Coming back to BOB, what mistakes should I not repeat?

[overtrix]

BOB was truly excellent - interesting, different, funny, non-broken. Just let the force guide you, it worked last time

[Marcotte]

I just uploaded (on the first post) a new work-in-progress version of BOB. It adds another skill tree. It took a while since I wanted to do the weapon list before posting it, which is probably the most boring part of doing a module (at least one like BOB, which needs a big variety of them). And now I am thinking of redoing it all again because I had a better idea on how to do weapons...

Anyway, since I have asked all of you what were my mistakes with the TE3 version of BOB, I guess I should mention what I personally believe they were, and what I will do differently in the TE4 version.

In no particular order:

Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards: (Warning: time-wasting link)
While during the early game, non-magical fighters (weapon masters and barehand fighters) and melee monsters could deal decent damage, at the end the big damage was pretty much confined to magic spells. One reason was that STR only gave you +1 to damage (at least for barehand, but weapons followed closely), while POW gave higher and higher bonuses as the spells got stronger.
What I am going to change:
I will unify the effects of POW and STR. Now all damage will be of the form XdY, and when they apply, POW and STR will always give a bonus of +1 per stat to Y (the number of sides). That way, if I make sure that late game weapons and claws have a high enough X (the number of dices), then STR will keep being competitive.
Also, I increased a lot starting HP, so early weapons can be stronger without being too strong against level 1 monsters/players.

Armor either useless against magic or overpowered against melee attacks:
Also linked to the previous point, but since armor was a more-or-less flat damage reduction, it prevented as much damage from a 50 damage magic attack and from 20 damage melee strike. So it was hard to balance it for both at the same time.
What I am going to change:
Again I will use the fact that damage is now all in the XdY form. Not armor will be applied for each roll, so its effect will be magnified when X is large. Therefore a spell could do 5d10, while a melee strike would do 2d10, and both will get the same relative damage reduction from armor. Furthermore, this add a distinction between a 2d10 and a 5d4 weapons (the first one being much better against armor).

Boring skills, fun skills:
In short: Weaponmastery and Barehand Combat were boring, Mutation and Thaumaturgy were fun, the others were in-between. The problem with the melee skills was that they only did 2 things: increases accuracy and dodging. And melee combat was pretty much simply hitting until the enemy was dead. Barehand combat could get some special attacks through mutations (tail and bite attacks), but it didn't help much.
What I am going to change:
Instead of having simple skills, I will have skill trees. That way, I can add special skills that add fun ways of fighting (like in ToME 4).

Planning a 100-levels game, but only doing 30 of them:
I was planning on gradually increasing the level counts, but once I reached version 0.2.0, when the dungeon was 30 levels deep, I realized that BOB works better if it is not as long as, say, Angband. That lead to many silly things, like the Fireball spell requiring a skill level of 75 to have no failure rate, the best healing potion being a "medium" one, and the strongest non-boss monster being a "young" dragon.
What I am going to change:
Well, that one is easy: the game is now planned to have only 30 levels.

Lack of mid-game progression feeling:
There was only one thing to do in the old version of BOB: gets gradually stronger (higher level, better items), then go to level 30 and defeat the BBB. Between the start and the end, its only a grind. The grind could be fun, and dangerous, but it was still only a preparation for the final battle. There were no artifacts, uniques and quests to give the player the feeling that he was getting further ahead in the game.
What I am going to change:
That one is harder to change without changing what BOB is about (so quests are out). What I will do is add a mini-boss at every 3 levels. Killing them would be optional but highly recommended. That would hopefully give some feeling of going somewhere. And since the bosses battles were always the funniest in BOB, having ten of them instead of only one should be fun. (And I like coding boss AI.)


And there are my mine gripes with the old BOB. There are other small issues, but these could have been fixed easily without having to redo all the monster/object/spell lists.

[madmonk]

Yummy!

[madmonk]

Got I a problem...

Put Bob into Modules... then tried running t-engine and could not see BOB...

I checked and this is what you see in GDB. You can see it see BOB, then doesn't go on and list it. Hmmmm! Engine mismatch.

Code: Select all

Starting program: /home/jon/Download/t-engine/bin/Debug/t-engine 
warning: the debug information found in "/usr/lib/debug//usr/lib/libSDL-1.2.so.0.11.2.debug" does not match "/usr/lib/libSDL-1.2.so.0" (CRC mismatch).

warning: the debug information found in "/usr/lib/debug/usr/lib/libSDL-1.2.so.0.11.2.debug" does not match "/usr/lib/libSDL-1.2.so.0" (CRC mismatch).

[Thread debugging using libthread_db enabled]
WARNING: No bootstrap code found, defaulting to working directory for engine code!
LuaVM:	Lua 5.1
[New Thread 0xb6b7c6e0 (LWP 24333)]
[New Thread 0xb6962b70 (LWP 24334)]
[New Thread 0xb17e4b70 (LWP 24335)]
[Thread 0xb17e4b70 (LWP 24335) exited]
[New Thread 0xb17e4b70 (LWP 24336)]
Reboot using	te4	LATEST	boot	player	false
[ENGINE LOADER] available from dir: 	te4-0.9.19
[ENGINE LOADER] sorted:	te4	0	9	19
[ENGINE LOADER] loading engine:	0	9	19	te4
[ENGINE LOADER] using directory engine:	/engines/default/
Available resolutions: 1280x1024x32
Available resolutions: 1024x768x32
Available resolutions: 800x600x32
Available resolutions: 768x576x32
Available resolutions: 720x400x32
Available resolutions: 640x480x32
Using cached font	/data/font/Vera.ttf	12
[New Thread 0xb0fe3b70 (LWP 24339)]
[KEYBINDER] Loaded keybinds: move
[KEYBINDER] Loaded keybinds: hotkeys
[KEYBINDER] Loaded keybinds: inventory
[KEYBINDER] Loaded keybinds: actions
[KEYBINDER] Loaded keybinds: interface
[KEYBINDER] Loaded keybinds: debug
Remapping	HOTKEY_11	table: 0x9b00108
[RESOLUTION] changed to 	1274	954
Disabling FBO
[ENGINE] Switching to turn based
Creating module	.svn	:: (as dir)	false	:: (as team)	nil	
Creating module	angband	:: (as dir)	true	:: (as team)	nil	
Loaded module definition for angband-1.0.0 using engine te4-0.9.19
Creating module	bob	:: (as dir)	true	:: (as team)	nil
Module mismatch engine version bob-0.3.0 using engine te4-0.9.18
Creating module	boot	:: (as dir)	true	:: (as team)	nil	
Loaded module definition for boot-0.9.19 using engine te4-0.9.19
Creating module	example	:: (as dir)	true	:: (as team)	nil	
Loaded module definition for example-1.0.0 using engine te4-0.9.19
Creating module	example_realtime	:: (as dir)	true	:: (as team)	nil	
Loaded module definition for example_realtime-1.0.0 using engine te4-0.9.19
Creating module	gruesome	:: (as dir)	true	:: (as team)	nil	
Loaded module definition for gruesome-1.0.0 using engine te4-0.9.19
Creating module	tome	:: (as dir)	true	:: (as team)	nil	
Loaded module definition for tome-3.9.19 using engine te4-0.9.19
tome	angband
example	tome
angband	example
boot	angband
angband	example_realtime
angband	gruesome
angband	boot
angband	tome
example	gruesome
example_realtime	example
gruesome	example_realtime
boot	gruesome
gruesome	gruesome
gruesome	boot
boot	example
* Module: tome
 ** 3.9.19
* Module: angband
 ** 1.0.0
* Module: boot
 ** 0.9.19
* Module: example
 ** 1.0.0
* Module: gruesome
 ** 1.0.0
* Module: example_realtime
 ** 1.0.0
[ENGINE] Switching to turn based
[MODULE LOADER] module MD5	0085631e304df7f76f6c62ae6957197e	computed in 	91
[PROFILE] switching to dev profile

[madmonk]

Yes, looks like you are using t-engine 3.0.18 and not t-engine 3.0.19.

[Marcotte]

Yes, looks like you are using t-engine 3.0.18 and not t-engine 3.0.19.

Yes, but t-engine 3.0.19 has not been released yet. But it's a simple fix for those on the development engine: simply edit line 26 of init.lua by replacing the 18 by 19.

[Duskheart]

Tried it out, looks promising, i REALLY enjoy the mutations ^.^
got a new version ready yet?

[Sirrocco]

I think you may be incorrect on the "boring skills, fun skills" side of things. In particular, it's *good* to have a variance in how complicated the available skills are. My personal favorite character type was the mutation-heavy barehander, and honestly, I *liked* "simply hitting until the enemy was dead". Bob was a relatively light game in some ways, and that was actually part of what was cool about it. Perhaps you could add in a melee tree for "brutish grappling" or whatever that would stay with simply hitting until the opponent is dead - it'd have a small but noticeable hit/dam benefit over the default attack from the barehand tree, and possibly some low-percentage chance of a few random debuffs (slow/daze/weaken/immobilize stuff) but basically consist of running into the enemy over and over and over again without any form of changing up attacks, while the barehand tree itself would bring a variety of interesting melee options.

Additionally, BoB seems like the sort of game that could only be improved by coming up with moderately humorous names for its skills.

[Marcotte]

I think you may be incorrect on the "boring skills, fun skills" side of things. In particular, it's *good* to have a variance in how complicated the available skills are. My personal favorite character type was the mutation-heavy barehander, and honestly, I *liked* "simply hitting until the enemy was dead". Bob was a relatively light game in some ways, and that was actually part of what was cool about it. Perhaps you could add in a melee tree for "brutish grappling" or whatever that would stay with simply hitting until the opponent is dead - it'd have a small but noticeable hit/dam benefit over the default attack from the barehand tree, and possibly some low-percentage chance of a few random debuffs (slow/daze/weaken/immobilize stuff) but basically consist of running into the enemy over and over and over again without any form of changing up attacks, while the barehand tree itself would bring a variety of interesting melee options.

There is still going to be a variance, but part of that variance will be inside the tree themselves. For example, the barehand tree has currently two skills: one that increase accuracy/dodging, and one that increases damage (but only if you don't have a claws mutation). So the player has the choice of either using that skill or mutations to increases his melee damage. Similarly, he won't have to take any of the active skills and just focus on skills that gives passive bonuses (like counterattacks or speed increases).

But one of the problem with "boring" skills was that increasing them only gave the player a small, hard to judge, bonus. By reducing the number of skill points, and increasing the effect of each skill level, hopefully I have reduced that issue. (At the cost of often having no skill to increase at level up.)

Additionally, BoB seems like the sort of game that could only be improved by coming up with moderately humorous names for its skills.

Agreed. I guess I should make sure that the skills name are not used where the code need to reference the skills, to allow me to effortlessly rename them later on.

[Marcotte]

Hop, I posted another WIP on the first post of this thread.

Main changes:
- Addition of the Rune casting skills
- Rewrite of the monster lists. They now scale with the dungeon level.
- Monsters can use abilities
- Monster statistics (and for some, abilities) are randomized

I think it is starting to get at the point where balance considerations start to be meaningful. So, if you have any comments on that subject, I'm all ears (or all eyes, depending).
But there is two points that I already know, and will be fixed in the future:
1: Blobs are highly unbalanced monsters, with their high crush armor. And slimes with their huge acid resistance. This make these two elements much worse than they should be with a balanced monsters list, as they are supposed to be more rarely resisted than the other elements. This issue should get better as releases add more monsters.
2: Weapons and armors (especially high-level ones) may be unbalanced. But I won't touch them until after I release version 0.3.1, since I plan to fully rewrite them to a system where most weapons are a combination of a material and a shape (kind/type/whatever).

[Zaive]

I just got to dungeon level -1 by going up twice from the starting level...

It and level 0 were completely devoid of enemies, too.

[Marcotte]

I just got to dungeon level -1 by going up twice from the starting level...

It and level 0 were completely devoid of enemies, too.

Well, that's an artifact of the example module I used as a base. I really need to remove that stair on level 1, but I keep procrastinating on that point...

As for the lack of enemies, that's simply due to enemies having a minimum level at which they can be generated, which happened to be 1 or higher for all of them.

[Marcotte]

Plonk, another WIP uploaded in the first post.

Principal additions since the last WIP:
- Added thaumaturgy, however it only do direct damage right now, the side effects will have to wait.
- Added rats and snakes to the monster list.
- Allowed the creation of the character dump ('d' while looking at the character sheet).