Halls of Mist is here!

[getter77]

So, aside from the various mad dashes to get the ingame help and manual stuff in good order, as well as "old" foes that are leftovers----what's the near term roadmap of the game look like in terms of the next targets and the roughly hopeful release pace to hit them?

In other words, are you intending to hew closer the the Chengband style or the Sil one?

[Mikko Lehtinen]

So, aside from the various mad dashes to get the ingame help and manual stuff in good order, as well as "old" foes that are leftovers----what's the near term roadmap of the game look like in terms of the next targets and the roughly hopeful release pace to hit them?

In other words, are you intending to hew closer the the Chengband style or the Sil one?

I don't have a todo list at the moment, and for now I prefer playing to developing, but I like Scatha's list a lot. It seems to generate good ideas.

For a couple of days I've been perfecting a new game mechanic that tries to answer these two concerns:

- Sometimes tripped over several altars per level when I didn't want them
- and none over several levels when I did!
- not enough data to conclude anything, but don't know if this level of apparent variance is desired.

- I like the dungeon descent rules
- But are there any advantages to skipping a town break?
- I guess it saves a few turns of your torch ...

I'm again picking two different concerns from the list and proposing a mechanic that might help with both...

The mechanic: When you walk near a down staircase, make a Mapping check. If you succeed, you know what kind of an area the staircase leads to. The possible areas are: Desolate, Wilderness, Barracks, Rich, Temple, Magical.

These styles are already used in the dungeon generation. If the player takes the stairs, the game would start the dungeon generation by making a room of the chosen style. New rooms tend to copy styles from rooms that are close to them, often leading into big areas of one style. Finally the game would start the player somewhere near the first room. Easy.

BTW, I have a reason to often want many altars on the same dungeon level. That way the player gets to choose who to worship.

Do the long-term effects which have a chance of wearing off each dungeon level also get checked on returning to town? That would be another natural way to give an incentive for staying in the dungeon.

I decided I don't like the way how this breaks the timekeeping flavour. Min Depth = weeks of time. As returning to the town doesn't increase Min Depth, it seems weird why it would count against the long-term effects.

[Mikko Lehtinen]

Some easy questions from Scatha's list:

- tables get surprisingly big
- On a similar note, could you have more than one table in a room?
- Would feel natural, and I think tactically interesting

Good idea, but annoying to code. Saved for my maybe/sometime list.

- I haven't worked out if bushes do anything except block sight and make movment hard
- Similarly are trees different from rubble?

Bushes don't block sight. (Together with trees it might seem that they block sight.) All they do is make movement hard. That's enough to make them tactically interesting.

Trees are rubble in a very real sense. The game "paints" traditional Angband dungeon features with Eytan Zweig's trap layer. All the new dungeon features are made like this. Eytan probably didn't realize how flexible his trap layer was.

There are two wands that affect trees and vegetation.

[Mikko Lehtinen]

I had an idea.

Introducing early-game challenges - like a graveyard full of slightly OOD skeletons, who will flood the player given the chance - but with a higher chance for magic circles on the level.

An orc "dining room" - rows of tables, columns and... well, orcs (who are bad at jumping, IIRC?).

Basically things that force you to use the more creative aspects of the game early on, as practice for the later depths.

Good idea, but the game already implements this in a way!

Monsters are much more likely in rooms with terrain features, and they tend to be thematically appropriate. Actually you will often see orcs around a table and undead near circles.

Empty rooms are often just that -- empty. Why bother having monsters in rooms that would be boring battlegrounds?

[Mikko Lehtinen]

I gave some thought on my future development plans.

I take streamlining and documenting the current game mechanics very seriously. Transparency of the mechanics is the goal. If a game mechanic proves hard to explain in documentation, it probably needs simplifying. I want the game to be accessible to non-Angbanders, too!

Game balance will also always be high priority. The game absolutely needs to be challenging to force the player to use all the tactical options, but it should not get frustrating. This tightrope walking takes lots and lots of playtesting, but coding-wise all that is needed is a continuous stream of minor, easy tweaks here and there.

Monsters will probably gradually get more interesting, both in game mechanics and in flavour. I've lately concentrated on dungeon generation and items. It's time to start thinking monsters. Borrowing stuff from other variants is highly likely.

For nifty new game mechanics, the plan is simple. Whenever I tire of playing the game, I need to code in new stuff to draw me back to playing! It's better to not keep a todo list about possible mechanics, I prefer a big someday/maybe list that I can pick from when I feel like coding. I want the game to develop organically, and sometimes to surprise even myself.

This plan is devised to maximise my own enjoyment. That's the best guarantee I can think of for continued development.

[getter77]

Yep, that sounds like a solid plan with the only question mark left being if changes will come all at once in giant updates, or trickle in moderately, or some mix. Guess it depends on how things go and feedback!

Main thing is garnering visibility to grow the playerbase to help arrive at answers to the questions as they happen---quite a good bit is out there but taking part in ARRP should help for starters. Further, you then may also attract wouldbe contributors as far as art, music, etc---which would also hopefully have a multiplicative effect.

[Mikko Lehtinen]

I did think of a publicity stunt: The Official Halls of Mist Campaign!

You may join the campaign at any point with exactly one character. All players are allowed to play only one dungeon level per day (town doesn't count), and they are expected to report about their progress and keep a player diary -- short notes is all that's required. If your character dies, you may start with another character on the following day.

The campaign ends when someone finally manages to kill The Thin White Duke. There would be a prize for the winner, maybe real cash...? This would be so fun for me that I could invest some money. Or would a cash prize be a bad idea in a competition that depends on the honor of the participants? Ideas for a better prize?

Any flavourful pieces of writing in player diaries that I like would be incorporated in the game world in future versions (new artifacts, uniques, monsters, anything). You can draw a picture of your character, and it will be included in the pdf rule book. Roleplaying and inventing new stuff about the game world is encouraged (it's a No Myth setting), but you can also just focus on the competitive strategic challenge aspect if you like.

I would create a web page for the campaign.

Does it sound fun?

[HallucinationMushroom]

I would play such a competition for the fun of it, though I know I would not win. It would be neat to watch the progress, run stats, build narratives...

I think a game-based reward would be a better and easier incentive, like a shopkeeper or artifact or statue? I learn toward an artifact within the game that makes sense within the world and reflects some instance or experience the winner had at one point.

It wouldn't be a post by me if it didn't ramble... I've done things too like you've mentioned elsewhere... like in Nethack I like to make one of each of the classes and play a level a day until it gets down to like, the Valkyrie and the Samurai. etc... Probably a product of isolation (Playing Moria in small town Mississippi), but I find the tournament dynamic interesting, especially in a game I cannot reasonably expect to win so I find the fun elsewhere.

[Mikko Lehtinen]

Statues, hey! Altars often have statues around them. Some of these statues could represent the greatest either living or dead permanent followers of the goddesses in the official campaign. Your score would affect how probable it is to encounter your statue near the altar.

[Mikko Lehtinen]

build narratives...

There could be a rule in the official campaign regarding world-building: whatever any player writes about the world is true in this campaign! Other players must take this fact into account in their diaries. A common wiki to keep track of changes in the fictional world?

For the next version of Halls of Mist, I would incorporate the "best" or most popular ideas and write them down in the PDF rulebook. In the next campaign the world-building would start from this new "core" setting.

Let's say someone invents the Castle Starfall, famous for the Templars that guard it. I could create an ego item "of Starfall" based on the behavior of some player Templars originating from that place...

[getter77]

You might then consider taking a page or so from the gist of how Mercury is going about things: http://www.decisionproblem.com/mercury/

[Mikko Lehtinen]

It was in a corridor. I had only range 1 lighting. It was more a case of a random "screw you" from the RNG (helped by my unpreparedness, of course).

Guess what just happened to me? Death Sword in a corridor killed me straight away from no damage, no wounds.

I made my personal game a little harder.

• 20% more experience needed.
• Minimum number of monster groups on a level increased by one. This increases the number of Chaos and Aether monsters and makes levels with lots of empty rooms more difficult. It should not affect levels with lots of furniture.

I think the released game was a bit too easy, and the changes probably make the game better. I'll be playtesting. If anyone wants to upgrade their difficulty level, or to playtest the more difficult settings with me, ask me for the source or executable!

[Mikko Lehtinen]

You might then consider taking a page or so from the gist of how Mercury is going about things: http://www.decisionproblem.com/mercury/

Mercury looks very cool and interesting!

I guess I would prefer to just offer a roleplaying and world-building opportunity for those campaign players who like the idea. Minority? Majority? I don't know.

Actually I can just do it here on oook, starting right now. When posting a Halls of Mist character to the ladder (no one has posted one yet), you may post your notes "in character" and/or invent stuff about the character's background or about the game world in general. I will use this flavour in future versions of the game.

Any winners will be incorporated in the game somehow.

[Mikko Lehtinen]

Copying my own post from another thread:

Monsters are placed in heterogenous groups of 1-4, not individually. To compensate, there are more empty rooms. Most of the monsters in a group come from the same realm (Thornwild, Skulgard, Chaos, Aether). Creatures from Skultgard are placed in 'civilized' rooms with furniture, Thornwild monsters are placed in wilderness. Chaos and Aether are placed at random anywhere after all the other monsters have been generated if there's still demand for more monsters.

At the moment monsters from Chaos or Aether are not associated with any dungeon features. Groups of them are simply dropped to random places on the level -- it might even be a corridor (that's the reason for Death Sword kills). Sometimes they are dropped in rooms that already have 'civilized' or 'wild' terrain features and monsters.

Perhaps the easiest way to associate these monsters to dungeon features would be to be to transform the nearby, already generated dungeon with some "chaotic" or "aether" anvironmental effects. Let's say any dungeon features at most 15 squares from the monster drop point would be altered.

For example, a chaotic environment effect would transform nearby trees into alien, flesh-eating trees... In an environment affected by the presence of Aether altars would turn into demon-worshipping ones...

What would a chaotic or aether wall or floor square look like? (Aether: a wall covered in ectoplasm that drains your life? Chaos: flaming wall?) Maybe only a certain percentage of these most basic features would be transformed, depending on how weird effects the terrain features have.

Just thinking aloud. If you can think of any sufficiently weird terrain features, let me know!

[Starhawk]

This game is fun and devilishly hard, and really makes me miss my quiver, and the newer interface from recent versions of Angband (more intuitive picking up / stacking / targetting / etc).

One thing that's been driving me batty is having the dungeon level displayed right next to that big XP bar. It's so counterintuitive that it took me several games to even realize what the bar was for. I'd love to see the DL display moved to the other corner of the screen.