Re: Tentative Entombed 2 Design Decisions
@Tikki your certainly not the first person who fancies a feline race in the game, and while I don't specifically go for the hole firry thing I can see they could be fun to play, especially unarmed.
Thinking about the game and battles this afternoon a couple more suggestions occurred to me.
Firstly, the chance of randomly occurring special circumstances for battles. Anyone who has played Smugglers 5 (either one), will know what I'm thinking here. For those who haven't, what I mean is that occasionally (say in a one in ten chance), you get a message at the beginning of a battle about some factor in the environment that has a major effect both upon you and the enemies and will change how a battle is fought.
For exampl:
"you notice a glowing symbol on the wall and recognize it as an anti magic glyff. All magic is disabled"
or "This is a narrow passage, you will only be able to attack in single file. No switching ranks, a nd only one person on each rank"
or "The floor of this chamber if thick with oozing mud. All combatants have their speed reduced and are easier to hit"
Other effects could involve random damage or conditions occurring, eg, a volcanic cave where random bursts of lava occasionally damaged opponents, or a cave thick with poisonous mould where everyone risked poisoning, actually there are lots of possibilities.
This sort of thing would mean yet more randomness for the game, and of course the need to change up your stratogy.
In addition, it would be cool if you could tie these sorts of special events to a theme on a given floor. For example if there was a floor which was an old mine like in Entombed 1 have it full of unstable rocks that occasionally crashed on opponents, or the need to work around chasms or stalaktites, while a volcanic level, in addition to being populated with firy creatures might have lots of lava pits and flame bursts to work your way around.
This was something I always thought might be fun in original Entombed given that some flaws did get a little draggy with repeating monsters, but even though Entombed 2 is set to be randomer than it's predecessor (and randomer is a totally cromulant word), a little more couldn't hurt.
Secondly I was thinking about status effects. The entombed 1 ones such as zombie rot, sleep, and poison, and indeed the buffs like haste or regeneration were very cool, and I'd be glad to see them again, not to mention some new ones, fear to stop you attacking, strength or coordination boosts etc. However, it also occurred to me there could be other effects that played a slightly different part in the game. These you could call corruptions.
What I'm thinking is effects that don't immediately do anything bad, and don't increase unless you get jabbed with that effect again, however unless you watch it that effect builds up until nasty st uff starts to happen and eventually you lose the character altogether.
one example I remember from one Angband varient I liked was slime. if a creature hit you with a slime infection, it wouldn't do much just add a few points of slime you could view on your character sheet. When however you started to get higher than 20 slime you began to move more slowly, occasionally you'd start dropping your weapons, you'd find yourself taking acid damage as your body turned to slime, and if you got over 30 slime that was that, you'd been turned into a humanoid blob of slime and were doomed! (yes, you can all go yech now).
Another example I remember reading about in one game was chaos taint. If you got hit by a chaos creature you started to build up the taint of chaos. At a certain level, random chaotic things would start happening, like you'd grow thorns on your skin, morph into other forms, or send out waves of dark energy that stunned everything around yo u. chaos got too high and boom! you ended up completely losing yourself to chaos and became a chaos beast.
Another example might be vampirism. Lets say being hit by one vampirism attack didn't do much, however once your character got to say around 12 vampirism, they'd randomly start performing a bite on other party members or enemies which would in turn increase their vampirism until eventually they turned into a full vampire, became a monster and needed killing.
Other examples could include possession by spirits, madness, or lycanthropy.
The thing with corruptions, is that they are a thing you manage throughout the game, sinse unlike other status effects like zombie rot or poison, they won't just go away after time, but in themselves at low levels they're not too nasty, they're just something that sits there in the background and before you know it bam!
Also, corruptions by their very nature are harder to cure, you can't just rest or glug down a potion, often to reduce or cure corruptions takes either special items or actions, ---- for example finding specific holy shrines while adventuring and preying to the right deity, getting specific blessings from items that reduce or counter corruption when worn, or maybe killing specific creatures, ---- perhaps if the person hit with vampirism were to strike down the last blow at a vampire it'd reduce their over all vampiric taint.
I don't know how this gells with the resting risk/reward mechanic, but I always do find corruptions an interesting idea, particularly with how they just creep up on you, especially in a multi character game like Entombed where losing a character to slime or possession wouldn't necessarily be the end of your game.
It's Jason's decision of course, though I thought I'd suggest these now as they occurred to me, and of course sinse Jason is working on the battle mechanics at the moment.< /p>
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