On 22 January 2011 21:07, David Ploog <dpl...@mi.fu-berlin.de> wrote: >>> This is on console. >> >> Still helpful. :) > > Poor consolists getting mobbed :) Now I need some consolation.
Awww. I wasn't trying to be mean, though I have been concentrating on Tiles mode, being more complicated what with command keys and mouse actions. >> Yeah, this is because the lua epilogue is evaluated sometime between >> level load and stats update. Not sure how to change that. I could >> remove the forced -More- at the beginning, but I rather like how the >> tutorial starts out with what the player needs to do if the game >> appears "stuck" on the messages. > > Would it be possible to display the whole stat section after the message? I don't know. Didn't want to deal with dungeon.lua or whereever the epilogue is handled. :( >>> 2. The club in the first room of lesson 2 is not very easy to see in >>> console (it is grey). Perhaps we're better off with a quarterstaff? >> >> Yes, good idea. I've also replaced the (grey) helmet with a (blue) >> pair of boots. > > That's good. Fun fact: in my last game I got elven boots. But in the one > before, I got a naga barding :) Racial includes bardings? Oops, I didn't know that could happen. Will fix that! >>> 3. The second training dummy (with the club) is too harmless. It never >>> hits. I've increased its hit points while reducing the first dummy's ones. This does mean we're cheating a bit, because the player will attribute the difference entirely to the fact that the second one is wielding a club. On the other hand, it's a harmless lie and if the players are more careful around monsters wielding weapons, so much the better. I've also experimented with giving the dummy a mace instead, but the increased weapon delay meant that it was actually less likely to deal damage to me. When I increased its hit points to make up for this, I once had a training dummy beat me to death (naturally I was playing as if I had never heard of hp regeneration), which put an end to those experiments. > Well, I didn't bother to pick up the darts when I first played the > tutorial. The point is that later hints refer to the darts... so if I'd > been prompted to take them I'd have known it's my fault. Hmm... the second level does start with "Pick up those darts on your way out", but I guess no one reads the intro messages. :D I'll move the message to the darts themselves. >>> 10. I died to the gnoll once, which is probably okay. > > It is absolutely okay if players die regularly whenever the approach the > battle in a stupid way (i.e. not retreat into the hallway). But it would > be good if deaths under "optimal" play are rare. (By the way, "optimal" > includes kiting: hit the gnoll until you connect and the gnoll is > poisoned, retreat etc. I think that's good! With this method, I didn't die > anymore.) Yes, and the tutorial now does mention this. However, poisoning (like everything else) depends on chance, so this strategy is not entirely reliable. > However, we should: > (a) tell players (in some way, could be indirect) that the encounter can > be reliably overcome (i.e. it is not dumb luck) That might be achieved by a sensible death message. See (b). > (b) tell dead players that often it is the player's fault, but sometimes > she just isn't to blame You should have gotten some mention about that in the death message, though there's certainly room for improvement. >>> 11. I am not sure if telling players to take out the bats with sling is >>> good advice. The poison scimitar will do just fine. There could be a >>> shooting monster around which makes using the sling a good idea. >> >> Well, the dart-throwing kobolds come later, and the earlier goblin >> also qualifies as a sort of shooting monster. Maybe add another single >> dart-throwing kobold? > > Yes! I wanted to have something were switching weapons (ranged -> melee) made sense, and sometimes you'll take out the kobold early. For me, the bats seemed perfect because they tended to flutter away, so I switched back to kiting and then back to melee when they came close. Sometimes, they'd flutter right away again, of course, but at least the ' key saw a lot of activity. :) Is it that bad? > 13. In the current round of tests I finally took out the island kobolds > from afar (been dying too often when I was too lazy to do it, nice > challenge). Might be sensible to remind the player about the possibility of retreat at this point. > Anyway, when you do so you go to XL 3. I chose Str which > immediately made me not Burdened when picking up the 50 rations :) Just > increase their number a bit more. (Also take into account that the player > may not have picked up the dagger, or the stones.) It appears you're not such a pack rat as me, chopping up all those jackals on the way and carrying their chunks. :) It's probably best to reduce the starting Str instead. 50 meat rations is already bordering on ridiculous. > 14. The encounter after you get the wand of fire should be something > drastic -- definitely not a goblin with a dagger. We want to tell players > to use stuff (e.g. wands) on tough enemies. I mean Right. What would you recommend? Keep in mind that the player probably wouldn't even realize that it's something epically dangerous. Ranged attack is out, of course. > 15. spacing: "Use xvto check the wall types." Fixed, thanks. > 16. There's a bug (or at least misfeature) with wand targeting (when > you're asked to check the wall types): The feature under the cursor is > _not_ listed (in console, that is). Oh, I didn't try checking the wall types while targeting. xv works, and I'm surprised to find out that 'v' also works while targeting. Any suggestions on how to deal with this? > The loot is neat. The section about going back to the shop is great. > What's the reason for the dagger and the statues in the room which sends > you to the shop? Oh, those are remnants of my original treasure room design. Originally, the room was filled with smaller gold piles, but I couldn't decide where to place the shopping message, so I changed it to a single pile. The former might be more flavourful, though. Maybe put the message square in the middle? > There is a single square of rock wall -- is that intentional? Nope, typo. :) > 17. Final fight: you don't need anything from shop. The wand of fire will > do. This should be finetuned so that the wand won't solve the encounter > and stuff from the shop is almost necessary. Now that I can control the number of charges, I could play with that. On the other hand, there's some kind of variance in how many charges it takes to take out one measly goblin (1-3 charges), which will probably increase if we take a larger monster. Also, I absolutely want the player to be able to experiment with shooting the _fire_ wand at the different types of walls, which means we need ~6 more charges. If you skip melting the wax etc., this leaves the player with a whole lot of charges for killing all those monsters. Of course (hehe) we could equip them with fireproof armour. :P > I am not so sure about "uppercase W". What about > (uppercase) <white>W</white> > when the command is first introduced, but just > <white>W</white> > afterwards? At least in console the distinction between "w" and "W" is > obvious. Changing that is, while certainly possible, not trivial. The get_command() method returns the command name as a whole, which for the tutorial includes the "uppercase" prefix. It's only in the lua wrapper that this is encased in colour tags. I'm not sure passing a boolean parameter (for highlighting or not, or mentioning uppercase or not) through all those nested function calls is actually worth it. Also, I think these commands aren't repeated often enough for this to really matter. We need the uppercase distinction at the first encounter and on the summary screens. See section 4.7 of https://crawl.develz.org/wiki/doku.php?id=dcss:usability_project:report Hopefully, the repetition will make it clear that lower and uppercase are distinct commands without actually having to hammer the player on the head with it. Hard to tell, really. (I was surprised by this being an issue, too.) It's just not terribly high on my todo lists. Customized shops are much more important, but also much harder to implement. (Looking at the code made me decide it's not _that_ important, either.) Thanks, Johanna ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Special Offer-- Download ArcSight Logger for FREE (a $49 USD value)! Finally, a world-class log management solution at an even better price-free! Download using promo code Free_Logger_4_Dev2Dev. Offer expires February 28th, so secure your free ArcSight Logger TODAY! http://p.sf.net/sfu/arcsight-sfd2d _______________________________________________ Crawl-ref-discuss mailing list Crawl-ref-discuss@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/crawl-ref-discuss
