AaarrRL is a pirate-themed RL. (As far as I can tell it is the only
one?) To me, there are two fairly distinct paths such a game can go
down:
1) Ship-as-a-player. Similar to games like Pirates! and countless
others. In this game your @ is a ship (or more likely, a series of
progressively better ships). You need to worry about crew management
(grog & rum instead of food obviously!), morale, cannon broadsides,
better sails, etc. This is more of a "big picture" game. I have a
bunch of ideas on how to incorporate some of the usual RL standards
(magic, lots of items, etc) into this framework, but it is less-
obvious sort of stuff. Monsters are things like other ships and sea
monsters. Items are things like crew members, cannons, treasure
chests, etc. Magic are "abilities" that come from having specialist
crew members.
2) Player-as-a-player. The standard RL path. In this game your @ is a
pirate of some caliber and the usual RL mechanics are relatively
simple to translate. Instead of swords & sorcery you have swords &
pistols (lots and lots and lots of pistols). Monsters are things like
skeletal pirates, imperial overlords, crazed voodoo islanders, etc.
Items are the usual RL things: potions, weapons, scrolls, treasure
maps, gold coins, etc. Magic is mostly ambient in the form of voodoo
artifacts and the occasional undead pirate. Oh, and insults!
To me, both of these paths could potentially be lots of fun (agree/
disagree?). I like the idea of having to worry about (in case #1)
which battery (port or starboard) of cannon I have loaded, and whether
I should risk turning around to give a fresh broadside, or wait until
my current side reloads. And oh, BTW I should try and pick up a gunner
crewman to speed that up a bit.
On the other hand (case #2), I also like the idea of busting into
somewhere with 14 braces of pistols and dueling with evil imperial
governors.
In the current incarnation of AarrrRL I am straddling both of these
worlds. Your "ship" @ zooms around in the ocean, fighting sea monsters
and the occasional pirate ship. The player also has the option to
board another ship and essentially this is a separate "game" with your
@ now representing you (the captain), with the usual RL combat
mechanics. The game hasn't progressed that far yet but I can already
feel the design difference required for each "game".
My worry is that going down both of these paths will be potentially
too hard to balance -- do I force players to be successful at both
"games", or is 1 enough? Maybe you can have a really crappy ship and
just run away from the sea monsters, and always deal with enemy ships
via boarding. Or maybe you can have a really crappy "human" and just
sink any other ship you come across... of course this robs the player
from the "swords & pistols" combat that I consider pretty critical to
Pirateyness.
Sorry for the lengthy discussion... just looking for a bit of
feedback. Is this maybe why I haven't seen any other pirate RLs? :)
HF
It would be nice if your ship was represented by a little more than an
'@' so you could tell what direction you were faceing.
Personally I think you should keep the two games, when someone thinks
of a pirate RL they think of both. Of course you have to decide
wether you are the human or you are the ship. If you are the human and
have crew members it might be a good idea to just hide in your cabin
so you don't get shot.
If you wanted them to seem more connected, you could have the ship
view happening up top, while you controlled the ship by walking around
on it. Bumping the steering wheel to change direction and the mast to
change your tack.
< ( ]
: .
. :
\ .
(
/
I'd agree that you should keep both systems, just make sure that
everything necessary to progress through the game can be obtained in
ship, on foot, or and through the combination of play styles.
SIDENOTE: When i first saw your 7drl announced I thought it was going
ti be a roguelike based on the AAAAAAAAAH Real Monsters cartoon.
I think the devil is in the details, and my immediate reaction (which
you should not take for more than it is worth, and which I am offering
only because you asked) is that #1 is not well suited to the Roguelike
genre but #2 could be great. Ship-to-ship combat involves a lot of
stuff like wind strength and direction and ship mass, momentum,
direction and turning speed. If these things can be done enjoyably in
a computer game at all, it would have to be a game involving graphics
rather than text, continuous movement rather than a discrete grid, and
realtime play (even if it could be paused) rather than a division of
time into atomic turns. Conversely, a lot of the strength of the
Roguelike genre comes from interesting terrain, and I don't know how
you could reproduce the strengths of a well-designed dungeon generator
on the surface of an ocean.
I like some of the aspects from #1, specifically the resource
management or crew, weaponry, grog, ship specs etc. But I think those
would be best integrated with the overall approach you outlined in #2.
If you want to include some sort of sailing mechanic, I would let the
ship guide itself to a waypoint you set. While in motion, the player
would be an @ standing in a ship map that would vary depending on your
model of ship, its weaponry, its crew, etc. Encounters en route could
consist of another pirate ship pulling up alongside you and trying to
board, sea monsters surfacing and attacking with ranged attacks or
damaging your ship directly, ghost pirates drifting aboard, airborne
monster attacks etc. The player could direct the cannons as though
they were wands in his inventory as long as there was a crew member
manning each one. The model of ship would determine the layout of the
ship map, the amount of hit points that the ship has and how quickly
the ship moves (i.e. how many turns of automatic waypoint travel it
will take to reach the destination). The ship weaponry would affect
the reload speed, range and damage of each weapon. They could be
placed on the ship map manually by the player or automatically
assigned to the various turret slots on the ship map. The crew and
their personal items and supplies (including grog!) would determine
how skillfully they could manage the cannons and how effective they
would be in melee or pistol combat -- maybe also how likely they are
to mutiny, get in fights with one another, etc. Lots of places to go
from here -- put a brig on your ship so the player can capture pirates/
creatures/innocent people and sell them to law enforcement/zoos/
slavers, have quests from governors/law enforcement/treasure hunters/
pirates to escort a trade ship/embargo a rival island/capture pirates/
loot a merchant vessel/find buried treasure where X marks the spot,
etc.
I just think the key is to avoid getting bogged down in a physics
simulation of a ship or anything else that you can't picture being fun
to play within the limits of the roguelike genre.
Only if it _is_ entirely simulationist. No particular reason it has to be.
Of course, also, the old Avalon Hill "Wooden Ships And Iron Men" was
fairly simulationist and had discrete turns and movement. The OP should
take a look at it.
--
David Damerell <dame...@chiark.greenend.org.uk> flcl?
Today is Second Gouday, March.
Tomorrow will be Second Chedday, March - a weekend.
@Pender: Thanks especially for your lengthy response. In my opinion, a
very "simulatory" ocean combat game is yeah, pretty boring. At this
point about the only "simulationy" aspect of the @-as-ship game is the
fact that your "area of attack" is determined by which way you are
facing. However, as win mentioned, I do need a better way of
representing your ship's "orientation". There is a Wrestling 7DRL that
does this pretty well actually. Early on in the game I experimented
with some more restrictive movement: you weren't allowed to just "back
up" and move in the direction immediately opposite your facing.
However, this got frustrating pretty quick. The nature of a RL is that
there is lots of finger-flying all over the numpad (or vi keys)...
having to think about which directions you aren't allowed to move in
is no fun. Similarly, I think worrying about wind and tacking is also
not so much fun.
I am sort of intrigued with the concept of interacting with the ship
as a @-only though. Where you'd essentially have a "control level"
with all of your guys on it and certain hot spots you could "bump" to
control the ship. I'm not sure how much fun this would be though. If I
take the suggestion of just using the ship to pass the "travel time"..
am I just hitting 'rest' a bunch of times as I wait for the ship to
move along course? Or do I need to track a ship on another screen/
minimap? I'm not sure how fun these two scenarios are. Is it more fun
to blast someone with a cannon broadside while you are an @-as-captain
staring at a bunch of @-as-crewmen load cannons? Or is it more fun to
do it when you are an @-as-ship?
Although I -do- like the idea of fighting sea-monsters not just in the
"big picture" @-as-ship world... someone mentioned having to fight off
tentacles and ranged attacks from the deck of a ship. There is
probably a fun mechanic in there, where basically any big enough
monster can "board" your ship once it gets close enough (and cannons
become useless). In this scenario, it would be similar to boarding
another ship, except the monster is boarding YOU.
Hrm,... so that sounds like a lot of fun. But also a lot of work. :)
My other question is... how much time do we spend on the ocean?
(Someone mentioned boring terrain -- currently I am generating each
level as an area of "islands" which essentially is like any generic
"cave level" in other RLs)
If ocean combat is so cool, is it OK for the player to hop out and
spend 4 or 5 levels on foot? I'm thinking getting out to hunt
treasure, fight voodoo islanders, explore ancient atlantean ruins,
etc. Then you'd just "meet back" with your ship on the other side.
Or maybe it is better to treat the ocean like an "overworld" map, and
have anything "on foot" by definition be a limited-depth dungeon?
Sorry, lots of ideas again, but I do appreciate the feedback. :)
> My worry is that going down both of these paths will be potentially
> too hard to balance -- do I force players to be successful at both
> "games", or is 1 enough? Maybe you can have a really crappy ship and
> just run away from the sea monsters, and always deal with enemy ships
> via boarding. Or maybe you can have a really crappy "human" and just
> sink any other ship you come across... of course this robs the player
> from the "swords & pistols" combat that I consider pretty critical to
> Pirateyness.
I think having both elements makes the game more fun. I'd personally
say the player should be required to do a bit of each. Otherwise
there's a danger of other ships shooting you down before you can board
them, or just as equally a chance that they'll board you whilst you're
trying to shoot them down. Different enemies will have different
strengths and weakness that the player will have to tackle in
different ways.
Personally I'd say you should get AaaarrrRL into a more playable state
(essentially include enemies that fight back) and see how enjoyable it
is. Then build up from there. It could end up that the ship element
is just a sidegame to the main sabre'n'pistol fun, but it still has a
value in the game.
--
Darren Grey
> I am sort of intrigued with the concept of interacting with the ship
> as a @-only though. Where you'd essentially have a "control level"
> with all of your guys on it and certain hot spots you could "bump" to
> control the ship. I'm not sure how much fun this would be though.
The analysis should start and end with how much fun this would be, in
my opinion. Assuming the player immediately assumes control of the
ship, as I take it he would have to do if he wanted to go anywhere,
then is he just navigating like an @ would do in an ordinary dungeon?
One keypress, one movement, rinse and repeat, and the only difference
is that the dungeon walls are supposed to signify islands? Far be it
from me to claim a perfect imagination, but I can't personally imagine
this being interesting.
> If I
> take the suggestion of just using the ship to pass the "travel time"..
> am I just hitting 'rest' a bunch of times as I wait for the ship to
> move along course? Or do I need to track a ship on another screen/
> minimap? I'm not sure how fun these two scenarios are. Is it more fun
> to blast someone with a cannon broadside while you are an @-as-captain
> staring at a bunch of @-as-crewmen load cannons? Or is it more fun to
> do it when you are an @-as-ship?
Presumably the time would be spent fighting off random encounters --
sea monsters, ghosts, tentacled ocean horrors, pirate ships, royal
navy ships, ships of rival governors you've wronged. The more time
spent traveling, the more encounters to be fought, modified of course
by how friendly those particular waters are. There's no need to make
the player hold down the rest button; queue up a bunch of encounters
with some recuperation time in between, and hack together some uber-
rest mechanic to allow the player to fast-forward to the start of the
next encounter once the current encounter is complete, if he chooses.
Yes, I think it would be more fun to blast someone with a cannon
broadside when you are @-as-captain. That way each cannon could have
its own stats, and more importantly, the physical position and
orientation of each cannon would be strategically relevant to the
battle. Things would also get tactically interesting when enemies
boarded your ship and going after your cannon crew: do you send the
crew to safety belowdeck and let that cannon go offline? Do you have
the crew neglect his cannon while he fights the enemy? Do you redirect
other crew members (or yourself) to defend him while he doggedly
sticks to his guns? This can get as complex as you like. Maybe he has
really good cannoneering ability but lousy combat rating... maybe he
is connected to an important political family and allowing him to come
to harm would redound to your detriment when you are in that family's
waters...
> Although I -do- like the idea of fighting sea-monsters not just in the
> "big picture" @-as-ship world... someone mentioned having to fight off
> tentacles and ranged attacks from the deck of a ship. There is
> probably a fun mechanic in there, where basically any big enough
> monster can "board" your ship once it gets close enough (and cannons
> become useless). In this scenario, it would be similar to boarding
> another ship, except the monster is boarding YOU.
Yes. Or enemy ships can pull up alongside you once your cannons on
that side are offline and lower bridges to board.
> Hrm,... so that sounds like a lot of fun. But also a lot of work. :)
Who knew this Roguelike business could be so much work? :)
> If ocean combat is so cool, is it OK for the player to hop out and
> spend 4 or 5 levels on foot? I'm thinking getting out to hunt
> treasure, fight voodoo islanders, explore ancient atlantean ruins,
> etc. Then you'd just "meet back" with your ship on the other side.
Or meet it back where you left it once you'd completed your
exploration / conquest / treasure hunt. It's definitely OK to have on-
foot levels. Maybe you can take some of your crew with you. Maybe they
can specialize in skills that are useful on land. Maybe one of the
voodoo sorcerers can be bribed to join your crew. There's no need to
decide on a ratio now; once the framework is in place, you can tinker
to satisfaction.
> Or maybe it is better to treat the ocean like an "overworld" map, and
> have anything "on foot" by definition be a limited-depth dungeon?
That's how I pictured it.
Anyway, these are a lot of wild-eyed ideas. As always, the key to
success is starting with a more limited vision and working on aspects
that are fun to work on and fun to play until it blossoms into a full
game. At that point, it doesn't really matter if it matches your
initial design.
Again, thanks for the comments. I think all of us can agree that "fun"
should always be the metric of choice. :)
However, I have to disagree with your comment up here. I can imagine a
world with @-as-ship being interesting enough. Really, if you bend the
usual RL tropes a bit you can have a full fledged "dungeon
experience". Instead of food, you worry about crew morale/drunkeness.
Instead of picking up items lying around, you are scavenging from
floating wreckage (including new sailors) or sunken treasure. Instead
of bump-attacking rats and snakes you are "broadsiding" sea monsters,
sharks, lots and lots of other pirate ships. etc.
Instead of spells you get new abilities by picking up specialist crew
types (e.g. bribe a voodoo priestess, hire an extreme navigator,
rescue a crack gunnery master, etc).
I'm not saying this is MORE INTERESTING than @-as-player swashbuckling
& pistols & bloody ship decks, but it is certainly something worth
thinking about, from my perspective.
However, I am willing to admit that I am the only one. And again, here
is where "most fun" comes into play. :)
HF
I'd propose that you simplify the ship navigation, though. I think
instead of having to contrive a control scheme and ASCII
representation that makes controlling the ship easy, you should just
stick with a single @ and let the arrow keys govern movement as they
would in a dungeon. This will simplify gameplay a lot. However,
don't just throw out all the strategic things like wind, # and
readiness of cannons, crew, etc. You can still take these
calculations into effect as speed of movement.
So, if your ship is facing east and you suddenly want to move west,
that move would take longer. If a sea monster is chasing you, this
might be represented by the sea monster getting to move twice to your
one movement. If you're bumping an enemy ship to attack, then do the
internal check to see how long it takes you to reload your cannons.
That one movement could give the enemy enough time to fire their
cannons and throw grappling hooks, thereby interrupting your cannon
fire. (Don't want to sink a ship that's tied to yours!)
Also, I disagree with the above sentiment about the overworld not
being that interesting. I think you can make it easy enough by
including both continental shorelines, larger islands, archipelagos,
etc.
Anyways... I have a LOT more ideas, but I have other things to do and
you'll have plenty of your own. I'll be keeping an eye on your
progress. : )
-Ryan
>> 1) Ship-as-a-player. Similar to games like Pirates! and countless
>> others. In this game your @ is a ship (or more likely, a series of
>> progressively better ships).
> It would be nice if your ship was represented by a little more than an
> '@' so you could tell what direction you were facing.
Two characters is enough for showing a direction, if you are willing
to accept eight directions. Use two different characters, one for the
front and one the back. It would also give another visual difference
between ship and human modes.
Making the ship larger would allow for more discrete movement and
more minor influences such as the effects of wind, but that isn't
necessarily desired.
> win <ander...@gmail.com> wrote in news:4dc51264-4b30-44ec-a6b3-
> 4aa324...@u15g2000prd.googlegroups.com:
>> On Mar 24, 6:24 am, Heroic Fisticuffs <heroic.fisticu...@gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>
>>> 1) Ship-as-a-player. Similar to games like Pirates! and countless
>>> others. In this game your @ is a ship (or more likely, a series of
>>> progressively better ships).
>
>> It would be nice if your ship was represented by a little more than an
>> '@' so you could tell what direction you were facing.
>
> Two characters is enough for showing a direction, if you are willing
> to accept eight directions. Use two different characters, one for the
> front and one the back. It would also give another visual difference
> between ship and human modes.
You could rip off Privateer: ASCII Sector's ship movement. It uses a
little cursor near the ship to show direction and speed.
I took this as a challenge, so I made a demo (plus I really like
making physics simulations)
source code here.
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/4827407/irate.cpp
z and x change your direction
c and v change the wind direction
spacebar to do nothing.
up in the right corner there is a dial that points to where the wind
is coming from.
I added the kraken for eye candy
Jesus, what a hideous nightmare of micromanagement. Kind of reminds me of
Navy Yard, where a perfectly good game of blasting each other with salvoes
was broken up by tedious interludes of levelling up each cook's mate
individually [1].
Sure, it would be good to switch to @-as-captain during a boarding action,
but even then I wouldn't change the @-as-ship interface. During a boarding
action, if you're not personally in combat, you can continue to issue
@-as-ship commands, one per turn, and perhaps more importantly can look at
what other ships involved in the action are doing. If you're also the best
melee fighter on the ship, you've got a potentially tricky decision to make.
[1] Yes, I am exaggerating.
--
David Damerell <dame...@chiark.greenend.org.uk>
Clown shoes. I hope that doesn't bother you.
Today is Second Chedday, March - a weekend.
Tomorrow will be Second Stilday, March - a weekend.
And _Puzzle Pirates_, of course!
The UI in combat is effectively @-as-ship, if you're in command. Sure, you
_can_ walk around the ship, but it doesn't matter and you can't command
while you're doing it.
--
David Damerell <dame...@chiark.greenend.org.uk>
I imagine cannon placement and upgrades to work like a tower defense
game. I would let the leveling up and such happen automatically; time
spent manning a cannon increases a crew member's affinity for manning
a cannon, and likewise for sword fighting, pistol fighting, etc. I
grant that micromanaging multiple crew members in a roguelike could be
a nightmare, but I also think it's something that a good interface can
go a long way to fixing.
The tide of sentiment here seems to be against me on the issue of @-as-
ship, and that's fine -- it was just one dude's off-the-cuff opinion :)
But why would you _want_ to? What possible benefit is there over knowing
my crew's overall proficiency with the ship's guns and having done with
it?
I really cannot understand this fetish for fiddly detail that contributes
nothing.
I think the dwarf fortress player within me would be very excited to
be able to (have to?) issue orders to each individual pirate, and
check on the status of each individual cannon. However, any time the
dwarf fortress player within me gets lose I tend to lose entire
weekends without memory -- so I try to keep him in check. :)
Thinking about participating in a battle from the deck does sound
interesting for me. Especially when we are talking about ship-vs-ship
combat. It is very easy to picture @-as-captain running below deck to
inspire, or threaten, or dramatically put out a fire. However, it does
get somewhat limiting when you consider the typical nature of most RL
monsters. e.g. a player (@) against a large monster (D). With @-as-
ship, this metric still holds up pretty well. I can very well imagine
a man o' war going up against a large dragon. (Thanks to the Temeraire
series.)
However, when i try to picture this scene from a @-as-captain
perspective, it breaks down. I can see the deck, and in some cases I
could see monster "elements" like tentacles (for sea monsters) or side-
effects like burning (fire-breathing dragons) or other ship damage.
But I can't see the ACTUAL monster. Because if my "level" is the deck
of a ship, and I have 12 @-crewmen running around on it. Having a tiny
"D" zoom over my screen is not going to cut it. And firing cannon
broadsides at an offscreen enemy just doesn't seem very exciting to
me.
For now I think the dual nature of the game is a necessity for
"maximum fun" for "maximum people". The @-as-ship concept exists on
the "high seas", which in exists as quasi-dungeon crawling in its own
right. If you want, at any time you can visit your own ship and walk
around. This could potentially replace the usual "rest" phase. It
would be interesting to be able to drill down into your ship after a
battle and actually see the wounded crewmen lying around. (Why am I so
slow??!) The @-as-pirate concept will also come into play during
boarding action, and numerous dungeon "branches" in the form of
pillaging, treasure hunting, ruin-exploring, governor-daughter-
rescuing, etc.
The trick will be balancing these along a longer-period game path.
Thanks again for everyone who has chipped in.. it's been a very
illuminating discussion. Thanks especially to win for putting together
a sailing demo... I haven't been able to try it out yet but I'm
curious. At this point I am leaning heavily towards ignoring most
"true ship physics" sort of stuff because I don't think it would
translate very well to the @-as-ship walking around/exploring
framework.
HF
Well, going back a bit, I think it can. Part of the problem you have with
a game set at sea is terrain. An obvious way to introduce terrain is to
make the game take place in a relatively land-locked environment; and a
way to make land more significant, as well as to change the implications
of terrain at different times, is to introduce a concept of wind direction
and the relative ease of movement. Being trapped on a lee shore can and
should be a serious problem. Likewise, squalls and fog alike would provide
for moving terrain in tactical battles.
In particular, I think an absolutely fatal mistake would be to have a
"world map" for strategic movement and have tactical movement take place
on isolated submaps. A prolonged tactical battle can and should have
implications for your position on the strategic scale - to say nothing of
the possibility of stalling a losing battle until nightfall or a change in
the wind forces the enemy to break off the action.
I would suggest, rather, three levels of zoom-in and timescale. In the
outer one, you give movement orders like "sail to here" and, if the wind
doesn't change significantly [1], the player's next action is taken when you
arrive. If you're trying to head into the wind, you either give orders for
a series of relatively short beats, or identify where the ship is to come
about in advance. This is the exploration interface. Alternatively, this
could work with straight roguelike-style movement on the ocean, with the
time taken for a move simply determined by the prevailing wind.
Sadistically, a player's position when out of sight of land might not be
entirely accurate after a while...
When a potentially hostile ship is sighted, you zoom in a bit and switch
to a turn-based interface; you order the ship steered and sails raised or
lowered on a turn-by-turn basis, or whack the space bar to advance time a
bit and see what happens. The middle interface is like DF; you can give
any number of orders in one turn, because the turns are long.
Once you're nearly in gunshot, you switch again to a similar interface but
where the turns are shorter and what you can do in each one is lesser -
while "load a broadside" or "wear ship" might take a turn in the middle
interface, here the order is given and executed over the next several
turns, and you can only give one order per turn (perhaps with some
facility to queue orders - "fire when your guns bear", etc).
I strongly urge you to read from chapter VI of _Hornblower and the
Hotspur_. The engagement there between _Hotspur_ and _Loire_ is exactly
the kind of thing that could be made possible in such an interface, and
would provide a real test of skill for the player. The risk with a
simplified @-moving-around interface is that there will be little subtlety
to combat beyond closing and hosing - and frankly, I don't think players
will be surprised or overwhelmed if an Age of Sail game incorporates wind
direction and speed as a mechanic!
_Wooden Ships and Iron Men_ is available on the Web. I do recommend a
look; movement rules incorporating wind direction and speed don't have to
be prohibitively complex.
Of course, there _is_ a problem with this proposal: you've got to write a
vaguely plausible AI.
[1] Or something happens - a ship is sighted, a spar carries away...
--
David Damerell <dame...@chiark.greenend.org.uk>
Clown shoes. I hope that doesn't bother you.
Today is Second Stilday, March - a weekend.
Tomorrow will be First Potmos, April.
I added some cannonballs just for fun, a and s to fire them
I also added some currents to see what that would feel like, They
aren't a whole bunch like real currents but they're still operational.
to move upwind you have to point 45% degrees to it
to actually get anywhere you just hold down the spacebar