Tferl development started longer ago than I would really care to say. Almost the entire time since I first started with it it has not been in active development(as you can probably tell by what has been released so far). Tferl was never that far from my mind though, and I thought a lot about the setting and game play even when I hadn't touched the code for months. This has given me an advantage of knowing pretty well what I really want in the game. Instead of just jumping in to make "some roguelike", I now have a good idea of the game I want to make. Hopefully this allows me to avoid some problems as I develop the game in the future.
Without further rambling from me, lets get into one of the goals that I want to hit with this game.
How to start a new game
One thing that some roguelikes do that annoys me is when character creation is overly complicated. This happens fairly often in roguelikes with class systems.
As a player it can be very confusing when entering a new game. When you have literally hundreds of possible character combinations to choose from, it can really slow down an inexperienced player from actually entering and playing the game.
One of the other problems I have with classes in roguelikes is that they limit some of the big decisions that are possible further into the game. If you for instance create a magic user, suddenly half the items that you now find are deemed worthless, all from one early decision that you made when you had the least amount of investment in the character. Most classed roguelikes suffer from the problem that each class has too similar of a lategame between games.
I would prefer a roguelike to have almost all of its complex game changing choices to be added in at different points later in the game, and ideally there should be no point in the game where there are no more strategic choices to be made.
I really liked how Brogue plays in that it is items that are what differentiates one play-through from another. You don't know how the game is going to play out until you find your good item drops and you begin to enchant them. This makes for good varied late game play, but at the trade off of having a weak predictable early game.
The unfortunate problem caused by having a predictable and less interesting early game is that it discourages quickly restarting a game after a loss. In a game like Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup, I find it incredibly easy to restart a game when I am playing with different classes each time. It almost seems like each character combo is a completely different game. When I restart a game of Brogue I know almost exactly what to expect from the first few floors, and I know that it will require a reasonable amount of time for the game to differentiate itself from the last one.
The problem is that each of these approaches have major drawbacks.
What I plan on doing about it
Ideally one would want both a varied early game, and a just as varied late game. One would also want the game to be quickly picked up by new players while also providing early game options for more experienced players.
I mulled this over in my head for quite a bit and I think I have come to an interesting solution.
From the start I have wanted a system without classes (and possibly levels). This was greatly influenced by both rogue and brogue.
But as I thought about the problems mentioned before I wanted to try out something different than what rogue or brogue does. This led to some ideas on a starting shop system.
Instead of starting off at character creation screen, you instead are given a fixed amount of money to buy your character's starting equipment. Starting equipment will be anything from armor and weapons to consumables and magical equipment. I hope to make the starting system interesting enough to allow strategy in choosing starting play style. Because these early game items are far from enough to get through the entire game, the late game should still vary widely depending on the items that are dropped.
One problem that I foresee could happen is the already mentioned starting complexity problem. It can make it more difficult for both new players to get into the game and experienced players to restart after death.
In my eyes this problem can be reduced in three ways.
The first is to give new players a "starting" option so that they can quickly begin playing without having to confuse themselves with a huge multitude of options. In the case of this game, a basic warrior or magic build to choose from. These builds would have basic and easy to understand items, perfect for a new player. when they are ready the new player can make up their own item builds.
The second option is to include features for faster restarts. This would include saving item builds to load later, to either edit or use as a quick start.
The third option is to unlock new items in the store through play. This would reduce the staggering amount of items that would confuse a new player, while gently introducing them to new items as they play.
Predefined builds and build saving/editing are both something I would like to implement. The unlock system is something I am still contemplating on.
Next time
I think this is enough of a blog post for now. This one took me much longer to write than I would have liked. No date on the next one, but I think it will be an interesting post.
As for the game, I am still working on it when time allows (far less than I would like). A new build should be out in not too long, but it is still almost just a tech demo. Things are still chugging along though.
