The hunt for the lost rainbow jewels

WIP games, tools & toy projects
#61

I’ve actually managed to spend some hours on the project again … not much progress, but still. I’ve managed to give magic items color hues. So far I’ve defined:

add life - yellowish green
add mana - blue

add damage - orange
add defense - brown

resist fire - red
resist ice - cyan
resist lightning - yellow
resist poison - blueish green
resist fear - white
resist confusion - purple

Also I’ve been adding some environmental stats. Part of the values is natural for the place, but they can be altered by spells (eg. cold + humid + fireball -> hot + dry)

Temperature
Ground status: solid dry, solid moist, swamp, water, ice, lava …
Static: Uncharged, Charged, Highly charged, Sparking …
Air: Dry, humid, dusty, steamy …

The exact conditions may change. This is just a design sketch so far, somewhat matching the elemtal magic effect of fire, ice, lightning.

#62

The item hues make the inventory colorful, but I’m not sure if it actually looks good. On the other hand the hue and saturation give some immediate information about the magic effect and the strength of the effect (you’ll learn that quickly while playing):

But I’ve got a question about item prefixes and postfixes.

Would you like to have different names for weaker and stronger mods for the same effect, e.g. blade weapon prefixes:

“sharp” +1…15% damage to blades
“slicing” +16…30% damage to blades
“vorpal” +31…45% damage to blades

or rather one prefix “vorpal” with a range of 1…45% risen damage? The item color saturation will give a hint of the effect power anyways.

I don’t think it add much to have a lot of different affixes, but maybe I’m missing something.

PS: Yet another question - at the moment there is poison damge included, but that is just another damage type to the PC. I wonder if I should replace this by acid, which also harms the equipment. Do you think damage to the equipment is a good feature for an RPG, or is it just annoying to need repairs or even replacements of items after a fight with acid-based enemies? Different materials will have different natural acid resistances, e.g. noble metals resist more, iron less.

#63

Second: Would Give it a try.
First: No idea.

#64

I’m still feeling uncertain about the acid and item corrosion idea. It adds some variety, but I imagine that mosters with acid attacks or acidic monsters (corrodable weapons will ge damaged if you strike them) will be among the most disliked in the game.

I’ve worked some more on the item mods. There will be a bigger variety of mods eventually, I’m just starting:

601×600 136 KB

What do you think about the mods display?

#65

In Arcanum there were many things that damaged weapons and armor. Fire Elementals would damage just about everything so you needed to be careful when fighting one. Hitting doors and stuff with your sword would damage it. I think that the idea is fine but one would need to make sure that the items could take a slight beating before breaking.

#66

Strangely I don’t remember a lot of details from Arcanum although I played it through twice. A thing that got stuck though is that item repairs lowered the max durability so the item would eventually break, unless you had a master repair skill.

It was a fine mechanic in Arcanum, so let’s try it :slight_smile: Adjusting the durability and item damage shouldn’t be too difficult, but I guess I’ll have to raise all durability numbers by a factor of 5 or even 10 to allow tracking of many small item damages.

There’s still a lot of code to write …

#67

I’ve got the graphics for a first player race done, the Conians. To go with the “rainbow color” theme, I gave them rainbow colors. I’m still not quite happy with the result, it seems to lack expression, but it allows to test if movement correctly shows all 8 directions.

As said before, I’m quite bad at player and monster graphics, so I need to cheat a bit and use what I actually can make. At least the style fits the imps which I made some time ago, so it will be consistent in the game.

Also it means I’ve now got one player race and one monster race and so I can work on combat next, because there are actually some opponents in the game ;D

#68

Once again, a question: Would you prefer a simple currency like “520 gold” or something structured like “1 silver and 50 copper coins” ?

#69

Simple. Simple is good.

#70

if you have different values of coins, its not really more complicated (the computer does all the counting) and it could make you be more protective of your gold coins than of your silver coins as theyre harder to get. youd happily spend silver coins on junk and food, but youd think twice before paying with gold.

#71

An old roguelike which I used to play for a while had different coins fro treasures, copper, silver, gold, mithril, and adamant. They were converted to gold coins automatically when picked up, and the smallest unit of currency was 1 gold coin.

Maybe I’ve been sidetracked a bit by the idea to have different sorts of treasure, and at least for the start I should go with one coin sort and see if that is good enough. Maybe I’ll use silver for a change, gold coins used to be a real big value.

#72

One thing that always bothered me about games when it comes to currency is that it has not physical weight. Maybe have 3 major coins, gold silver, copper or what ever. Thing is, you could have 50 gold worth 500 silver but 500 silver is 30 lbs and 50 gold is say 5lbs. This would make the whole multiple currency system actually useful instead of a hassle.

#73

This is a very interesting suggestion, thanks a lot :slight_smile: In town one might be able to exchange coins for lighter coins at a merchant, but in the dungeon one must take what’s there.

It’s kind a cool to imagine an adventurer, dirty and in ragged clothes, to enter a shop, carrying big bags and a big smile. The shopkeeper already knows what’s coming, and tries not to facepalm, “Oh noes, we’ll be counting copper coins for hours again!”

I feel tempted to go with copper, silver and gold coins, and one magic metal, which is required as payment in very special locations or situations.

#74

"That would be platinum.

Or Unobtainium, your pick."

Seems like most games do this. :emo:

#75

Well it’s just another option for quests, but I’m not sure why you think it’s bad. I’m still designing, so if there are reasons against, I can easily change the plan. Later when 120 game mechanics depend on it, it will be more difficult to change something.

#76

I guess what I was saying was it seems like too many simply add another tier of money (or anything for that matter) for certain edge cases, or they tack on a completely different and entirely foreign approach that doesn’t sit cohesively with the rest of the mechanics.

Sorry, I’m a bit tired right now, probably not making as much sense as I could.

To quote Drenius: “Simple. Simple is good.”

#77

In case of software the KISS principle sure is a good idea. In case of games, simple sometimes means boring, that’s the sort of simple to avoid.

In the games where the “magic metal” idea came from there was also armor and weapons made from it. So it wasn’t super-special just for a quest, but a superior metal/alloy that was unknown to humans how to create, but found now and then.

But 3 is a good number, 3 tiers of coins should be fine. Quests work with quest items as well, you know the dreaded “fetch this item for me” quests - if that is a coin of unobtainium or the trinket of neverfoundness doesn’t matter much from a technical view.

#78

Now I’ve already got a question again. What sort of weight (mass) unit would you prefer?

Pounds? Kilograms? With fractional digits or rounded to the nearest integer?

Or rather a made up unit?

Internally mass will be measured in grams, and converted for display. I think that should be precise enough.

And, if coins will have a weight, should coins become item stacks in the inventory? Diablo I had that, but at the time it didn’t feel very convincing. From a designer point of view, if coins have weights, can be picked up and dropped, and if there are several sorts of coins, they should be item stacks (like arrows, bolts, or other stackabale items).

#79

just make them all weigh 5 grams, then gold is an advantage and copper fills your pockets quickly. though copper coins might be an advantage when you are somewhere where you are at risk of being killed or robbed.

#80

I think if you are being killed, the loss of coins is your least problem :smiley:

The questions about the weight units referred to all items, though, not just coins.