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Party-based roguelike - controlling more than one character.

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stefo...@gmail.com

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Mar 13, 2014, 4:24:19 AM3/13/14
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It always bugged me that my favourite types of game - roguelikes (particularly nethack) - only let you control one character. It dulls the tactical possibilities. No tanking, flanking, etc.. Basically its about exploration, progression and discovery.

Which is fun! But the tactical could beefed up. Here is my attempt at introducing squad-based tactics to the roguelike genre (pitch)

"Can you imagine leading an acid blob, an elf and a minotaur into combat? Or perhaps a pit-viper, a zombie and a slime demon?

Dungeon Bash puts the player in control of a team of three adventurers, randomly selected from a list of over thirty radically different creatures, each with their own strengths and weaknesses."

Heres the Kickstarter link. Any aid you can give to make this a reality is very much appreciated.

Questions welcome

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/96136851/dungeon-bash

Stef

Filip Dreger

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Mar 13, 2014, 6:07:32 PM3/13/14
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On Thursday, March 13, 2014 9:24:19 AM UTC+1, stefo...@gmail.com wrote:
> It always bugged me that my favourite types of game - roguelikes
> (particularly nethack) - only let you control one character. It dulls the
> tactical possibilities. No tanking, flanking, etc.. Basically its about
> exploration, progression and discovery.

There were many attempts, and usually they were simply not fun enough.

Roguelikes and turn-based strategy games are completely different beasts, in fact they are polarly opposite:
- strategy games generally play SLOWER than "real time";
- roguelikes play FASTER than "real time". Good players fly through dungeons, slowing down only occasionally, to make an interesting tactical choice. This is why the few "real time" roguelike games feel slow.

I think that each attempt to make the controls harder (and controlling many characters will probably be either slower, or frustrating) will push the general feel of the game away from what I'd call a roguelike.

Good luck with your campaign, though.

Filip

stefo...@gmail.com

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Mar 13, 2014, 6:24:00 PM3/13/14
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Hi Filip

I think whats important is the rate of decision making. 'Flying through a dungeon' means you aren't doing anything interesting, you're just waiting until the next interesting thing happens.

What Ive tried to do is condense the decision making so that very little time is spent 'flying around'.

As far as controls go, what Ive done is made a leader mode option that is enabled when there are no monsters around (the flying around bit) and it auto-disables when there are monsters around. When in leader mode, you can double tap a space to make a waypoint and the leader will auto navigate to it, and the party will auto-follow. As soon as a hint of a monster appears on the edge of a viewport, the party stops and it reverts to manual, individual control.

adityar...@gmail.com

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Mar 20, 2014, 2:48:27 PM3/20/14
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Are there any plans to expand to PCs? Specifically linux?

flip...@aim.com

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Dec 3, 2014, 9:34:23 PM12/3/14
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It would be awesome if you could collect all 30 characters.. (or more) and go to a safehouse or guild hall or something where you can then swap between the characters you've unlocked. I guess this leans a lot more towards RPGs.
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