code written for the Magic-Handling GUI Interface in a good solid 2-hour stretch of coding, yet last night, when I finally managed to get round to doing some coding after spending most of the evening do something else (equally mentally draining as coding), I found I had great difficulty in doing even the simplest of functions (I was trying to write the routines to calculate the mana cost and spellcasting success probability of spells). In the end, I gave up and went to bed.

Its not quite got to the stage that Andrew describes though:

"...It has got so bad recently that I've started dreading coding, in so far as the idea of doing something half-way and getting interrupted is a feeling I don't particularly want to experience."

It also doesn't help that my s.o. is suffering from a bad flu at the moment and is thus spending most of her time playing Age of Conan, and seeing her play it nibbles slightly at the edges of my own MMO-addiction.

Thoughts on Serialisation

I'm finding out that implementing Serialisation (i.e. writing the state of the game out to disk) is a pain. Not only because pre .NET Delphi (I'm using Delphi 7) doesn't support inherent serialisation natively, in the way Java does, but because it requires a great deal of clarity of thought when it comes to designing and writing data structures and classes with serialisation in mind.

Let's look at what serialisation is required for Kharne:

• Storing '@' information, such as current location, stats, inventory and current effects that he/she(/it) is subject to. The player is represented by a specific instance of the TCreature Class.
• Storing the dungeon information. Ironically, I'm finding that this is the simplest to serialise, since the Dungeon class (cunningly called TDungeon) is basically just a multi-dimensional array of integers and booleans.
• Storing the monster information. Monsters (also instances of the TCreature class) are stored in a TObjectList, and there are soft references to them in the dungeon class (by soft, I mean absolute ID addressing, not pointer referencing).
• Storing the item information. Items are stored in a TObjectList, and there are soft references to them in the dungeon class. However, there is an added difficulty in that Items themselves are effectively compound objects (consisting of a base TItem and optionally one or more TItemEnchantment classes to represent magical properties of the item).
• Storing the high-score table and any bones files.

The old Kharne did all this successfully enough, but with one major drawback: the save files lacked any soft of compression and were stupidly big (20 Mb!). This was due to the crude method I previously used for handling saves files (basically, standard Pascal WriteLn/ReadLn). This bloat is unacceptable however in the new Kharne. Fortunately, if I switch to using a more modern implementation, i.e. streaming (which Delphi supports extremely well using both TFileStream and TMemoryStream) and also use one of the many compression libraries, the save files can be reduced to an acceptible size.

Now, there are plug-in Delphi libraries available that implement serialisation but I'm not convinced that using them would be any easier than using the above methodology. I will have to do further investigation on these.

Progress Report #4

Not that much has happened in the last few days on Kharne, progress wise, I've been busy doing other things in that strange place called Real Life. Most of the time that I've actually spent on Kharne I've spent refactoring some of the data handling routines to finish their conversion from flat-text storage to reading from the SQLite Database instead, but I'd like to present a little feature that I thought worked really well all the way back in TKAngband, and is pretty much an essential part of MMOs, and which I'm reproducing in Kharne. Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you:

The minimap. . Unlike the console version of Crawl*, for example, where you can't display the map and the dungeon view at the same time,

Kharne's minimap is in a separate window that can be displayed and hidden at will, dragged around the screen, and auto-updates as the player moves around the dungeon (always being centered on the player). I think its quite a cool feature, and I'm surprised more windowed-roguelikes don't implement it.

* Yes, I know Crawl's map offers additional functionality like traveling, but traveling is unlikely to be a feature of Kharne for some time. Incidentally, the tile version of Crawl does indeed have a minimap.

Metaplots and Dungeons

All Roguelikes have metaplots, even if its only to give a thin veneer of reason as to why our little '@' hacks his (or her) way through dungeons. In Angband, the goal is obstensibly to defeat Morgoth. In Crawl, its to recover the Orb of Zot. In Nethack, its to recover and ascend with the Amulet of Yendor. Larn has an unusual plot device - the goal is for the player to traverse a dungeon in search of a potion that will cure his ailing daughter of 'dianthroritis'.

I haven't decided what the metaplot for Kharne will be yet, although I'm very interested in exploring different aspects of Roguelike gameplay during the different phases of the game. To this end, like Crawl, I'm going to implemente themed dungeon branches. Unlike Crawl however, I want all the different dungeon branches to be theoretically accessible from the town level (with one exception I'll come to later).

Each dungeon branch will consist of 10 levels, of increasing difficulty. There are 9 branches, therefore there are a maximum possible 90 levels to delve through.

Before describing each dungeon branch, there are a few important things I'd like to note about the intended gameplay:

1. The challenge to the player should increase as he/she delves deeper. This isn't just a matter of throwing bigger and tougher monsters at the player (although this will happen), rather, I'd like to throw the player into progressively tougher and tougher situations. I have a few idea for implementing this other than some of the standard Roguelike fare, e.g. Vaults, Mutations and increased Monster AI.


2. I want to avoid Angband-style grinding (e.g. the so-called "Stat-Gain" phase). It won't be necessary to visit every single dungeon or indeed every single dungeon branch - in fact doing so will increase the chances of a death since levels will be dangerous. Dungeons are semi-persistent - whilst within a dungeon branch, levels are persistent, but as soon as you leave the branch and return to town, they will disappear, Angband-style.


3. I want to allow multiple paths through most of the game, to increase replayability. This would be as well as the standard roguelike randomness replayability. To achieve this end, all dungeons with the exception of the final ones are completely optional.

Player start out in the town level, called the Nexus:

The two introductory dungeons (suitable for levels 1 to 5), are The Wilderlands and The Fortress.

The Wilderlands is built using the cave-generation algorithm whereas the Keep uses the rooms-and-tunnels approach. The Wilderlands will be very much themed upon an outdoor feeling, with animal-themed foes, whereas the Fortress will have a martial setting and will be filled with goblinoids. It is intended that the player uses these two dungeons to learn the basics of Kharne's gameplay and to start the gearing-up process.

Beyond that, there are two intermediate dungeons (suitable for levels 6 to 10) - The Mausoleum and The Keep:

Both use the Rooms-and-Tunnels approach, and the Mausoleum is an undead-themed dungeon whereas the Keep is filled with magical artifacts and creatures. At the moment, I'm intending to have the first vaults appear in the later levels of these dungeons (although vaults aren't implemented at the moment), and the purpose of these are to equip the character with items that are necessary to venture further in a safe manner.

The Advanced Dungeons are suitable for levels 11 to 15 and are basically the Elemental Planes - the Planes of Air, Fire, Water and Earth:

At the end of each dungeon, on the bottom level, is a heavily guarded Elemental Key. This serves two purposes - one of these must be collected to allow the player to enter the final Dungeon (it doesn't matter which elemental plane it comes from), and also one will allow the player to resurrect once, with some....far-reaching consequences (I'll discuss this in more detail in a later post).

And then we have the endgame dungeon, suitable for levels 16 to 20, and the final part of the game. At the moment, its called the Abyss, and its filled with demons and devils and other similar creatures. There will be a macguffin at the bottom of this dungeon, the obtainment of which will be the game's victory condition.

Although the majority of foes in each dungeon will be specific to that dungeon and themed to fit in with that dungeon's theme, there will be a set of common foes across all non-Abyssal dungeons. Some of these will be in the form of demonic and elemental "invasions", with creatures scaled appropriately to the current dungeon difficultly (effectively these will operate as moving and non-permanent vaults). Other will be in the form of rival adventurers and adventuring parties. I'm especially looking forward immensely implementing these, as I remember fondly in Baldur's Gate the first time I came across a rival adventuring party.

Oh, and there will be one other special dungeon...which is specifically tied to player ressurection. I'm still working out the details, but to give you a bit of a hint, this is one of my favourite tabletop-RPGs of all time.