FAangband, NarSil, Beleriand - state of play

[Nick]

I've been thinking for a while I should give an update on what's happening with these three. I'll do these in separate posts; this post is basically designed to commit me to actually doing this

[davidk64]

I log in most days to see if there is an update on your projects. Great news!

[EugeneLesnov]

Can't wait to read some news!

[Nick]

General comment first. I'm finding less time for *band development at the moment, for a variety of reasons. I'm hoping this is currently improving; time will tell.

FAangband
Current version is 2.0.1, released nearly three years ago. It's an attempt to take the improvements (id, classes, traps, modern code) in Angband 4.2 and build the old FAangband on top of them. I played it not too long ago, and am reasonably happy with the balance - MITZE says it's too easy, but he says that about everything.
The development version has had nearly 700 changes since then, many of them imported from V, and especially recently many by backwardsEric. So it's really long overdue for a version update, and I may do that some time soon. It still has plenty of bugs, but I think none of them too game-breaking at the moment. I've focused on it sporadically over the last few years, but it's really not my current focus.
Prediction: Minor bugfixes to continue, possible version bump (to 2.0.2) some time, not much to see for a while.

[Nick]

NarSil
Current version is 1.3.0, released nearly a year ago. It is an attempt to (almost) faithfully reproduce Sil 1.3 using modern Angband code, motivated by the intention to base Beleriand gameplay on Sil rather than FAangband. The reproduction has been I think fairly successful, with still the odd bug and probably some cases still where monster behaviour is not quite done right. I will release a 1.3.1 at some point with the bugfixes that are already in the dev version and probably a few more.
1.4 (which I am just starting work on) will have gameplay changes, with the main ones being:

1. Introduction of the V/FA rune-based ID and
2. Formal separation between what the player sees and the actual state of the cave (noticeable in things like doors opening out of sight not updating on the map until the player sees them)

Rune-based ID will impact the perception abilities Lore-Keeper and Lore-Master; I haven't decided exactly how yet.
The main reasons for these changes are that I think they're an improvement, and I want them in Beleriand.

[Nick]

Beleriand
OK, this is the big one.

I have been working on this on and off (mostly off) for about 12 years, with the basic idea being to set a game in Beleriand with as faithful as possible a representation of the second map of Beleriand. The idea started off as FAangband with a better map, and changed many times as I struggled with what a sensible win condition was, when during the First Age it should be set, and what the gameplay should be. About three years ago I made a concerted effort to at least get an implementation of the map in place, which can be seen in the github repo (note that I'm not even sure what the gameplay in that code looks like, or even if it will run). At that point I was confronted with the need to actually make a game, and realised I still didn't know what that was going to look like. After a bit I decided that Sil's gameplay was a better fit than FAangband's, so I did a rewrite of Sil (which has now become NarSil). That brings us to now.

Given that I'm trying to do a more "realistic" version of Beleriand, the traditional *band idea of getting super-powerful and killing Morgoth didn't seem to fit. I considered various possibilities like setting just before or during the War of Wrath (when the Valar came and defeated Morgoth), or having a bunch of (maybe optional) tasks to do including fetching a Silmaril as in Sil. Most recently I have come back to the thought that the idea is to mimic life in Beleriand, and to feature the map in all the detail I can.

So my current (final?) plan is that the player will be trying to make a map of Beleriand, by visiting everywhere. Here's what I think I need to do:

• Pick a time setting - probably near the end of the Long Peace, so let's call that one done
• Get NarSIl updated as much as possible to match the gameplay I want (hence the ID changes mentioned earlier) without compromising NarSil itself
• Patch together the map work I've already done with the NarSil core - this is a lot of work, and will result in a kind of Frankenstein game which makes no sense
• Work out how the actual flow of the game will work, especially how character development (XP, skills, abilities etc) works in an open world setting with still not completely specified aims
• Implement all that into a final game that someone may actually want to play

I feel like this makes more sense than any of the other ideas I've had, but that's happened plenty of times already, so who knows really. And, especially given that I'm struggling to get development time and not getting any younger, this is not going to happen quickly.

Opinions and comments most welcome; I could do with some input other than my own thoughts

[EugeneLesnov]

First of all, thank you for sharing your plans.

I will not hide it, "Beleriand" is the very roguelike that I dream of.
Starting with the idea itself, ending with your favorite setting..It gives me goosebumps that we are so close to the perfect game (haha).

To be honest, at first I wanted to literally dump a bunch of ideas and thoughts into this thread. But it's going to be too messy, I think.
Therefore, for now, a few general thoughts:

1) The setting is perfect, the time of the unfolding events is also an excellent choice.
2) Imitation of life is a great idea, but it needs to be developed. Factions? The impact they have on the overall map? The reputation system?
3) Randomly generated additional quests. Something like "Bring me X items to gain Y of gold from me".
4) Randomly generated events that affect the environment? For example, rainy weather, which will not allow you to use a torch in wilderness?

I understand that it is easy to generate ideas that are unimaginably difficult to implement in a foreseeable period of time, but if brainstorming is required, perhaps this thread will be the right place for this case, huh?

[Nick]

There are some good ideas there (I had thought about weather). My aim is to start with something very basically playable, and then refine it and add features over time.

I have to emphasise too that none of this is going to happen quickly. I'm just starting on the required changes to NarSil, which will take a while, and I imagine it will take longer still to get Beleriand even vaguely playable.

[Karkaroth]

On NarSil/Beleriand:
I don't think I've said this on here yet - thank you (and Eric of course) for making NarSil! It has been a wonderful boon to me in my quest to do roughly the same thing you are - grab Sil's chassis and turn it into a different Tolkien-themed roguelike. *band? Can I call it that when it's a Sil variant? Anyway, it's been awesome to have it for my own use, and delightful to get to find and solve problems with others.

Runes sound interesting! I'll have to think about my opinion on them; from a First/Third Age character's perspective, it fits to gather lore so that you can say "Oh, yeah, this has all the hallmarks of a Man-slaying weapon, for sure," but it also fits to rediscover the properties of each mighty weapon each time. Runes definitely cut down on the slightly comical feeling of "I'm a scientist! You can tell because I stab an orc, a man, a spider, and a wolf each time I find a new weapon!" Repurposing (and renaming?) Lore-master et al. looks pretty easy when ID is explicitly rune-based; you're just Elrond, you can read wacky scripts and know enough history to just identify that this is the sword of the king of Gondolin.

One slightly ridiculous idea I just got from your mention of XP etc: ability requirement modifiers. This would be a bit tortuous to implement, and is probably a bad idea, but.... Aragorn didn't look like Strider because he got a lot of XP and spent it on that, he looked like Strider because he became Strider. Poison Resistance costs less or is easier to buy if you've been poisoned a lot; crowd fighting if you've been surrounded a lot; Jewelry if you've identified multiple unique amulets/rings, and so on. Again, probably absolutely no fun to implement and not a good idea; I sure don't want to add this myself.

Another thing I think would be funny: artifact horns.

Formal separation of game reality/player belief: oooooh. This I like. More sound messages, perhaps perception check based? I would like to hear a door creak softly, and not know if it was 20 tiles away and I rolled well, or 10 tiles away and I rolled badly.

On Beleriand in general, that sounds awesome! My brother was imagining a vague version of that for Keys of Orthanc, where you can wander around the world entering "dungeons," possibly with disparate aims - loot the hoard of/kill the Frost Dragon in the Northern Wastes, beat up Saruman and rescue Gandalf, handle the hive that is Gundabad somehow, delve into Moria and find evidence of Balin/rescue mithril/kill the Balrog, invade Mordor and break stuff/rescue the Ithil-stone/somehow kill Sauron, and so on. I do not think it will ever happen, but who knows; I might piggyback off of your work once again. I will definitely play whatever you come up with someday; the current version sounds like something I'd dream up, so it definitely has my approval . I'd look forward to Gorgoroth, Taur-nu-fuin, and so on, though I haven't checked where in the timeline they get nasty. But yes, tempus fugit.

[Nick]

I think it's easiest to just call them all *bands

Thanks for all the thoughts; while I'm focused on pretty prosaic stuff at the moment, I find that having possibilities for the future to think about keeps my motivation up.

[wobbly]

One thing I'll just say, its probably worth picking up a Sil/Narsil win when you have time to play? I mean I'm not expecting you to go hardcore, and even not hardcore is a challenge some people don't meet. But you'll understand the mechanics better if you get a basic 1 Sil win through. Just find/pick the easiest win (We could have an angband comp? test Narsil, conditioned around 1 Sil wins). I don't know, mostly a perspective thing?

[Nick]

One thing I'll just say, its probably worth picking up a Sil/Narsil win when you have time to play? I mean I'm not expecting you to go hardcore, and even not hardcore is a challenge some people don't meet. But you'll understand the mechanics better if you get a basic 1 Sil win through. Just find/pick the easiest win (We could have an angband comp? test Narsil, conditioned around 1 Sil wins). I don't know, mostly a perspective thing?

This is a good idea; I'm not sure if and when I'll actually do it I have played a bit, but not gone beyond about 500'.

[Nick]

I should add, the reason I'm not trying to win Sil at the moment is that I'm neck-deep in getting the ID and player cave stuff done. Maybe then I will try to give that a thorough playtest.