Beleriand status

[Nick]

One alteration to the Sil formula after you've recreated the mechanics could be changing the setting slightly though?

Say, Nargothrond YS 495-500? Instead of retrieving a Silmaril, the player is tasked with reclaiming the Nauglamír from the hoard of Glaurung. An underground elven city against the pictoresque backdrop of Taur-En-Faroth and the mighty Narog should provide ample vistas of wonder to showcase, no?

Many things are possible

I am kind of planning to have other goals besides retrieving a Silmaril. Options there include having more than one goal per game, or choosing a goal at game start. Having multiple settings is also a possibility. None of this is going to happen in a hurry, though...

[Infinitum]

One alteration to the Sil formula after you've recreated the mechanics could be changing the setting slightly though?

Say, Nargothrond YS 495-500? Instead of retrieving a Silmaril, the player is tasked with reclaiming the Nauglamír from the hoard of Glaurung. An underground elven city against the pictoresque backdrop of Taur-En-Faroth and the mighty Narog should provide ample vistas of wonder to showcase, no?

[Nick]

Mechanically, it would be a great opportunity for exploring terrain types we discussed previously that make less sense in a dungeon, but provide their own interest. e.g. passable scrub that still blocks LOS (and LOF?), or water etc.

That said, most of the terrain near Angband is bleak, so it might take a while to get to some of this pretty stuff.

Yes, one of the problems with this approach is that the early stages of expansion are going to start with a boring trudge across the desert.

The question of how to deal with travel generally is a bit tricky. Currently I'm thinking of a travel skill, with abilities for things like staying fed, avoiding monsters and getting through difficult terrain, that lead to an ability for fast travel which largely abstracts the process away. I also want to be featuring the map, though, so it will take some balancing.

[half]

New plan is:

1. Start with rewritten Sil;
2. Extend by adding a (relatively) small amount of map outside the dungeon, and start the game out there too, adding monsters and altering the skill/ability system as needed;
3. Repeat 2 until we have a complete map. Easy, right?

That sounds awesome. We tried hard with Sil to combine tight gameplay mechanics with a much more (first age) Tolkienian feel. One area where we didn't do very well on this is that it is all set inside a dungeon. While there are prominent sequences like that in Tolkien's works (under the Misty Mountains in The Hobbit, Moria in the Lord of the Rings, Angband in The Silmarilion), the first age is full of so much more colour and life and beauty that we couldn't capture.

Mechanically, it would be a great opportunity for exploring terrain types we discussed previously that make less sense in a dungeon, but provide their own interest. e.g. passable scrub that still blocks LOS (and LOF?), or water etc.

That said, most of the terrain near Angband is bleak, so it might take a while to get to some of this pretty stuff.

[MicroChasm]

OK, surprising nobody, I've changed my plan again.

New plan is:

1. Start with rewritten Sil;
2. Extend by adding a (relatively) small amount of map outside the dungeon, and start the game out there too, adding monsters and altering the skill/ability system as needed;
3. Repeat 2 until we have a complete map. Easy, right?

My hope is that doing things incrementally will ease the transition from the beautiful, finely-cut gem of Sil to ... whatever Frankenstein creation this turns out to be. The immediate implication is the game will now be set between the Dagor Bragollach and the Nirnaeth Arnoediad, around year 460 of the First Age. It is likely that there will be new skills to support travel and probably negotiation, that the experience pool will be split in some way that constrains what it can be spent on, and that abilities may be only available in some locations.

Now you know as much as I do

That seems like a super cool idea! I'm definitely interested to check it out when it is playable. Good luck with the project.

[Nick]

The plan is to set the game after the third kinslaying, with all the major elven strongholds destroyed and the land overrun by servants of Morgoth. So there should be a feeling of walking through the broken remains of everything the Noldor and the Sindar had created.

I also plan to have a fixed timeline, so if the character survives long enough the Valinorean host should arrive in preparation for the War of Wrath. I'm leaning toward that being the end of the game, but am not sure what the player should be trying to achieve by then.

OK, surprising nobody, I've changed my plan again.

New plan is:

1. Start with rewritten Sil;
2. Extend by adding a (relatively) small amount of map outside the dungeon, and start the game out there too, adding monsters and altering the skill/ability system as needed;
3. Repeat 2 until we have a complete map. Easy, right?

My hope is that doing things incrementally will ease the transition from the beautiful, finely-cut gem of Sil to ... whatever Frankenstein creation this turns out to be. The immediate implication is the game will now be set between the Dagor Bragollach and the Nirnaeth Arnoediad, around year 460 of the First Age. It is likely that there will be new skills to support travel and probably negotiation, that the experience pool will be split in some way that constrains what it can be spent on, and that abilities may be only available in some locations.

Now you know as much as I do

[LordL]

I had a dream you released a Beleriand trailer. It had simple cel shaded polygonal 3d graphics and started with the player in a forest, getting into a wooden boat and drifting down a river. I was impressed by the physics of the boat. Then lots of blood started dripping from the ceiling of the boat cabin and it looked like a grainy survival horror game, I think this part happened because I watched Silent Hill 2 recently. Anyway I want to play Beleriand.

Interesting, this doesn't even look like a roguelike, more like action adventure. Did it have Sil-like mechanics?

[Nick]

Anyway I want to play Beleriand.

Yes, me too. RL is keeping me busy at the moment, but the Sil rewrite is at least still progressing.

[clouded]

I had a dream you released a Beleriand trailer. It had simple cel shaded polygonal 3d graphics and started with the player in a forest, getting into a wooden boat and drifting down a river. I was impressed by the physics of the boat. Then lots of blood started dripping from the ceiling of the boat cabin and it looked like a grainy survival horror game, I think this part happened because I watched Silent Hill 2 recently. Anyway I want to play Beleriand.

[Nick]

How is it going?

Fine, but slow - or maybe more precisely, there's a lot to do. I'm probably something like halfway through getting the rewrite of Sil done.

[LordL]

How is it going?

[Nick]

I am curious to see what Nick will do drawing on Sil as an inspiration.

Yeah, me too.

[Quirk]

Yes, this is quite extreme. One of my aims was to reduce the numbers that appear in the game down to a manageable size. I think I ended up with numbers that are about half way between D&D numbers and Angband numbers (and much lower than, say, JRPG numbers). But unlike D&D, I wanted all weapons to be unique and not have any that are strictly better or worse than each other. And I needed to do this while having the numbers be thematic for that weapon (e.g. that they would end up being good when wielded by the kind of character that intuitively would be good at wielding them in the real world).

This I consider one of the game's great successes, though as you say the tightness of the numbers can leave relatively little room to tweak things: most weapon types are viable right down to Morgoth (at least as artifacts, or smithed) assuming the character is built to take advantage of them. However, if I were embarking on a new project and wanted to make use of similar mechanics while preserving the goal of every weapon being unique, I would consider very carefully how many weapons I wanted the game to have before settling on the numbers.

Sil is definitely much like a poem. The constraints, of this type and others, have at times seemed torturous as I have laboured to balance a weapon or replace a skill. It's instilled in me a deep respect for the original vision that worked so fully with such a small and consistent palette.

I am curious to see what Nick will do drawing on Sil as an inspiration.

[Estie]

I wonder what odd taste for structural poetry is responsible for the 8d1 hammer in vanilla.

[half]

In other places also changing a single number can make for a world of difference. Balancing shortswords and daggers has been tricky for precisely this reason: the difference between a d5 dagger and a d6 dagger is substantial, and balancing so that a d5 dagger is potentially relevant to a fresh character and a d6 not overpowered to a stabber is a hard problem that has led me to drawing a lot of graphs.

Yes, this is quite extreme. One of my aims was to reduce the numbers that appear in the game down to a manageable size. I think I ended up with numbers that are about half way between D&D numbers and Angband numbers (and much lower than, say, JRPG numbers). But unlike D&D, I wanted all weapons to be unique and not have any that are strictly better or worse than each other. And I needed to do this while having the numbers be thematic for that weapon (e.g. that they would end up being good when wielded by the kind of character that intuitively would be good at wielding them in the real world).

For some reason I seem to have been anchored to the Angband longsword at 2d5. So that is where I started. And through variation in the five numbers: attack, dice, sides, evasion, and weight, I managed to meet all my objectives. It wasn't easy, as these were also the numbers I needed to later tweak to adjust balance, leaving little room to move.

To top this off, I had various aesthetic ideas about how the numbers should look. I started with a triple of swords: the dagger (1d5), the longsword (2d5) and the greatsword (3d5), which seemed elegant. And then I decided to make all chopping weapons (e.g. axes) do even sided dice, while others do odd sided dice.

So there was indeed very little room to tweak things. It ended up a bit like a short poem, or similar, where it is highly constrained and every part has a purpose, and it becomes remarkable that it is possible at all. I love this kind of thing (especially the end product) as something to marvel over, but you are very much right that can be a lot of work!