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

[Marcotte]

For those who don't remember me, I was the creator of one T-Engine 3 modules, BOB. Like the other TE3 module makers, I lost both interest and motivation due to the never-ending alpha status of TE3. But since TE4 beta was released last May, I have been toying with making a new module using it (prior to that the plan was to use libtcod). A little while ago, I finally convinced myself to start working on a new incarnation of my previous module: BOB. (I attached my very preliminary version of it at the end of that post.)

But before I start going crazy coding everything in it, I would have one question for the few of you who still remember playing BOB on the old engine:
What were the mistakes in the way old BOB was designed? And what should be done to avoid them in the new version?

Obviously, I have already some answers for this question, and some solutions, but I would like to have other point-of-views than mine.

[madmonk]

Yes!

Keep on developing it, please! BOB was fun!

[madmonk]

I just downloaded it, so will let you know in due course!

[madmonk]

OK, some feedback...

Dungeon level

I see you can go up as well as down... it would be useful therefore to have an indication of what dungeon level you are on!

Forges

Can you change the color (or even remove??) forges that have been used.

Graphic mode

Can we have the ability change the graphic mode? I don't like the current one, do like ascii

Mutations?

Says it all

Skills

I found I could not take back a point allocated in the leveling up process in error.

Resting

I am getting a slow down when resting... DG got this in the early days as well.

[Marcotte]

Hey, I said that this version was nowhere near ready

Most of what you mention is on my list of things to be done before the first real release, so I am painfully aware of them. For example, if you save and reload, you'll see that depleted forges are darker, but sadly I haven't yet found how to update the tiles in-game.

Anyway, enough about the currently unplayable WIP version, I am more curious about what you think were the flaws in the old version of BOB, that I should be careful not to put back in this one.

[madmonk]

Sorry about that... I know you know, etc. I really enjoyed T3 BOB so I am delighted to see you back and developing it for T4.

OK, commentary:

Forges

I think your separation of forges into multiple colours in T3 was a mistake. I like the current design - one forge fits all.

Character Classes

Too early to say, but I am struggling with the bare-handed fighter (that may be me, though).

[Sirrocco]

well, if you're going with a skill system anything like the one that BoB started with...

- For each skill type, you should be clear in yourself whether it's intended to be a passive skill, a primary skill, or both.

Passive skills: a lot of characters will be interested in taking at least some of this. Even relatively small quantities can be useful into the endgame, which means that spending a few points in the beginning works fine even if you never spend any points in it again. Mutation was a huge example. As with mutation, some characters would go heavy into it and some would go light, but everyone wanted at least a bit, and there was a degree of diminishing returns as you invested more and more heavily.
Primary skills: this is intended to be your major damage-dealer. Generally people will take one or maybe two of these, and keep pushing them through endgame. Spending a few points in the beginning *is* pretty much a waste, as it won't be an effective weapon in endgame, and if it's not an effective weapon, it's not anything.

Once you've done that, it helps you focus on the balance side a bit better. Passive skill balance is easy - you make sure that even a small quantity can be useful to most folks (hello, head-gems) and that higher levels become less and less worthwhile (so that it's a judgment call of exactly how much you want, based on how useful that *particular* kind of passive is to your build). Primary skill, on the other hand, each need to be powerful enough that if you focus on that thing, you can win the game with it, without horribly gimping yourself. Every primary skill is going to have some costs and drawbacks to it, and the greater the drawbacks there are, the greater the benefits should be.

- I'd say that you should have *some* means of getting value out of forges that aren't helpful to you. Perhaps let us break them for resources? You come up to a forge. If it's a kind you like, you access it. If it's a kind that's useless to you (a weapon forge for unarmed fighters) you break it open and it sprays a decent quantity of money over the ground. It would make the profusion of "forges I can't use" rather less annoying.

- Get rid of +creativity items. Swapping in gear just before you access a forge and swapping it out just after is annoying, and adds nothing to the game.

- Once you get enough skills in (particularly once you get a fair number of passives in) you might consider including races of various sorts. Each race would have access to a small number of skills (generally 3-5, I think) that would be designed to work reasonably well together, and have some stat bonuses. Possibly have racial limits by level on how high you could crank skills - so you might have a race that has weapon skill, elementalism, and low-capped mutation on the one side, and one that has unarmed combat and high-capped mutation on the other.

[yufra]

Most of what you mention is on my list of things to be done before the first real release, so I am painfully aware of them. For example, if you save and reload, you'll see that depleted forges are darker, but sadly I haven't yet found how to update the tiles in-game.

I am a relative newcomer to ToME (dabbled a bit in ToME2, completely skipped ToME3), but the above I can help you with. You need to "invalidate" the map object stored in the C part of the engine. For example if you wanted to change the color you could do this:

Code: Select all

        -- Update the color
        self.color_r = 200
        self.color_g = 0
        self.color_b = 0
        if self._mo then
                self._mo:invalidate()
                game.level.map:updateMap(self.x, self.y)
        end

I used something like this in my module to change the color of the player's "@" as damage was taken, so this occurred in a function where "self" was the player object. Cheers!

[Marcotte]

yufra: thanks, your tip worked.

madmonk: bare-handed fighters are a little disadvantaged by the current monsters, as blobs are half of the level 1 monsters and are mostly impervious to fists.

Sirocco: thanks for the balancing tips. The problem with BOB is that many skills are simply about dealing damage (elemental control, magic strikes), so it's kinda hard making them stay relevant when keeping them at low level. As for skills that are very powerful at low level (hello, mutations), I will have to be way more careful about them this way around. For example, head-gems (if they exist) should only be available after some non-trivial investment in skill points, but still be worth it for those who need their mutation slots for other ones.

About using only one kind of forge (or making useless forges actually have some use), that's a good point. How I meant specialized forges in old BOB to work was to make the player decide whether or not to open a vault depending on if he needed the forges inside. But with many open vaults, that didn't work that well. One possibility that madmonk suggestion made me think about would be to allow the general forges to have of everything (including mutations) and have only a few specialized forges on a level (say 2-3 versus 4-5 general forges). Then the specialized forges can be made to give much better stuff, but be very strongly defended to discourage those who don't need them to seek them out.


By the way, BOB design was always about "the more the merrier" with regard to items, monsters and spells. But as I painfully try to fill the monster lists, I realize that it may be preferable to simply have a few base monsters, then scale them up according to the current level (like in the current version of ToME). Sadly this is not very doable for items (due to stacking, mainly of potions), but what do you think of doing it that way?

[darkgod]

Ohhhhhh BOB's back
I had a quick play with it, I did not really try the T3 version but this seems to be headed in a fun way, it feels quite different from T4, which is a good

[Sirrocco]

You may have misunderstood some of what i was trying to say.

- It's fine to have primary skills, that you pretty much have to keep investing in. That's not a problem (as long as they are clearly labeled as such). Things like elemental control would go into this category. It's true. If you only invest three points in it, by the end of the game, it's not going to be relevant (and that's okay).

- Passive skills aren't so much about being *powerful* even at low levels as they are about being *useful* even at low levels. Basically, passive skills are such that if you have access to them at all, and they're at all pertinent to your playstyle, you'll likely want to invest at least a bit in them. Making more primary skills available to the character gives the character different options on how to win the game. Making more passive skills available to the character inherently makes the character more powerful than they were.

Passive skills don't need to be balanced, though - not in the same way. If every magic-using character out there dips slightly into mutation in order to get a nifty head-gem at a certain level range, that's not actually a fact about mutation balance. That's a fact about magic-using balance (and, to an extent, creativity balance - as mutations are somewhat creativity-dependent). The things that need to be balanced (at least somewhat) are the primary skills.

Primary skill balance is pretty simple. First of all, make sure that each primary skill can get you where you're going. It should be able to handle enemies through the entire dungeon (somehow or other) and defeat whoever the big guy at the end is. Second, you should be able to look at any two primary skills, and explain why someone would want each rather than the other (and have the advantage/disadvantage columns be at least *somewhat* balanced). For example, elemental control requires you to fill your equipment slots with gear that provides elemental abilities. It's probably not otherwise as good as the non-elemental gear you could be wearing. It's also pure damage-dealing - it doesn't do anything useful except kill. In order to be viable, then, it needs to be a better damage-dealer in some way than runes, which work off the same stats but only fill up inventory space (rather than equipment space) and have some useful non-damaging effects. It also needs to be better (on average) than thaumaturgy, which doesn't require equip space or inventory space. On the other side, it is ranged, has area effects, and provides easy access to multiple damage types, so it probably shouldn't be as good at dealing continual single-target damage as melee or unarmed (and, indeed, with the mana limitations, it is not).

Your attitude towards forges is a bit warped. Consider: the difficulty of a vault can be though of as the chance it has to kill your character. High-danger vaults tend to be equally threatening to other high-danger vaults at the same level. Thus, if you can afford to crack open one of the high-difficulty vaults on a level to get at the forge type that you know you want (without making it totally suicidal play because hey - it's just one forge, so having even a moderate chance of dying simply isn't worth it), there's a good chance that you can afford to crack open the others as well. Maybe if you're playing a lightning-diving, high-risk game it might be worth cracking open some vaults to get at the goodies inside even though they might kill you, but you'd have to be diving pretty fast. It doesn't even work in ironman games - with those, you'll be cracking open vaults for the exp and money, even if the forges are completely worthless.

Aside from that, I'd ask that you make things like Magic Strikes a bit more transparent. If I'm investing a permanent resource (like skill levels bought with skill points) into attacks that have "we unlock other attacks for you to buy later" as a major selling point, then I'd really like to know what other attacks would be unlocked - how much they cost, and so forth. This is not as much the case with things like mutations (which I can always swap out later, even if it takes some work) or runes (which are totally dependent on what I buy from forges). It's not even as much the case with Thaumaturgy, which at least comes out and says "this is entirely based on luck. Do you feel lucky?" I just don't want to be in the position of having to make permanent decisions about my character based on incomplete information.

[Marcotte]

Your attitude towards forges is a bit warped. Consider: the difficulty of a vault can be though of as the chance it has to kill your character. High-danger vaults tend to be equally threatening to other high-danger vaults at the same level. Thus, if you can afford to crack open one of the high-difficulty vaults on a level to get at the forge type that you know you want (without making it totally suicidal play because hey - it's just one forge, so having even a moderate chance of dying simply isn't worth it), there's a good chance that you can afford to crack open the others as well. Maybe if you're playing a lightning-diving, high-risk game it might be worth cracking open some vaults to get at the goodies inside even though they might kill you, but you'd have to be diving pretty fast. It doesn't even work in ironman games - with those, you'll be cracking open vaults for the exp and money, even if the forges are completely worthless.

I guess you are right, although whenever I played, I often ignored mutation or library forges if I didn't use these respective skills. I guess that was playstyle.
I guess I should aim to differentiate forges more on what kind of dangers lurks inside instead of what kind of rewards waits in them. Anyway, I just reimplemented how the forge interface works so that I no longer need different forges for different goods (objects vs mutations), so I'll likely just use plain general forges for the first release and maybe the few first (I may change my mind later).

Aside from that, I'd ask that you make things like Magic Strikes a bit more transparent. If I'm investing a permanent resource (like skill levels bought with skill points) into attacks that have "we unlock other attacks for you to buy later" as a major selling point, then I'd really like to know what other attacks would be unlocked - how much they cost, and so forth. This is not as much the case with things like mutations (which I can always swap out later, even if it takes some work) or runes (which are totally dependent on what I buy from forges). It's not even as much the case with Thaumaturgy, which at least comes out and says "this is entirely based on luck. Do you feel lucky?" I just don't want to be in the position of having to make permanent decisions about my character based on incomplete information.

Magic Strikes will be much more transparent. While which one will fire on any given attack is still going to be random (with bias), the player will be able to see all available strikes straight away. So no need to guess that the cold strike is a requirement to the life draining strike. Thaumaturgy will also be more transparent, since I plan on having each skill increase tell you exactly what kind of spells you could be getting (and all of them will have equal probability).

[madmonk]

I guess you are right, although whenever I played, I often ignored mutation or library forges if I didn't use these respective skills. I guess that was playstyle.

As did I...

I guess I should aim to differentiate forges more on what kind of dangers lurks inside instead of what kind of rewards waits in them. Anyway, I just reimplemented how the forge interface works so that I no longer need different forges for different goods (objects vs mutations), so I'll likely just use plain general forges for the first release and maybe the few first (I may change my mind later).
The only reason to go for some forges is for the contents and not for what guards it. So if you are going to create a "well-protected" forge make the reward good!

Magic Strikes will be much more transparent. While which one will fire on any given attack is still going to be random (with bias), the player will be able to see all available strikes straight away. So no need to guess that the cold strike is a requirement to the life draining strike. Thaumaturgy will also be more transparent, since I plan on having each skill increase tell you exactly what kind of spells you could be getting (and all of them will have equal probability).

That sounds really good!

As for monsters: I liked T3 BOB for the sheer variety of monsters so I would hope that you would do the same here!

Elemental Control: I don't see any reason to take it since it is tied to finding equipment to cast from! I believe it will always be on the periphery of any characters development.

I just got to the bottom level in the dungeon (ended up as 12th - 13th level. I played a weapons fighter with Magic Strikes, and had some magic strikes maxed out by the end.

Fun! Fun! Fun! More please!

[Marcotte]

As for monsters: I liked T3 BOB for the sheer variety of monsters so I would hope that you would do the same here!

I also favour sheer variety in BOB, however there a few problems I am running into that will probably leads to go for levelling monsters with fewer base monsters. The first one was that, in the old version, I often ran up on distinct colors (and I'm colorblind, which reduce even more the available ones), creating confusion. This gives me a hard limit on how many monsters I can create per letter to about 10 or so. And levelling up monsters will avoid me to have to use these colors on power-upped versions of the early game monsters.

Elemental Control: I don't see any reason to take it since it is tied to finding equipment to cast from! I believe it will always be on the periphery of any characters development.

Actually, I found it to be the opposite. Elemental Control was pretty much the only skill tree that was about all or nothing. It is useless at low level (too few damage to make up for the lost equipment slots), but is very much worth it at high level (making it up for the slots). In many ways, Elemental Control is inflexible, this is only one way it is.

[madmonk]

The first one was that, in the old version, I often ran up on distinct colors (and I'm colorblind, which reduce even more the available ones), creating confusion. This gives me a hard limit on how many monsters I can create per letter to about 10 or so. And levelling up monsters will avoid me to have to use these colors on power-upped versions of the early game monsters.

Easily solved since you now have tool-tips available... so if you can't tell what a monster is mousing over with the mouse will tell you what it is! Should go a long way to help!