Welcome, Guest. Please login or register.

Login with username, password and session length

 
Advanced search

1411275 Posts in 69323 Topics- by 58380 Members - Latest Member: bob1029

March 28, 2024, 06:38:27 AM

Need hosting? Check out Digital Ocean
(more details in this thread)
TIGSource ForumsCommunityDevLogsDwarf Fortress meets The Outer Wilds? "Ultima Ratio Regum", v0.10.1 out Feb 2023
Pages: 1 ... 6 7 [8] 9 10 ... 53
Print
Author Topic: Dwarf Fortress meets The Outer Wilds? "Ultima Ratio Regum", v0.10.1 out Feb 2023  (Read 176659 times)
s0
o
Level 10
*****


eurovision winner 2014


View Profile
« Reply #140 on: June 11, 2013, 03:06:39 PM »

Not sure how it would work from a player's perspective, do I have to press 'up' 8 times to move one tile? What happens if I press 7 'ups' followed by one 'down' etc.
i would presume the game always automatically takes enough turns for 1 button press to equal 1 tile. that's how all roguelikes i know of handle it.
Logged
Ultima Ratio Regum
Level 7
**


Game Studies Lecturer, "Ultima Ratio Regum" person


View Profile WWW
« Reply #141 on: June 11, 2013, 03:59:32 PM »

Not sure how it would work from a player's perspective, do I have to press 'up' 8 times to move one tile? What happens if I press 7 'ups' followed by one 'down' etc.
i would presume the game always automatically takes enough turns for 1 button press to equal 1 tile. that's how all roguelikes i know of handle it.

That is indeed how it is done. No matter what speed you move at, one press is one tile Smiley.
Logged

eigenbom
Level 10
*****


@eigenbom


View Profile WWW
« Reply #142 on: June 11, 2013, 04:08:19 PM »

Oh right, yeah that makes sense. So if I were crawling through rough terrain and move one tile, there's a possibility to see enemies moving up to 16 tiles? That's the extreme, so I guess it seems alright..
Logged

Ultima Ratio Regum
Level 7
**


Game Studies Lecturer, "Ultima Ratio Regum" person


View Profile WWW
« Reply #143 on: June 11, 2013, 04:38:34 PM »

Oh right, yeah that makes sense. So if I were crawling through rough terrain and move one tile, there's a possibility to see enemies moving up to 16 tiles? That's the extreme, so I guess it seems alright..

At the extreme, yes - I'll probably give you a choice in the options menu to watch all intervening turns, or just "skip" to the next turn you get a move. The latter is the usual in roguelikes, but the former might be interesting too.
Logged

Ultima Ratio Regum
Level 7
**


Game Studies Lecturer, "Ultima Ratio Regum" person


View Profile WWW
« Reply #144 on: June 12, 2013, 01:53:20 AM »

I'm going to sometimes post blog updates here instead of the hyperlink to the devlog. Would people prefer it this way? Either way, here is this week's, cross-posted:

Short update-focused blog entry today. I’ve been working on a bunch of things, some which are bug fixes and small features, some of which are further development of the procedural graphics in the ziggurats, and some of which are secret for now. Here’s a list of what’s been done over the last week, and what the goals for next week are. Next week’s blog entry will be something a little different, hence why this week’s is both a retrospective for the past week’s work, and a… prospective?… on next week’s.

This week:

Seven new procedural graphics have been finished off for ziggurats, leaving all the block graphics finished. These include various creatures and locations, each of which has a wide variety of different poses, positions or permutations. As ever, generated art is a central part of the game, and I’m pretty damned happy with how these are looking.

Ocean travel is now temporarily enabled for the next few releases. In the future, you’ll  need ships or similar to travel, but for the time being, you can travel across ocean squares when you’re in the fast travel screen (‘T’). This ensures you can get to all the imporant ziggurats in this release.

Ziggurat rewards have been largely programmed in. Right now, these are either a) secrets, or b) hints towards which ziggurats you can find secrets in. Naturally in the future there will be a far greater variety, but for the time being, 0.3 is focused on locating these items.

Various bugs have been fixed, and various small features added, generally in the direction of clarity and ease of use. A few small things have also been removed as they aren’t fully implemented yet (for instance, the skills menu), to focus on the exploration in this release.

This coming week, I’m going to be focusing on finishing off all the possible puzzle generation. There’s a very large number of components coming together so that the blocks, clues, codewords, puzzles, pressure pads and gates all combine correctly, and ensuring the game places puzzles of the correct difficulty on appropriate floors. Expect easy puzzles at the bases of ziggurats, and ones that pretty much require a pen and pad at the top. I’m also going to be trying to deal with a few more little bugs and features, and generally continue cleaning up 0.3 for release in a month or so. Next week’s blog entry will likely be a tribute to one of my favourite authors, Iain Banks, who died this week, but after that normal service will resume. By the time of the next URR update all aspects of ziggurats should (fingers crossed) be completed, at which point I’ll give a little postmortem on that process, and keep you all updated on finishing things for this release off. See you then, and remember – clues might be hidden anywhere.

Logged

eigenbom
Level 10
*****


@eigenbom


View Profile WWW
« Reply #145 on: June 13, 2013, 02:16:18 PM »

I subscribe to your rss, but if you want feedback then you should post your devlog updates in full here.. Smiley
Logged

Ultima Ratio Regum
Level 7
**


Game Studies Lecturer, "Ultima Ratio Regum" person


View Profile WWW
« Reply #146 on: June 15, 2013, 02:44:34 AM »

I subscribe to your rss, but if you want feedback then you should post your devlog updates in full here.. Smiley

Thanks Smiley - yeah, I think that's wisest. I'll post them in full up here from now on.
Logged

Ultima Ratio Regum
Level 7
**


Game Studies Lecturer, "Ultima Ratio Regum" person


View Profile WWW
« Reply #147 on: June 26, 2013, 04:44:37 PM »

The last week  has seen more coding than much of the last month – having lacked the internet for the past week, very little else has been done aside from it. As ever, the release is a mix of things I’m making public before-hand and a few secrets I want people to find, but here the updates I can share. I’m aiming for release probably around late July at the moment, but it might get pushed into early August. The first half of July is almost entirely full with academic work, so we’ll just have to see how it goes. I’ll be doing a lot of playtesting towards the end of June once I have a pretty stable build, but ziggurats are looking all but finished.

Puzzles are 100% finished. There are five “levels”, finishing off with “boss” level puzzles. Even when I know how to solve the puzzles, they still take me some thought. Playtesting it with people who don’t know how they are generated under the hood have found them so far genuinely challenging and really interesting to solve, so I have high hopes. They include a vast quantity of procedural art (something like 200+ images?) and over 300 possible puzzle permutations, and that’s not even counting the clues. You’ll have to play A Lot if you want to see even a small percentage of these things.

Ziggurats are 99% finished. They generate the entire buildings, all puzzles generate (as above), the structures inside and outside match up, dungeons are three-dimensional, which is to say staircases lead directly up and down, not to random points on the floor above, and some areas can only be accessed from floors above or below. It makes for a really interesting structure to explore, and it’ll be all the better in the future once a greater variety of rooms exist. Special ziggurats also have secrets atop them, whilst by the end of tomorrow other ziggurats will have clues pointing you towards the special ziggurats if you’ve taken the wrong one. In the future these will be treasure rooms etc. Lastly, as well as “Look-up” graphics for blocks, I’m adding ones for doors, iron gates, and a few other things. They look pretty cool.

A basic inventory system is now in place. This is not what it will look like in the future, but suffices for the time being to deal with the few items now in the game. It won’t be redone for the release after this (probably), but certainly will once a decent number of items actually enter the game.

Next update will be next Monday, and since I now have internet at my new place, they should be regular until release (I know I keep saying this, and failing to keep to it, but I’ll try). By this time next week, ziggurats should be totally finished and I should be onto bug fixing and optimizations. I’ve had a very crazy idea for hugely reducing save/load times I need to try out, amongst other things.

I cannot WAIT to show it off, but it just needs a little bit of final tweaking...
« Last Edit: June 27, 2013, 03:33:16 AM by Ultima Ratio Regum » Logged

Ouren
Enjoyed Some Pizza!
Level 7
*


Poppy Works


View Profile WWW
« Reply #148 on: June 26, 2013, 08:34:41 PM »

Mmmmmmm


Can't wait sir  Beer!
Logged

Ultima Ratio Regum
Level 7
**


Game Studies Lecturer, "Ultima Ratio Regum" person


View Profile WWW
« Reply #149 on: June 29, 2013, 03:15:30 AM »

Thanks! Trying to get everything into a version I can start seriously playtesting by the end of this weekend. Definitely on track...
Logged

Inanimate
Level 10
*****

☆HERO OF JUSTICE!☆


View Profile
« Reply #150 on: June 29, 2013, 04:29:37 AM »

It's been a while since I dropped into the devlog forum, and I gotta say, there is no project I was hoping more to still see going strong (or even better, finished) than this one.

Keep up the amazing work, man! The game gets better and better with each update.
Logged
s0
o
Level 10
*****


eurovision winner 2014


View Profile
« Reply #151 on: June 29, 2013, 07:16:15 AM »

can't wait to see all this stuff in action! puzzle generation is something i haven't really seen attempted before, or at least not on the level you're aiming for.

also props for keeping this up for so long!
Logged
Ultima Ratio Regum
Level 7
**


Game Studies Lecturer, "Ultima Ratio Regum" person


View Profile WWW
« Reply #152 on: July 01, 2013, 04:22:49 PM »

It's been a while since I dropped into the devlog forum, and I gotta say, there is no project I was hoping more to still see going strong (or even better, finished) than this one.

Keep up the amazing work, man! The game gets better and better with each update.

Thanks for the very kind words Smiley. As I say, I can't wait to release the next version. This'll be the first one that really starts to move gameplay in the direction it's going to end up with.

can't wait to see all this stuff in action! puzzle generation is something i haven't really seen attempted before, or at least not on the level you're aiming for.

also props for keeping this up for so long!

Thanks! Once this release is out I will probably post an entry with some information about puzzle gen. Not enough that they are suddenly solveable due to all the info I've given out! But enough that I can shed some light on the kind of process that goes into it. I'll be doing the same for other type of puzzle, as I have five different types currently lined up. I have three major tenets, really, for puzzle gen:

- Every puzzle can be solved in only one way,
- Every puzzle can be solved without trial and error,
- And every puzzle has the fewest clues/hints possible for the solution.

As in, there are as few clues as possible to make sure there are enough clues. It's been a very interesting coding challenge to get the game to recognize what is "enough" clues and what is "not enough" and to make sure a player would be able to figure it all out!
Logged

Ultima Ratio Regum
Level 7
**


Game Studies Lecturer, "Ultima Ratio Regum" person


View Profile WWW
« Reply #153 on: July 02, 2013, 01:57:14 AM »

First, 0.3 update, second, general URR discussion. This week I’ve been focusing on finishing off everything except bugs and small features, and that’s going well. All the secrets and the basic inventory are fully implemented, ziggurats work perfectly, and I’ve done a lot of work on generating some rather nice door graphics. For example:



(I am aware there should be vines trailing inwards – working on it). This coming fortnight I’m rushing around the country like a mad person gathering data for my PhD thesis and giving a talk about roguelikes at an academic conference (which I will try and either record of convert to some form viewable here), but by the end of this fortnight I’d like all graphics finished off, one slight movement issue with blocks, walls and the player character fixed, then I can move onto bug fixing. The requirements for the next release are really coalescing in my mind now as well, so I’ll probably post about those in the near future. Whilst this is all going on, the body of today’s entry is about longer-term plans, specifically about permadeath.

Permadeath provides many of the things I love in roguelikes and roguelike-likes (I’ll just call them all “RLs” for this discussion, so that’s everything from Nethack to FTL). A high level of challenge; a huge amount of tension at risky moments that few non-permadeath games can emulate; and a genuine feeling of progress and accomplishment when you reach new areas you’ve never reached before (particularly when they actually look aesthetically different – I am looking at you disapprovingly, Nethack, and you approvingly, Crawl). An additional factor I think shouldn’t be overlooked is game balance. Which is to say, game balance in something like Dungeon Crawl is very carefully designed around permadeath. If you remove permadeath from Crawl the game becomes almost trivial. If you could reload and thereby reroll every floor, you’d never have to deal with any nasty unique; you could reload before consuming mutagenic corpses to farm every positive mutation in the game; you could reload floors with treasure rooms or shops until they sell what you want; and so on and so on. Game balance in any good roguelike is not just broken but utterly destroyed if you don’t have a single life you can’t reload, because it hinges on the game distributing good items, bad items, easy foes and nasty foes towards you according to whatever algorithms govern them, not according to someone endlessly rerolling until they get a great outcome.

However. I got to thinking about permadeath in URR, and realized an issue. Generating a world currently takes around a minute – once history generation is implemented, probably in the next version, it’ll take maybe 2-3 minutes to generate a world. That isn’t much by DF standards, and there will be a lot of gameplay in that world, but it’s still a decent block of time. I originally thought the solution to this was to simply let you have new characters in the same world, as many as you want, but that won’t work. A lot more will be said on this later, but here’s the big reveal: URR is developing a plot (lots more on this in the future, but it’s going to be very interesting, and nothing like normal medieval-story fare). A weird and obtuse one, but still a plot (which the secret items in 0.3 are a part of). Having infinite characters in one world means you, like save-scumming in Crawl, cannot fail to complete the game, if only by just trying character after character until one them gets through each challenge.

That does not appeal.

However, nor does having to generate a brand new world every time you die. Admittedly combat and death are going to be comparatively rare in URR compared to most RLs, but combat is going to be brutal and bloody, so you will lose characters, or to traps or starvation on long excursions if not to direct combat. I don’t want to discourge new players by forcing them to sit through a new world-gen every time they die rather than being able to jump back into the action, but I don’t want the game to be made too easy by having infinite characters all contributing to succeeding in a single “campaign”. I’ve been trying to think of a solution, and I think I’ve developed one which is original, sensible, and could produce some interesting emergent risk/reward strategies.

The current idea is this. You have three “lives” in each world – when you die you can create another character twice. When your third character dies, that world is finished. Each life starts with 25% of the XP of the previous character which you can assign into any skill tree from the start, but none of the items – they are left upon the original corpse, vaguely likes a Bones file in another RL. This means when you die the first time, you don’t have to reroll a world, and can learn from your mistakes whilst keeping whatever progress you made. Also, and possibly more importantly, it could lead to interesting tactics. Once you know the game you could make one character to do one particular area, then kill them off and start a new one for the rest of the game – you might have got a specialist to solve one region, but you’ve used up a full character, and you don’t have many to spare, so that’s a risk/reward decision. Equally, losing a character not by choice could let you reassess what killed you and either create a new build to deal with the same, or explore another region with another build.

So that’s the current plan. There is no way to die in 0.3, so this isn’t implemented yet, but this is my plan. I’m firmly set on the “plot” idea as I have a lot of ideas for it (go read some Jorge Borges for some clues), and that necessitates true permadeath, but without the annoyance of endless re-rolling. I think it’s a good compromise, but I want to know what everyone else thinks. Let me know your thoughts! I should stress I have in no way settled on the three lives idea – maybe I will stick to normal one-life permadeath – but I’d like some feedback on the concept.
Logged

fylth
Level 0
***



View Profile
« Reply #154 on: July 02, 2013, 02:54:01 AM »

In order to make the revival mechanic work as far as the lore goes, maybe there could be some kind of item that brings you back to life upon death. These would be rare, perhaps as a rare reward for completing ziggurats, and would give the advantages of your three life method but without the arbitrary number of lives and also providing a valuable resource to hunt for, perhaps even sell for a nice sum.
Logged
s0
o
Level 10
*****


eurovision winner 2014


View Profile
« Reply #155 on: July 02, 2013, 03:01:56 AM »


amazing  Shocked

Thanks! Once this release is out I will probably post an entry with some information about puzzle gen. Not enough that they are suddenly solveable due to all the info I've given out! But enough that I can shed some light on the kind of process that goes into it.
looking forward to reading that!

re: permadeath: another thing you could do is keep the world largely intact but regenerate everything plot-related (unless i'm missing something about how the world gen works?). i guess your model is actually more interesting though.
Logged
Ultima Ratio Regum
Level 7
**


Game Studies Lecturer, "Ultima Ratio Regum" person


View Profile WWW
« Reply #156 on: July 03, 2013, 03:50:49 AM »

In order to make the revival mechanic work as far as the lore goes, maybe there could be some kind of item that brings you back to life upon death. These would be rare, perhaps as a rare reward for completing ziggurats, and would give the advantages of your three life method but without the arbitrary number of lives and also providing a valuable resource to hunt for, perhaps even sell for a nice sum.

Now this is an interesting option. Maybe completing each "branch" of the plot, of which ziggurats are one, maybe gives you an item that you can either set up to revive you (in which case you cannot "undo" that and use it for something else), or you can sell it for a high price, or use it to power up that character? That could give some very nice options for min-maxing for experienced players, but letting new player explore the game more? I'll have to think about it, but I really like that idea.

amazing  Shocked

Thanks! Once this release is out I will probably post an entry with some information about puzzle gen. Not enough that they are suddenly solveable due to all the info I've given out! But enough that I can shed some light on the kind of process that goes into it.
looking forward to reading that!

re: permadeath: another thing you could do is keep the world largely intact but regenerate everything plot-related (unless i'm missing something about how the world gen works?). i guess your model is actually more interesting though.

Haha, thanks Smiley. I never anticipated there being any real artistic/graphical component to this project when I began it; it's just emerged in the process...

That's also an interesting model, though I don't know to what extent I could do it. I'd have to really think about how that would work. Maybe it would keep ziggurats in the same places, but cycle what each one is? So plot-important ones get reshuffled into other possible locations? Hmm...
Logged

Ultima Ratio Regum
Level 7
**


Game Studies Lecturer, "Ultima Ratio Regum" person


View Profile WWW
« Reply #157 on: July 11, 2013, 01:44:30 PM »

Just got back from one conference and off to another on Monday. In the interim I'm aiming to finish all door art, door code, wall art (actually pretty cool), inventory stuff, plant growth, and a few secret things. Then it's onto bug fixing. August release impending! Will actually therefore have an update this coming Monday!
Logged

eigenbom
Level 10
*****


@eigenbom


View Profile WWW
« Reply #158 on: July 11, 2013, 01:58:22 PM »

Just got back from one conference and off to another on Monday.

Ah yes, the life of a PhD student. Hope it goes well, I did my PhD in procedural graphics a few years ago, the first couple of years were a blast. Smiley
Logged

Ultima Ratio Regum
Level 7
**


Game Studies Lecturer, "Ultima Ratio Regum" person


View Profile WWW
« Reply #159 on: July 12, 2013, 12:49:17 PM »

Just got back from one conference and off to another on Monday.

Ah yes, the life of a PhD student. Hope it goes well, I did my PhD in procedural graphics a few years ago, the first couple of years were a blast. Smiley

Thanks Smiley. It's going well so far - going into my third and final year atm, and mostly working on a book chapter I've been commissioned to do at the moment. Your PhD sounds like the kind of thing I'd like to read - is there anything on it I can view online?
Logged

Pages: 1 ... 6 7 [8] 9 10 ... 53
Print
Jump to:  

Theme orange-lt created by panic