> when the optimal play style is not an enjoyable play style
Reminds me of the old line about pudding farming in Nethack: "The DevTeam has arranged an automatic and savage punishment for pudding farming. It's called pudding farming."
Re:The Door Problem of Combat Design
by HelloNurse on Saturday August 10, 2019 @04:16PM
(#20664294)
In real life, I'd rather explore the rest of the corridor when there are no more monsters around, and even more importantly I would exploit the stupidity of monsters that forfeit their positional advantage. Why should I do something different in a game?
Re:The Door Problem of Combat Design
by lonelappde on Saturday August 10, 2019 @08:46PM
(#20665492)
Because games are supposed to be an alternative to real life.
> Here's some ideas I've had for my roguelike to try to address this
Also consider making some monsters lie in ambush, where they try to stay hidden until the hero is in a good position (for the enemy).
This is something I've really struggled with in my own roguelike where despite spending a ton of time on interesting procedural level generation and somewhat sophisticated monster AI, the gameplay often devolves to:
1. Peek out of a corridor until one monster notices you.
2. Retreat back into corridor where monster follows.
3. Dispatch.
4. Goto 1.
It's just not that fun. I think the real core game design issue this highlights, that crops up in a lot of places is when the optimal play style is not an enjoyable play style. It puts players in an unfun position of having to deliberately play "worse" to have more fun, but they feel like they're "cheating" the game or forced to do more meta-cognition than they want.
Here's some ideas I've had for my roguelike to try to address this (most of which I haven't had a chance to implement yet):
1. Put more cover and interesting decor inside rooms so that there are more interesting tactics available in there than in corridors and so that heroes don't get surrounded as much. In particular, half-cover tiles that can't be walked through be permit range weapons to go over aid the hero if they have a ranged attack and monsters don't because then they can pick off monsters while not being attacked in return.
2. Give monsters the ability to pick up or destroy loot. So if you see some treasure in the room the clock is ticking to get it before the monsters do.
3. Give monsters a "home" tile that they try to stay near. So they won't chase you too far into a corridor.
4. Make monsters wake up other nearby monsters.
5. Make monsters smart enough to not pursue the hero if other monsters aren't also chasing.
6. Give the hero more area effect attacks. This means they are less effective in corridors. This is one I really like and have implemented. In particular, I gave each weapon category a special attack that will hit multiple monsters across a couple of tiles. But that only works if there is enough open space to take advantage of it. The good thing about this is that instead of preventing (through smarter AI) or punishing (through things like closing doors before the player) the corridor strategy, it instead rewards going into open spaces.