Infinite Dungeon
Posted: Wed Sep 22, 2010 5:04 pm
Anybody here played Lufia 2? Great old console RPG. It had a side quest that sent the player to The Ancient Cave, which could occupy you for countless hours and was ridiculous amounts of fun. I suggest stealing it for T4 (or stealing it back, maybe; whatever programmer came up with it was clearly inspired by roguelikes). Darkgod has mentioned plans for an infinite dungeon, and I think this would be an interesting take on the idea.
Here's how it worked in Lufia 2:
The cave was non-persistent, accessible only late in the game, and was 99 levels deep. Upon entering, the player was stripped of all experience and items, only getting them back when they exited the cave. They were also given a handful of health and mana potions. Throughout the cave were scattered treasure chests of two types:
Red chests had random loot that you could use while in the cave, but which disappeared when you left the cave.
Blue chests had awesome loot that you could use while in the cave, and which you could take with you when you left. Furthermore, you could take these items back into the cave with you on later visits. Blue chests were quite rare and the loot gotten from them was, for the most part, totally unavailable elsewhere in the game.
In Lufia 2 you did not naturally regenerate health and mana, so you were dependent on the potions you start with and items from chests. Also, much of the loot could be activated for various beneficial effects, including mana restoration and healing. Spells in Lufia 2 were learned from scrolls. You didn't start the cave with any spells, but finding useful spell scrolls in chests was a large part of a successful trip. Bad luck with chests meant short, painful trips.
It was nearly impossible to make it to the bottom of the Ancient Cave on your first (or second, or third...) try. The goal for early trips to the cave was simply to survive long enough to find blue chests and escape with the loot, thus making later forays to the cave easier. And, of course, the blue chest loot was awesome, and helped a great deal with completing the rest of the game.
In short, each trip through the Ancient Cave was something like playing an Ironman Angband character. Your resources are extremely limited, you pick your fights carefully, and depend on rare, lucky finds to allow you to progress further.
Making a similar dungeon in T4 would require some tweaking. First of all, built-in health and mana/stamina/etc regeneration would break the experience, so I would recommend removing those for a character that enters the cave. To get health or resources back, you have to level up or use a potion or hope to find an artifact that activates for healing or resource gain. This would force the player to pick fights sparingly and use special special abilities sparingly. This also means that we'd have to tone down monster aggressiveness so that avoiding fights is easier. Maybe reduce monster vision range, or make them cancel pathing when the player is out of sight. Ideally we'd use chests, though Darkgod would have to add support for them.
For the blue-chest items, I recommend implementing randomized artifacts. Randarts would only be available in the Ancient Cave (or whatever we call it), thus providing good incentive to take on the cave. They should be tuned to be roughly as powerful as endgame artifacts and include no stat requirements, so as to make them usable by characters of any level in the Ancient Cave.
The entrance to the cave in the overland map should take you to a sort of lobby, where an NPC can explain the basic mechanics and ask you if you actually want to enter the cave. If you do, he charges you an entrance fee, strips you of all experience and items, gives you 10 healing potions and 10 potions of restore [whatever resource your character uses], class-appropriate starting gear, a scroll of Word of Recall, and teleports you in. I envision having the entrance fee start out at one gold and double for each successive trip, which puts a soft cap on the number of Ancient Cave runs you can make; for example, a tenth trip to the Ancient Cave would require a 512 gold entrance fee. The eleventh would be 1024, and so on. The Word of Recall scroll yanks you back to the lobby with no delay, and is usable at any time. It should definitely be fireproof.
There needs to be a balance between entry price and ease of escape. The way I set it up above, escape is easy and guaranteed (if you're careful), but geometrically increasing entrance fees motivate you to make the most of each visit. Another possible implementation would be more like Lufia 2's: free entrance but you don't get a Word of Recall scroll. You have to find one in the dungeon. Of course, dying in Lufia 2 just meant you reappeared at the last save point. With permanent death in ToME, I thought guaranteed escape felt more appropriate.
Monster difficulty should probably be regulated carefully like in starter zones, seeing as how you're getting dumped in this cave at level 1 with crap gear.
Some things to consider:
How should we treat talents and spells that restore resources? Manaflow, for example, is available to Archmages relatively early and effectively allows the player to rest to recover their mana (and health, too, with healing spells). The fundamental challenge of the Ancient Cave is thus negated as soon as a player gets Manaflow. Unending Frenzy, on the other hand, restores stamina when you kill something, so it doesn't break the Ancient Cave.
How should randomized artifacts be handled? This could have an entire thread devoted to it.
Should stairs be one- or two-way? I don't know exactly how savefiles work, but two-way stairs mean that either old levels have to be saved (problematic in a 99-level dungeon?), or old levels are remade when you go back up stairs, opening up all sorts of abuse; for example, bouncing between levels 1 and 2 looking for blue chests. I recommend one-way stairs.
Should any aspects of a character be preserved when entering the cave? For example, should a character who gained access to the sand tree by eating the organ still have access to it in the cave? How about access granted by completing escort quests? Or should a character be broken down to an exact duplicate of their first-game-turn self?
I imagine there are a ton of issues I didn't consider. I'm eager to hear everybody's thoughts on this. And if I didn't make this sound fun, then you'll just have to take my word for it. It was a blast in Lufia 2. Also, if one considers the ratio of coding time spent on new content to time spent by players on new content, then the Ancient Cave starts to sound really good.
Here's how it worked in Lufia 2:
The cave was non-persistent, accessible only late in the game, and was 99 levels deep. Upon entering, the player was stripped of all experience and items, only getting them back when they exited the cave. They were also given a handful of health and mana potions. Throughout the cave were scattered treasure chests of two types:
Red chests had random loot that you could use while in the cave, but which disappeared when you left the cave.
Blue chests had awesome loot that you could use while in the cave, and which you could take with you when you left. Furthermore, you could take these items back into the cave with you on later visits. Blue chests were quite rare and the loot gotten from them was, for the most part, totally unavailable elsewhere in the game.
In Lufia 2 you did not naturally regenerate health and mana, so you were dependent on the potions you start with and items from chests. Also, much of the loot could be activated for various beneficial effects, including mana restoration and healing. Spells in Lufia 2 were learned from scrolls. You didn't start the cave with any spells, but finding useful spell scrolls in chests was a large part of a successful trip. Bad luck with chests meant short, painful trips.
It was nearly impossible to make it to the bottom of the Ancient Cave on your first (or second, or third...) try. The goal for early trips to the cave was simply to survive long enough to find blue chests and escape with the loot, thus making later forays to the cave easier. And, of course, the blue chest loot was awesome, and helped a great deal with completing the rest of the game.
In short, each trip through the Ancient Cave was something like playing an Ironman Angband character. Your resources are extremely limited, you pick your fights carefully, and depend on rare, lucky finds to allow you to progress further.
Making a similar dungeon in T4 would require some tweaking. First of all, built-in health and mana/stamina/etc regeneration would break the experience, so I would recommend removing those for a character that enters the cave. To get health or resources back, you have to level up or use a potion or hope to find an artifact that activates for healing or resource gain. This would force the player to pick fights sparingly and use special special abilities sparingly. This also means that we'd have to tone down monster aggressiveness so that avoiding fights is easier. Maybe reduce monster vision range, or make them cancel pathing when the player is out of sight. Ideally we'd use chests, though Darkgod would have to add support for them.
For the blue-chest items, I recommend implementing randomized artifacts. Randarts would only be available in the Ancient Cave (or whatever we call it), thus providing good incentive to take on the cave. They should be tuned to be roughly as powerful as endgame artifacts and include no stat requirements, so as to make them usable by characters of any level in the Ancient Cave.
The entrance to the cave in the overland map should take you to a sort of lobby, where an NPC can explain the basic mechanics and ask you if you actually want to enter the cave. If you do, he charges you an entrance fee, strips you of all experience and items, gives you 10 healing potions and 10 potions of restore [whatever resource your character uses], class-appropriate starting gear, a scroll of Word of Recall, and teleports you in. I envision having the entrance fee start out at one gold and double for each successive trip, which puts a soft cap on the number of Ancient Cave runs you can make; for example, a tenth trip to the Ancient Cave would require a 512 gold entrance fee. The eleventh would be 1024, and so on. The Word of Recall scroll yanks you back to the lobby with no delay, and is usable at any time. It should definitely be fireproof.
There needs to be a balance between entry price and ease of escape. The way I set it up above, escape is easy and guaranteed (if you're careful), but geometrically increasing entrance fees motivate you to make the most of each visit. Another possible implementation would be more like Lufia 2's: free entrance but you don't get a Word of Recall scroll. You have to find one in the dungeon. Of course, dying in Lufia 2 just meant you reappeared at the last save point. With permanent death in ToME, I thought guaranteed escape felt more appropriate.
Monster difficulty should probably be regulated carefully like in starter zones, seeing as how you're getting dumped in this cave at level 1 with crap gear.
Some things to consider:
How should we treat talents and spells that restore resources? Manaflow, for example, is available to Archmages relatively early and effectively allows the player to rest to recover their mana (and health, too, with healing spells). The fundamental challenge of the Ancient Cave is thus negated as soon as a player gets Manaflow. Unending Frenzy, on the other hand, restores stamina when you kill something, so it doesn't break the Ancient Cave.
How should randomized artifacts be handled? This could have an entire thread devoted to it.
Should stairs be one- or two-way? I don't know exactly how savefiles work, but two-way stairs mean that either old levels have to be saved (problematic in a 99-level dungeon?), or old levels are remade when you go back up stairs, opening up all sorts of abuse; for example, bouncing between levels 1 and 2 looking for blue chests. I recommend one-way stairs.
Should any aspects of a character be preserved when entering the cave? For example, should a character who gained access to the sand tree by eating the organ still have access to it in the cave? How about access granted by completing escort quests? Or should a character be broken down to an exact duplicate of their first-game-turn self?
I imagine there are a ton of issues I didn't consider. I'm eager to hear everybody's thoughts on this. And if I didn't make this sound fun, then you'll just have to take my word for it. It was a blast in Lufia 2. Also, if one considers the ratio of coding time spent on new content to time spent by players on new content, then the Ancient Cave starts to sound really good.
