Re: Permadeath and saves***

"Erik Piper" <erik@xxxxxx> wrote:
>Nearly all skills
>actually relevant (except for a few forgivable skill-design blunders,
>and I can't even remember which ones), check.

Track, Hunt, and Treat Disease were irrelevant in WC, but quite
important in ED.

>Above all back then the notions of in-game
>tutorial and self-exposing UI and mechanics didn't exist IIRC, and
>you'll want some of those, and that means decisions.

I'd remove a bunch of the "flavour" from the commands in the Inn, I
think. The commands would be:

(G)enerate character
(D)elete character
(I)nspect character
(V)iew cached items
(S)ave game (rather than (T)ell the Minstrel of your deeds)
(R)est at the Inn
E(X)it the Inn

>Also, beyond UI, there are a lot of potential brainteasers related to
>your rogueliker background. Permadeath? (Or better put: save-as-suspend
>vs. save-for-retry?)

Save-for-retry is canonical for the game I'm paying tribute to.

>Randomization (and on what scales?).

I'll go for some randomisation, but I'm not quite sure what yet. Thing
is, part of the character of the Wizard's Crown series came from the
amount of detail in the dungeons. Each "dungeon" was a specific place,
not just a featureless underground labyrinth.

>Graphical
>tiles to help the player better visually differentiate a wide range of
>functionally different objects, or ASCII because Graphics Are Bad (or
>Distractions from Game Design Itself Are Bad)?

Tile graphics. One of the important features of Wizard's Crown's UI
was being able to look at the (humanoid) enemies and immediately tell
what weapon they were armed with. Swords did good damage (long swords
did more damage than any other one-handed melee weapon and greatswords
did more damage than any other melee weapon full stop), axes (and golem
fists) could break shields, flails ignored shields, spears had reach,
and maces were nothing special.

>These are fairly sticky
>problems, and I'm sure there are more than just these three.

There's a whole bunch of targeting modifiers etc. to balance - there was
a lot of detail in WC's combat engine.
--
Martin Read - my opinions are my own. share them if you wish.
\_\/_/ http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~mpread/dungeonbash/
\ / "tempted white eyes blinded by the night hollow like the towers from the
\/ inside laura's a machine she's burning insane" fields of the nephilim
.