Inspired by the chatter in the GD programming thread (as opposed to the Creative Projects and Other Games ones...), I've decided to attempt to revive one of my many overly-ambitious projects, this one concerning a Roguelike idea I had a while ago. The subject? Psych horror. This thread - serving as some form of motivation via hopefully generating interest and feedback - will commence with a fuckmassive infodump nobody will ever read (while I attempt to actually get something done).
The player character is somehow compelled to travel to and nose around in some mundane yet previously unknown location. There are lots of Poe-esque/Silent Hill-like scenarios I can come up with to explain the motivation for this, the simplest one being that the character has a growing obsession with something (a person or object) that they feel is connected to the location in question.
Exploring the location itself will always involve going down levels, as is Roguelike tradition, but the themes of the levels themselves will become increasingly alien and surreal as the player gets "deeper". Finding that a nondescript warehouse has a sub-basement isn't a cause for concern; finding it somehow has an entire contemporary town hidden under it is bizarre.
Furthermore, there are monsters about, but I hope to take a more considered approach to them than most Roguelike authors - you won't be slaughtering hordes of them at once, and they should at least have a modicum of intelligence.
1. The game should be moderately streamlined. Characters - and enemies - should not be overly disposable. If you die, it had better be for a good reason. The experience should be intense if at all possible, but that can't be enforced via making things extremely difficult; there's no better way to remove mystique from a game than making you go through the motions every time you want to do something (checking for traps in NetHack, for instance). As we all know, the trick to flow is making sure you're pushing the player just enough but not too much. Furthermore, there's no point in displaying every bit of information if there isn't an extremely solid and deep system in the back so that information is worthwhile.
2. The game should put an emphasis on quality over quantity. There's absolutely no point in having enemies if they can't fuck with you and be independently threatening and/or interesting. Everything of note should have some ability or emphasis to make sure that it isn't generic. This includes rooms and locations.
3. The game should involve non-linear design. Elements like character stats and attributes, for instance, should affect the player in a nonbinary fashion. Specialising in one specific area shouldn't mean you have less potential to "advance" in other areas; it should actively hurt your effectiveness in other areas.
Character creation will begin with the player determining stats, which will, as noted previously, be nonlinear. My current approach is to make each stat dualistic; putting points into it helps you in one way while hurting you in another. Once this is done, the game will take the player's two highest stats and use them to determine the character's class. The purpose of a class is purely to determine the player's starting equipment, the cost of their feats, and possibly some elements of their backstory.
The player has an initially set number of points to spend on feats, which are the primary form of character advancement. There is no increase or decrease of stats via character advancement; there are no flat bonuses to health or the like via advancement. There are only feats. Feats benefit the character in a set, specific way: it might be a bonus to some element of the combat system, or some new action. You probably know how this sort of thing works. Each class has its own feat cost "table", so to speak, but all feats are available to all characters. The player earns more points by advancing in the game. My hope here is that this approach'll allow people the most freedom of play - there's no reason to have to run off and whack things if you don't want to.
Once the player has made their choices as to the direction of their character, the game will generate a simple character backstory. The specifics of the backstory may have some ramifications later on.
The game will generate levels procedurally as in any Roguelike; however, given the nature of the game, I think a better approach than the usual build-rooms-out-of-nothing would be to use a bank of set templates and arrange them procedurally. This allows me to easily make each level highly themed and create setpieces. By making the game arrange various combinations of room setpieces and monster setpieces, I can attempt to keep players on their toes.
Specific rooms should also have a "feel" that has a subtle affect on how things proceed within them. This could be something simple like affecting rolls slightly, or something more involved, like affecting mental states. For convenience I'll go over those next.
Any character in a game such as this should be vulnerable to emotion; the whole theme relies on it. In stressful situations the player character may, depending on their stats, crack, or completely flip out. There is also a special state - desperation - that kicks in whenever the player is really fucked over and about to die. This is a general buff that might just help you escape if you've reconsidered doing whatever highly dangerous thing you were doing that got you into your sorry state.
To put things in the light of buffs and debuffs (which is something I want to avoid), I'm currently considering anger more a buff that generally kicks in when it wants and is potentially followed by an enhaustion debuff, while fear is a debuff that kicks in in bad situations and is followed by desperation if things get bad enough. Building your character to hulk out over every little thing means you'll get scared less by things that are actually dangerous and have less chances to pull out if stuff goes wrong.
As the player advances through the game, the player character becomes more exaggerated in their ways. Despairing characters will forevermore be despairing; motivated and angry ones will get more and more obsessed and berserk. This is the point where the character's motivation starts to run away with them and they begin to stop caring about the bizarre situations they find themselves in.
There might be room for more esoteric mental state business but nothing I've really considered yet.
Combat should involve meaningful choices for the player. This is something Roguelikes are often terrible at - and they really should be better at it, considering that most of them are dungeon crawls. There are obviously dozens of different routes I can take things in this regard.
Arguably more fundamentally important is the way the game handles health and damage. I could use the typical HP-based system; it'd work so long as the combat system backing it up was good enough. I did think of an alternative, even more simplistic, system, which is functionally the same thing as HP but if you don't kill things in one hit it just does 1 damage. This allows me to abstract things out into "minor" and "major" wounds, as opposed to having "you smite the kobold shopkeeper for 6 damage" or whatever.
Magic is powerful and dangerous. It should mess you up if you use it improperly. Hell, it should mess everything up if you use it improperly.
Magic is gained from books found in shrines. Each shrine is guarded and contains one profane book, which has a random apperance and concerns a certain theme (probably sphere + emphasis, where emphasis is "positive" or "negative"/"constructive" or "destructive", et al). Here's where things get a bit more involved:
- You can't just open the book and kablam, magic. You need to find a reference. This means you need to find the right page.
- When the player opens the book, the game lets them either find to a specific page or peruse. Perusing takes time but quickly sorts through the pages until it finds one that actually that actually does something.
- When the player hits the right page, kablam, magic. No warning or confirmation. If they just happened to pick a page that turns the room into liquid fire while rearranging the entire level, bad luck.
A player will have to remember the appropriate pages (or make a note, cheater), because looking through the whole thing or picking pages at random is sure to be impractical.
The point of this over-wrought system is to provoke the feel of actually browsing through something that's well beyond your education and/or your human comprehension. ASCII art is probably a good idea too.
There isn't any mana in this game - but channeling energies through yourself is tiring and may hurt.
The game will involve procedurally generated artifacts, each having an effect drawn from a set pool. My hope is to make these artifacts have a more classical/SCP-esque feel to them than the typical +6 +rE longsword of slay orc. This means they should be able to do things that aren't necessarily beneficial or detrimental, just odd. Things that remove things from the universe or put things into other universes or put universes into other universes, for example. It'll take a while for me to get a lot of ideas, but implementing this sort of thing should be late in development anyway.
That wasn't anywhere near as big as I thought it would be, but I suppose it's not really covering the specifics of anything. I'll post more if anyone cares.
