Subject: Re: Boring random world Date: Tue, 26 Feb 2002 10:09:51 -0800 From: "Tarn" Newsgroups: rec.games.roguelike.development "Hansjörg Malthaner" wrote in message news:3C7BA430.A89B7074@danet.de... > Hi, > > after toying around a while with the idea of infite randomly created > worlds, I remembered some old findings. > > In the beginning it's impressive to adventure a endless world. But soon > things get repetitive, just another town, another dungeon, another forest. > Even if endless, the world is roughly the same everywhere. My > experience is > that after the basic ideas and concepts are discovered, such games get > boring. Finally I found they give the player a helpless and lost feeling - > regardless how much he adventures and how many monsters he has slain, > regardless how far he travelled, there is no end - new monsters pop up all > the time, and new dungeons are found all around - finally the player will > give up in frustration, feeling unable do create a noticeable impact on > such a large worl, unable to better the world, becuase the next step will > unleash new monsters and dangers, regardless how long he already played. > > c.u. > Hajo Wow! Hajo! Cheer up! You can do lots of things: 1) Think about making the world persist between games -- I don't mean just the predictably random part that we are talking about, but every change (like the walls the player has dug out and so on). As long as you store things well, the player doesn't make enough permanent changes to worry about memory over a good number of games. Then the player will not feel like every game is a dent in an endless structure, but that every game is one brick to build up a structure which represents some real change in the game world. 2) Allow the player to become so powerful that they can change the whole world. The frustration is just a matter of scale. The player should have to work very very very hard to become this powerful, so they will always have something to aspire to. 3) Make different levels of abstraction for your map. If you have empires that spread over the entire world (here I assume a VERY large world, but not an endless one), you can put a sort of Civilization game on top of the roguelike game, and allow the player to adventure in a world that slowly changes. By doing certain quests and so on (or becoming a leader) the player can influence things on the empire level. There can also be intermediate levels (village/cave to village/cave conflicts, city-state conflicts, country conflicts, up to the empire level). 4) In general, make every element in the game (the towns, caves, even the forests through nature spirits, elves, druids, etc.) interact with each nearby element. The player won't be finding just another town if it is at war with the last town he or she was in, or if it is always subject to raids from the goblin tribes over the mountains. 5) Give each town, cave, forest and so on, enough variables on each generation such that they are rarely similar enough to bore the player. We put enough energy into randomizing and complexifying everything else. There are many different ways to make a cave. Use them all. Give each cave a theme (a la the dungeon branches of various games). Give each forest some character -- there can be "evil" forests with dead trees and twisted beasts, "virgin" forests with lots of elves and other forest spirits, and more mundane forests that have already been logged once for instance. The more variables you come up with, the more random and complex it gets. 6) Allow very basic concepts to change between worlds. Although this can be unsettling, if game elements (the magic system, items, creatures, etc.) can vary between worlds, then after a player becomes bored with a given world, that player can start with a fresh one. You can have settings in the beginning and so on to control how far the game world deviates from, say, Tolkien or some such thing. If you use the persistant worlds from (1), or just a seed that recreates the same world, then the player will be able to slowly discover all of the fascinating variations from a standard fantasy world over the course of many games. 7) Come up with a decent random plot engine. Not just "go fetch this or kill this for 500 GP" quests, but linked quests and recurring characters and so on. With a little work, you can make the prose and so on not sound completely horrible. While it is probably impossible to capture the full feel of a prefabricated plot, I don't think it is impossible to do something passable. Then the player wouldn't be stuck just exploring (they could if they wanted). You'd have to make sure that the plot system doesn't suffer from many of the bad elements of fixed plot games though, you know, some of the reasons we play roguelikes in the first place:) 8) Keep a good high score list. Perhaps if you recount more information about the character and display it for posterity, players will have more fun playing just to roleplay a given character that accomplishes great deeds, with all of the hack-and-slash thrown on top of it. You could write them up in the form of a legend, or even have the exploits of the player's worst characters recounted in local bars for the amusement of the patrons. These are all things I wanted to try in my project, but I won't be able to report back on them for a while. I'm just adding inventory screens now:) Tarn