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Main » Arrested Development » Placement of the demon portal and finding it again problem
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Posted on 03-02-13, 03:20 pm
<i>Prophet of Celestia</i><br>Baka on the streets, senpai in the sheets

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In the old connected overworld version of Noxico, locations had a sense of distance. You could start in town A and walk around for several screens until you discovered town B.

For reasons I won't repeat here, you now learn of town B from a person in A, and have it available in the Travel screen. The problem is that there is no meaningful distance between A and B any more.

The original plan for the placement and finding of the demon portal was to find a board far from the player's starting location (or go the opposite way, place the portal anywhere and start the player off far from it) and then have the ratio of demonic to regular creatures slowly shift as you got closer to the portal board, along with a scary backing track maybe, to indicate you're getting closer to your goal.


The problem is, that's a distance metric. In the new system, locations have no distance between them, so we'd need some other way of letting the player find the portal.

One idea given on #rgrd is to have a special NPC, a cartographer or something maybe. You collect clues, and give them to the cartographer, who then uses them to triangulate the portal's location for you on one of his maps <small>(which you as the player never get to see as that would defeat the random, disjoint nature of the overworld)</small> and the portal is added to your travel list.

Thoughts?

I don't just program Noxico...
Posted on 03-02-13, 05:50 pm

 

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This is sort of one of the reason's I was pushing for a map based travel system. By giving each town or location of interest a geographical position, the player could gather simple clues that tell them generally where the portal is located on the continent, and then ask NPC's about locations that happen to be in that direction.

E.g. You've learned that the portal is mostly likely to the southeast of your current location, then you ask an NPC for the locations of any towns or other places of importance to the southeast. They either know of some, or they don't and you have to find someone else to ask. Once you find a location, you then travel to that location and repeat the process until you lock down the location of the portal.

Just to mix things up a bit, you could have different scenarios for discovering the next location. I.e. Early on, you're only interested in finding the direction that the portal is in, so it's mostly research at this point. Then later on, you need to find towns where someone knows how to find the portal, and as you get even closer to the portal, you start running into towns that have been cleaned out by the demons, and the only way to progress is to incapacitate a demon officer and then interrogate them.

These are just some suggestions and not necessarily everything the player would encounter (I could keep coming up with scenarios all day), but hopefully I've given you some idea of why I'd like Noxico to use a system like this.

As usual, let me know what you think.

Lead writer on Noxico (and sometimes programmer or designer) <br>
Posted on 03-02-13, 06:10 pm
<i>Prophet of Celestia</i><br>Baka on the streets, senpai in the sheets

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Adding a map to use as a travel screen would work if the overworld was still fully connected. It was made disjoint in the first place to make world generation so much faster, which in turn makes permadeath cheaper, which in turn makes it more rogue-like.

Really, parts of your post can be used, such as the "razed towns" bit, but simply nothing that requires distance and/or direction. One possibility where the concept of direction could safely be used is if you were to, say, find a lone survivor who says the invaders came "from [location name], over in that direction". And then the survivor dies or something, I dunno, just an example.


I don't just program Noxico...
Posted on 03-02-13, 06:27 pm

 

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Well, what I was thinking for the map wasn't an entire overworld or anything (don't worry, I still remember why you wanted to make the change), but rather just a map board. Basically the board could just use a modified version of the cave generator or a scaled down version of the world generator. Each tile on the board would have it's own biome and could either be empty space or hold a town or some other location.

Or would that still be too expensive, time wise?

Lead writer on Noxico (and sometimes programmer or designer) <br>
Posted on 03-02-13, 06:45 pm
<i>Prophet of Celestia</i><br>Baka on the streets, senpai in the sheets

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Generating 2000 tiles is nothing, considering the new worldgen can poot forth 18000 of them, then overwrite a good part of them with structures, and populate them.

It's more like, where would you put a given location, and what do you do when you run out of room?

I don't just program Noxico...
Posted on 03-02-13, 06:56 pm

 

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Well, for the running out of room thing, since we would have a finite world, we would need to have a finite number of towns, which would mean that we would generate their locations at the same time the world is generated.

As for placement, I supposed the easiest way would be to do it randomly, though if you wanted something more realistic, you could try to create a 2D probability distribution on top of the map with areas nearer to water having a higher probably of spawning towns and areas like deserts having lower probability.



Lead writer on Noxico (and sometimes programmer or designer) <br>
Posted on 03-02-13, 07:02 pm
<i>Prophet of Celestia</i><br>Baka on the streets, senpai in the sheets

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We're going off-topic again. Noxico does not have a concrete map. It had one before, it's not likely to get one back, and the problem was guiding the player towards the portal through a method that does not require what the game does not have, not how to implement a concrete map.

This is what we have, this is what was suggested. Sorry if I seem angry, trust me I'm not.

I don't just program Noxico...
Posted on 03-02-13, 07:10 pm (revision 1)

 

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Well, you are right about us getting off topic, but really, the whole point I was trying to make was why can't Noxico have a world map and why isn't this a valid solution to the problem?

Lead writer on Noxico (and sometimes programmer or designer) <br>
Posted on 03-02-13, 07:22 pm
<i>Prophet of Celestia</i><br>Baka on the streets, senpai in the sheets

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It can't have a world map because placement of towns and other locations on the map. Doesn't matter if it's presented as a board, doesn't matter how big the map is.

Here's one more argument regarding map placement. Though towns are pretty much always 3x3 rectangles, with generation starting in the middle, mission.js can produce locations of arbitrary size and shape. That includes taking 3x3 towns and bolting more bits onto them. Now, imagine trying to solve that jigsaw.



So, to recap for the topic's sake.

The player starts out in a specific town, and either there or in one of the first other towns is a cartographer. The player already knows of the portal's existence from Eutanr, just not where it is. The player then collects clues, and either brings them to the cartographer, who then adds the portal to their travel list, or pursues some other path, such as tracking down a small force of demons that's been razing towns.

Thoughts on that?

I don't just program Noxico...
Posted on 03-02-13, 07:57 pm (revision 1)

 

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My only concern with the cartographer method is that it might get a bit stale after a while. Rougelikes thrive on non-repetitive tasks, which is why I suggested a mechanic to find the portal rather than just a single method. I suppose that offering other means to locate the portal would help to alleviate that to some extent, but I still think that a mechanic that allows the player to independently pursue the location would be a better option.


Also, as to the map thing (yes I know you want to drop this, but this is something that I really want to talk about), I think you're misunderstanding what I intended the map to be. It isn't in any way a 1:1 representation of the towns or locations, but rather it is just a glorified menu where each town tile is essentially a button. Each tile on the map could be 100 m^2 or or 100 km^2, it doesn't matter. The map is just there to provide a relative location for each town to each other and to give the player a better sense of where each town is in the world.

Lead writer on Noxico (and sometimes programmer or designer) <br>
Posted on 03-02-13, 08:07 pm
<i>Prophet of Celestia</i><br>Baka on the streets, senpai in the sheets

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Hence the "or pursues some other path" bit. "Cartographer + hints = location" is just one, "razed town(s) + track down demon group = location" is another... and tell me, how many ways are there in Nethack to find the Amulet of Yendor and beat the game with it?

That's right. One. It's in Moloch's Sanctum, the lowest level of Gehennom, reached by using the same three items that are in every run, and the only variable in the Sanctum is the precise location of the secret door to the temple -- the rest of the map is completely predefined. You will always find the High Priest of Moloch there in the temple, sometimes Priestess, who carries the amulet. When you have it, the rest of the game is also always the same: you go all the way back up, through the same levels you've already seen before, chased by Rodney the Wizard of Yendor, monsters are always leveled to the highest you've reached before you got the amulet, and the upstairs on Level 1 instead brings you to the endgame level.

Compared to that, we already have two different routes to merely finding the demon portal, and behind that is a completely different world.

I don't just program Noxico...
Posted on 03-02-13, 08:46 pm (revision 1)

 

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The biggest difference between Nethack and Noxico is the amount of text that you see. Noxico is a far more text heavy game than Nethack, and seeing the same text over and over is where the majority of the staleness is going to come from. You are right in that creating a variety of different ways to find the portal could help to keep the game a bit more fresh, but that's only a tenable solution if we have enough people to write those other methods.

Even then, eventually these other ways are going to get stale too and then the game just becomes uninteresting. That's why I'm pushing for a mechanic to progress rather than a quest, as that way we can make things much more variable with much less effort.

Now, this mechanic doesn't need to be the one I suggested; it could very well be any number of other things. I only suggested that to provide something of a starting point and to illustrate a possible option. I'll try to come up with some solutions that work with what we have, but I still don't really understand why the quest system is preferable to using a mechanic.

Lead writer on Noxico (and sometimes programmer or designer) <br>
Posted on 03-02-13, 08:58 pm
<i>Prophet of Celestia</i><br>Baka on the streets, senpai in the sheets

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Really, anything works as long as it's not a distance metric.

I mean, when you think about it, the original plan back with the connected overworld was to have the player wander around and find the portal by watching the ratio of demons to regular creatures, and the backing track in the BGM. That's just one single way of finding it, based on distance.

In Nethack, the Amulet is at the bottom of the dungeon, at level 45 to 53, depending on how big the other parts of the dungeon are. That's, in a pretty obvious way, also distance. Not too different, and in a way even worse maybe since the above is X/Y and this is only Z.

Also, you keep using the words "method", "quest" and "mechanic", which looks to me as if you think all I want is one specific kind of non-distance-based solution. I never said that. It just so happens that the cartographer and razed town solutions can both be called quests, or methods, and that they can maybe be implemented without changing the code, which I most certainly prefer. But I never said it. All I said was "solutions".

In fact, we could go into an argument about the definition of "method" vs "mechanic". Let's not do that.

Ways to find the demon portal<ol><li>Collect clues, have an NPC triangulate the location.</li><li>Find razed towns, track down roving horde, get the location from their leader.</li><li>???</li></ol>

I don't just program Noxico...
Posted on 03-02-13, 09:25 pm (revision 2)

 

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Haha. Yeah, semantic discussions are definitely something we should avoid. Also, sorry about the nitpicking. I have an unfortunate tendency to fixate on details to the exclusion of the intent behind the words, and I guess come across as a bit combative when I do that. It's something I'm still trying - and failing, I suppose - to work on. :P <br/> <br/>Anyway, I've got a couple of other ideas here: <ol><li>An NPC is willing to divulge the location of the portal or someone who knows how to get to it, and wants something in return. Occasionally they try to screw the player out of the information and either attack them or try to run away.</li> <li>An NPC offers to take the player to someone who knows were the portal is. Sometimes they tell the truth, other times they lead them into an trap.</li> <li>Same as number one, but one of the gods send the player on a quest after communing at a shrine. Quest will be more difficult, but nearly 100% chance of the player being told what they want to know.</li> <li>The player is told the location of an artifact that can locate the demon portal and then has to search for it.</li> <li>Occasionally the player gets stupid lucky and finds a map in a chest that shows them the location of the portal. (Very low chance)</li> </ol>

Lead writer on Noxico (and sometimes programmer or designer) <br>
Posted on 03-03-13, 01:31 am

 

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An obvious method that I'm surprised hasn't been presented yet is, er, "befriending" a high-enough level demon that they divulge the secret to you. :P
Posted on 03-03-13, 01:08 pm
<i>Prophet of Celestia</i><br>Baka on the streets, senpai in the sheets

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Now we're talking. And yes, that is surprisingly obvious.

I don't just program Noxico...
Posted on 03-04-13, 04:08 pm
<i>Prophet of Celestia</i><br>Baka on the streets, senpai in the sheets

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Regardless of discovery methods, the portal itself now exists.



I implemented it as a Unique Character just so I could use scripts. It's marked as Beast so the only available verb is Look.

I don't just program Noxico...
Posted on 03-04-13, 04:46 pm (revision 1)

 

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Damn, that thing is pretty beastly. :O

Lead writer on Noxico (and sometimes programmer or designer) <br>
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