Tuesday 29 April 2008

Things from Roguelikes that would be useful in real-life #1: "Cotton Socks of Ooze Slaying"

I was playing about with item generation code earlier, and I found this unexpected item, which appears to particularly useful in case our brave little '@' is ever attacked by giant mutant verrucas or something :



This is an artifact of the way items will be generated in Kharne. Just like in MMORPGs, there are different "quality levels" of items, from Junk Items such as broken dolls that are there mainly for flavour through Common items like your standard short sword, through increasing powerful magical items all the way up to Epic and Artifact Items. Magical items have got certain "enchantments" placed upon them, and these enchantments are (in most cases) randomly generated. In the above case, the socks have two enchants on them - one of increasing AC (which worn items tend to have), and increased damage against oozes(!). The code at the bottom, "]27ENCH_ACENCH_SLAYOOZE" is used as a unique identifier for stacking purposes.

Does anyone else have any examples of similar useful items?

(incidentally, the above screenshot shows the current state of the inventory screen with graphics turned ON. At the moment I'm aware it breaks one of the rules in my previous posting - that of keyboard and mouse equivalence -being heavily drag-and-drop based; any released version will have much better keyboard control functionality, of course)

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

In LambdaRogue, I just removed all kinds of item variants. Until 0.2, I had old, cheap, standard, good, mighty and holy items, in addition rare and unique items and item sets. I also had many different items of some types, e.g. 20 different sword type weapons.

It seemed to be rather annoying for some players.

Now I only have standard, rare and unique items. The game still allows for item sets, but so far there's only 1 itemset left (which, if complete, ressurrects the player once from permadeath and then diseappears).

I now also carefully choose every single item - so I only have 6 different sword type weapons now and I think that's better than before.

It's just to difficult and time consuming to create hundreds of variants which still feel unique and not like stock. :-)

Dave said...

*nods*

I can't feeling as if my item handling is being heavily influenced by the 3-odd years I spent playing World of Warcraft. Which may or may not be a good thing.

Incidentally, do you know when v0.2 (or v0.2.1) of LambdaRogue will be out on Windows?

Anonymous said...

My item handling was influenced by good old Diablo 2 for a while - and the fun I had while searching set items, special items etc. :)

LR 0.2.1 will be released within the next days (perhaps tomorrow). I rewrote the quest engine today; partly to make it clearer (this was really the most ugly, confusing part of the source), but mainly to overcome the silly "only 1 quest at a time"-border. Now the player can accept as many quests at the same time as he/she wishes.