“Summoned” Creatures and Experience Points

Had to come up with a fix today in HamQuest regarding monsters and experience points.  In particular wandering monsters and creatures summoned by a necromancer or summoner (both of which were implemented today as well).

The fix is that no experience will be awarded for killing summoned or wandering creatures.  The reason for this is that the player can exploit summoned and wandering monsters to farm experience points (a sufficiently outfitted character can whomp on the lesser creatures  for quite some time, and rack up experience points while doing so).

So, a player could (and I did)  run away from a summoner, who will happily keep sending more goblins after you. I was pretty well armored and armed, and was able to pick off lots of goblins, orcs, and fimir before I finally got tired of it and killed the summoner. I likely could have gained two experience levels in this way had I continued.

A similar situation occurs with wandering monsters.  Currently the mechanism I use does a check for wandering monsters each time a room is entered (and the algorithm used guarantees no wandering monster the first time the room is visited).  A player can just stand in a doorway and blip back and fotth between two rooms, eventually generating an infinite number of creatures.

Now that they are no longer worth experience points, they are completely a nuisance to the player, especially the thief and ghoul, who are now a part of the wandering monster brigade.

Of the creatures now added, I would have to put the Dragon as the deadliest (I tried to fight one… I burned through 15 potions and hardly scratched him) and the thief as the most annoying…. easy to kill but he steals megaham pieces!

I’m now in a refactor of the code as well.  One of the things that will make further development easier is the ability to put the item descriptors into xml file, which means I need to make the classes representing items more into property bags, so make the xml easier to work with.  Actually, this is part of a more overall “configure the game with xml” effort, which will pay off in the long run.

Also, I have found HamQuest to be a new kind of game development experience for me.  Usually, I will come up with a little game, make it “done enough” and never touch it again. If the game is simple enough, I’ll port it to every platform/api/language I can find, but it doean’t really progress from the state I leave it in.

HamQuest has begun a life of its own.  I may set it down periodically, but I don’t think I’ll be able to set it aside completely.

Corpse Looting (I wonder what sort of spam comments I’ll get with the word ‘corpse’ in the subject line?)

Yep. It officially happened.  I got killed by a skeleton, and then the thief looted my corpse!

It reminds me that I need to fix up the messages.  The whole “a thief missed you” just makes me want to say “awww. i missed you too, thief!”

HQ1.0.0.5

Link to page

Link to game

A lot of developments between the last couple of versions.  For one thing, the game is a lot harder right now as a result of being unbalanced.

I have rudimentary shops now (called Shoppes, as any good tongue in cheek wannabe roguelike would have), and likely there are about a dozen or so bugs that I haven’t found in the game.

My “help screens” are out of date now, but as they are going to continue to get more and more out of date and I don’t want to be spending half of my time updating them, I’m going to wisely leave them for later in the process.  It still has enough information for the end user to play.

I have been playing a lot, and in playing I think one thing that is good is the starting condition of the player.  He is equipped with a dagger, a torch, and some ham. Also, all of the creatures that aren’t behind a locked door are on the weaker side now, so provided he doesn’t find himself surrounded, the player typically has a reasonable chance of succeeding through a few rooms.

However, the dagger will be done after killing several creatures, the ham will undoubtedly run out if the player doesn’t find some armor, more ham, or more potions, and that torch is practically going out already.

So this is good, as always, because having the player immediately in a crisis will get the player to engage with the game.

Also, I think the bosses and monster spawning is going to really help the end game (currently, the game is hard, and I haven’t played a full game to success in over a week).  I have now made the mistake of walking into a room with not even a torch or a single potion, only to have the dragon waltz over and kill me.

The move from traps that are always visible to ones that you have to detect by walking next to them is fantastic.  It completely changes the way a pleyer navigtes a room.

Anyway, I am quite excited with the new stuff.  I think I need to open it up on gamedev’s help wanted section to get some playtesters putting some time in on it.  Thats always a mixed bag, because there will be a lot of feature requests, but thats what happens when you roll the dice.

HQ1.0.0.3 Self-Check

HQ is updated and uploaded as of this weekend at version 1.0.0.3.  I actually have even more content in the game, but I wanted to get the monster respawning stuff out quickly.

http://www.playdeez.com/gamesfordownload/HamQuestInstall.rar

This version does also have durability based items, no longer random percentage breaking.  I also have adverse effects of armor on speed, so that’s something interesting to see how it affects balance.

I also yanked out the “how much light duration is left” statistic, and replaced it with the same sort of visible mechanism for determining how close an item is to breaking (yellow and pink highlights — stole it from diablo!).

I know already that I made the dagger too un-durable in this version.  10 hits and it breaks.

I have yet to play through a full game with the new fixes/adds.

One of the things I’ve noticed, though, is that the start of game phase (the dash away from danger and looking for weapons and potions) is still there, but the urgency for weapons is slightly less.

I’ve also found that throughout the course of the game, ham doesn’t stay in inventory very much.

Features “Completed”, Revealing Features Needed

Today I was able to polish off a few enhancements and fixes for HamQuest.

One, I have “finished” the trap spawning upon acquiring megaham feature.  Naturally, the spawning frequency of the various types of monsters will need tweaking, but the feature is in, and waiting for the right settings to be determined.

Two, I switched the weapon and armor breakage rules from random percentage with each hit to a durability system.  Now items are worn through use until they break.

Three, I fixed a glaring omission in the rules regarding armor. Previously, armor had absolutely no effect on movement.  Now it does.  Chain and plate armor have a speed roll multiplier (technically, so do shields and helmets, but they are both 1.0) which is multiplied into every speed roll.

However, these three new pieces lead to more ideas and decisions.

First, now that armor adversely effects the speed, shouldn’t there be another item that counteracts that effect?  I’m thinking magic boots.

Second, now that there is item durability, I’m thinking that I need some way of communicating that to the player visually, so I’m thinking of putting colored highlights behind the currently equipped items.  I’m also thinking about replacing the light duration timer for the currently in use light source to a similar thing.  Likely the colors will be yellow when durability is less than 50% and red when less than 25%.

Third, now that items are affecting the speed of the character, the fight mode becomes more complex.  Right now, the characters equipment is optimized for attack or defense, but not for speed.  Speed is ignored completely because before it was never modified.  Now the three need to be prioritized when certain combinations of items are carried.

As a side note, I was pleasantly surprised with how easily I was able to switch from a percentage breakage system to a durability system.  I was concerned that it was going to take a complete architectural overhaul.  It did not.

I think after I’ve wrapped up one more feature (wandering monsters) I’ll be ready to release revision 1.0.0.3 of hamquest.

The Quest For Ham Continues…

I’ve roughly put in the first of the new features into HamQuest, namely respawning of monsters when a megaham piece is acquired.  After a few minor snags, it works.  For the moment, I only have it add goblins, but that’s simply because I haven’t made my generator table for the various monster types.  That’s next to be implemented.

I decided to only replace traps with monsters, and not chests also. I felt that getting rid of chests was unfair to the player.  Besides, when I’m playing I tend to open all of the chests in the room anyway, whereas I avoid the traps.

I also have found that I tend to open chests last, after collecting all of the known goodies. Mainly, this is because a chest might contain a teleport.  In any case, this is what I expect my players to do as well.

I haven’t really worked on the code base for HamQuest in months.  I remember that it had its quirks and issues. I also have been coding for long enough to know that I should not fix them and refactor them into my vision of what the code should look like.  I do not get graded on the perfection of my code.  I get graded on how fun the game is.  My code has warts, and while I don’t always like it, I learn to live with it.

I will, however, be doing something of a refactor for some of the code as a result of the new features.  One of the new features is to finally switch from the percentage of breakage model for items(which I quickly learned to hate) and substituting a durability system whereby the weapons and armor get slowly eroded and destroyed because of use.  Naturally, this will throw the game balance out of whack again, but so be it… adding the other features throws it out of whack anyway.

I’m also really looking forward to adding persistent tenacious monsters.  Currently my thought is to include the wizard, who will use magic to conjure monsters and teleport himself around the maze, and the thief, who does what thieves do, and take your stuff, only to hide it elsewhere.

Periodic Dump Of Stuff

I played around with 6809 assembly a bit, and the MESS CoCo2.  I think I’m done now.

I also played around with Scratch again. I considered making a maze generation game.  Then I actually got started, and liked the extremely limited language almost as much as I had been enjoying the limitations of Disk Extended Color Basic 1.1.

I played Sid Meier’s Colonization (the 1994 version). Yup, it is still the same.  Also, it periodically just dies on XP, and using DOS box was painful in a different way.

I tried Qt for a bit, on both my mac and pcs.  Apparently I have failed to figure something out, as I keep getting weird errors when I attempt to use the macro magic way of mapping functions to events.  I will be returning to Qt, as it shows great promise, and likely is illustrating a limitation of myself and not of the tool.

And I played some HamQuest.  In fact, here’s a screenshot:

As you can see, I’m most of the way through.

And I think I’ve come to a realization:

HamQuest isn’t done yet.

Quite some time ago, I got feedback that gold was stupid and pointless.  If something is stupid and pointless, it shouldn’t be in a game.

I felt (at the time) that gold served as score, and so was important.

All other items have a purpose.  Keys open doors, weapons fight monsters, armor protects the character, light sources allow you to see, food and potions keep you alive, megaham pieces allow you to eventually exit.

Gold is left without a purpose.

No more.

I’m adding stores.  At least four of them, in fact.  One for light sources, one for weapons, one for armor and one for healing items.  I’m also considering having an inn (recover all hp to max) and a “casino” where a player can gamble with his gold.  A store will not be enterable unless the room it is in has been cleared of monsters.  Also, once used, the store will teleport itself to another room, and the minimap won’t show where.  There also needs to be some sort of cost when entering a store.  I’m not certain yet what the nature of the cost will be.  I might go with adding extra creatures, or I might have an increasing admission fee, or I may add a number of traps, which feeds into the second idea:

Also, HamQuest needs monsters to regenerate in some manner.  My current idea is to replace a portion of the unsprung traps and chests in the dungeon with monsters whenever a megaham piece is found.  The first megaham piece will turn 1/16 of the traps and chests into monsters, and the second 1/15, and so on, until the last one turns the rest of the chests and traps into monsters.  This allows the player the ability to minimize this effect if he wishes by springing all of the traps.

Naturally, all of this will add to the difficulty of keeping hamquest balanced, but I am not alarmed.  I’ll just need another round of playtesting.

My Head Is A 6809E Assembler

Lately, I’ve found myself doing a couple of things.

One, I’m playing the 1994 DOS game Sid Meier’s Colonization again.

Two, I’m programming for the TRS-80 Color Computer 2 again, via MESS.

Yes, I’m programming for a long-dead platform. In a way, it is better than some of my interests, which have been to program for platforms that were dead and didn’t know it.  This way it is more like practicing speaking latin.

Some of the things I’ve learned (or relearned):

1. at boot time, the memory management on the CoCo2 (in Extended Color Disk Basic) can be achieved by typing PCLEAR4:CLEAR200,&H7FFF:FILES2,256
2. if you are only interested in using PMODE1 (128px by 96px by 2bpp), you can reserve 2 graphics pages and set it up so that memory locations &H2000-&H7FFF (a whopping 24K!) can be used for machine language programming, leaving a small amount of room for a tool in BASIC to help with it.

Some Stuff

First, I am now 35.  I had a birthday party yesterday.  Technically, it was a “Bid Yap” party, as my family and I have anagrammed “Happy Birthday” into “Harp Thy Bid Yap”, and we sing the Harp Thy Bid Yap song.

Second, with the exception of the aforementioned Bid Yap party, I have been on a 1500 calorie per day diet.  Last week I lost 8.5 pounds.  Then I had my party, and ate a whole lot.  Today I’m back to the 1500 calories, although the leftovers for lunch probably put me over, but I did better than I usually would have.

Third, my attempts at gardening are finally bearing going somewhere, as I finally got dirt in about a week ago.  So far, I have only a few cucumber seedlings and some tomato plants that my sister in law gave me for bid yap.

Fourth, I am going to be attending college starting in late July.  I will be pursuing an IT degree.  My job does tuition reimbursement, so it’s like getting a 70% discount on it.  Furthermore, my status as “having once been in the military and having the word ‘honorable’ on a piece of paper” entitles me to a significant discount on the cost per credit. Even better, some of the training I received while in the military should transfer credits to my university.  Even more better, the fact that I wrote four books should make it so that I don’t have to take any composition or technical writing courses.  We’ll see later on how the book writing helps or not.

Fifth, as a ministry opportunity, my wife and I are organizing a yard sale for the purposing of ministering and gospelizing people, by getting folks in my church to donate their stuff to it, and donating both whatever money is made to a charity (because of weird bylaw stuff, not my home church, but an outside organization) and whatever stuff is left.  In this I am going to do my level best to make it obvious enough to a person who would regard what the yard sale is as some sort of “entrapment proselytizing brainwashing indoctrination” that ministry is the whole point of the yardsale, so that the people who come to it will not be completely surprised that they will be told about Jesus, but not so over the top that ordinary people are scared away by the freaky Jesus people.

My New Image Editing Tool

Originally, when I got my mac, I was using Paint.NET on my PC to generate or manipulate any art that I needed.

This has been a pain.

Yesterday, I tried Pixen.  While I’m still getting used to how it handles selections and such, it looks like its going to suit my need.

So I recommend this tool.