Strange Design

Considering: TMNT

I was a big fan of the E&L TMNT comics back in the day.  They were awesome, gritty, and had a great bit of world-building.  I always felt like the Pizza-Hut turtles were an awful reflection of the "true" TMNT franchise - although obviously way more people think of Michelangelo as a surfer who wears orange than as a silent killer in red...

I never saw the TMNT film that came out a few years back, but I did manage to pick up the game for $5, and finally played it to completion (and with 1000 Achievement points) as of yesterday.

No spoiler alert: the game is terrible.

The game is clearly developed with the Jade Engine - so named for the main character (Jade) of Beyond Good & Evil - but made popular by the Prince of Persia: Sands of Time.  A version of the Jade engine powers the Assassin's Creed franchise, and I believe the LEGO franchise as well.

Off hand, some wall-running and ledge-grabbing sounds like a decent fit for a TMNT game.  But the production of this game is simply awful.  There are some good bits - the camera design is quite masterful in the face of terrible level design, and the comic cutscenes are very well presented if you overlook the horrible "words" that make up the other half of their content.

The Story.  Oh, God - The Story!

The storytelling in this game is incredibly bad.  Clearly the story was written in outline form before production, and then "told" via slapped-together pieces of cutscenes between levels.  The guys say things like "we were surprised at what we found that night" - or "that was the least of the lessons we were about to learn!" - as if they are setting up some piece of action or gameplay that is going to finish that thought.  But the thoughts are not finished - ever.  It's as if the writers assumed that the heavy lifting of the story was going to be told through the game - which I assume was exactly the case.

Raphael has a secret identity - which everyone says was really important, but clearly isn't.  The Foot Clan show up sometimes - but have no connection to anything.  After the last level the game reveals that you are now going to fight an immortal conquistador and his transformed-to-stone buddies, because they once did something bad, and there is a celestial alignment tonight that focuses planet energy on the office tower he owns in his day job as a business owner.  All of this is revealed, you then fight and defeat the five of them, and then the game is won.

Huh?  This all happens after 15 levels of "we went on patrol, and guess what we saw!" - which always ends with "we didn't see anything.  But the NEXT night..." it's the worst story I've ever played - because it's so clearly trying to do something - but instead does nothing.  And wastes a ton of time in the process.

C Team Level Design

Back when I was working on the Prince of Persia games, I worked reasonably closely with some of the Ubisoft Montreal management.  They had arranged two teams of level-designers in Jade - the A team and the B team.  They staggered PoP games, which is why every-other-one was such a mess!  TMNT was clearly made by some new "C" team, because it has absolutely no consistency or clarity.  The movement controls, though ripped right from PoP, are somehow clunky and hard to use.  There are lots of depth-blind jumping sequences that I had to fail 2-20 times to get right.  Some levels took only 8 minutes to play, and others took upwards of 40.

Playing through the game was a chore - no doubt about it.  At least I have 1000 Achievement points to sooth my wounds.

Considering: FTL

FTL has been in the gaming press the past few weeks, and for good reason - it is excellent. At the core, FTL is a really tight ship simulator. On that framework there is combat, economy, and a few canned events. It's a very limited package, but the laser-like focus and the wonderful interaction between the game's systems make it much more compelling than most spaceship games.

If there are any shortcomings, they have to do with the economic model. The game requires you to buy items / crew / repairs from "stores" scattered throughout the systems. But these stores have only a limited inventory - and therein lies the problem. If you are depending on a particular resource - more missiles, for example, or more drones, or more crew - you can get totally screwed by a poor store selection. This is exacerbated because each store carries only one kind of resource - so if you want drones the drone-store is a goldmine for you, but useless to most other ships. Eventually, most ships have an interest in most items. But initially the scatter of the items for purchase is too wide.

Integrated design elements

The ship simulation is accomplished through tight-knit simulation of seven systems:

• Ships are modeled as a series of rooms connected by doors.
• Crew occupy one space in a room, move at some set speed, and their actions are determined by the room they occupy.  (A crew member in the cockpit is a pilot, etc.)
• Some rooms have a "system" within them, and some do not.
• Each room has an Oxygen level, displayed visually by the color of the room.
• Weapon hits affect a single room - dividing their damage between the hull, systems, and crew.
• Each ship has some number of "power" cells, which may be allocated between systems.
• Some systems (shields, weapons, drones) have sub-elements which divide up the power provided to their parent system.

When you fight another ship (fighting other ships is about 90% of what you'll do in the game) they fire weapons at you - these weapons might hit your shields, or they might hit a room in your ship.  If they hit a room they damage your hull, systems in that room, and any folks in that room.  Some weapons can even cause a breach - creating a hole in the room which quickly sucks out all the oxygen.

If you have a breach it is important to close all the doors around that room, so that most of your ship still has oxygen.  Then again, if a fire is started on your ship you might find that venting all the oxygen out of the room is the fastest & easiest way to put it out.  Now imagine what happens if your "Door" system is damaged such that you can no longer remotely open & close doors - you might be in a situation where you are frantically trying to repair the door system as the oxygen drains out of the room.

And all the meanwhile that enemy ship continues to fire on you, and you continue to fire on it.  If your oxygen system breaks it's not too bad - assuming that you aren't fighting breaches or fires!

The best defense

Initially players of FTL will focus on keeping their own ship alive.  But eventually you realize that you can use your knowledge of the simulation elements to defeat your enemies more rapidly.  You can upgrade your surveillance systems (or use psychic crew members) to see where the crew is working on your opponent's ship - a few firebombs in those systems might send them scrambling, unable to man the weapons.  Boarding actions are very exciting - you can send a crack team into the enemy ship to wreak havoc on their systems even without punching through their shields.  But do they have upgraded security doors that will slow down your assault?

Engine upgrades, pilot skill, and engineering skill all contribute to your ship's evasion chance - by focusing on engine power you can dodge a lot of attacks!  But without a pilot your evasion drops to 0.  This makes attacks on the enemy pilot quite attractive, especially against faster ships.

Power Overwhelming

The final piece of the sim is your power allocation.  This is pretty much the same allocation problem we used in Tie Fighter (or Cybercon III!).  Put all your power into the engines to boost your evasion rate.  Power up shields to prevent damage.  Allocate more power to weapons to keep more turrets firing.  Don't forget to keep power running to your oxygen and med bay!

The really interesting, sensible twist here is that you cannot simply put an arbitrary amount of power into any system - each system is limited by a power cell ranking, which you have to increase as an upgrade.  So you purchase increases to each system's power limit separately from simply increasing the maximum number of power cells you can deploy.  The pricing scheme really encourages you to purchase increased limits before purchasing more power - which ensures that you always have interesting decisions to make regarding power allocation.

These power cell units are ALSO your systems HP - so adding more power capacity to weapon means it is harder for opponents to take out your weapon systems.  It is a wonderfully elegant system.  This also means that when a system is temporarily damaged, you gain unallocated power which can be put elsewhere.  I'll often increase my engine power when my shields or weapons are down.

All in All

Is FTL a great game?  Maybe not.  It has a pretty limited scope, which gives it a very niche appeal.  But it fills that niche very well.  It's a great example of making a compelling game for a limited audience, and not charging an arm and a leg for it.  I think that's exactly the direction developers should be moving in, especially for premium games.

Week of Gaming #93 - 07/15/12

This week I've been consumed by the social duties of running a large Kickstarter campaign... but I've managed to balance it just a bit better than last week.  Mostly by starting a few new games - that's always good for my motivation!

Games of note this week:

1 - Serious Sam 3 BFE

2 - Dungeon Raid

3 - Endless Space

4 - Battle Nations

5 - Dungeons of Dredmor

Dungeons of Dredmor

I've been dying in Dredmor a lot.  Now that's not really unusual - most characters die, and some quite early on.  But what I mean is that when I try really hard to focus - I'm still dying.  There is a new expansion coming out August 1st which I'm very excited about, so maybe I should take a break until then - to recharge my capacity to sink hundreds of hours into such an awesome game, eh?

Battle Nations

They keep expanding this game, and I still think it's one of the best "click, then wait a while" games out there.  But I think my time with it is coming to an end.  Of the 7 or 8 resources the game uses, only 1 or 2 are relevant to me any more - the others just sit at maximum levels all the time.  I only use a few attack units - because everything else has been outclassed.  It's sad to leave it, but I suppose I've enjoyed it quite a bit for free, so why complain?

Endless Space

Custom Factions?  The game finally goes live and now I have to deal with the agony of designing my own race?  Now I spend an hour before I start the game, which means I get even LESS done when I want to play some 4x in space action.  I'm falling into a sort of normalized sequence of events during my first 20 or 30 turns - soon I'll start trolling strategy posts to see how closely to optimal I've been playing.

Dungeon Raid

This is a game I wish I'd thought of - it's a simplified game that's partway between Puzzle Quest and Tower Defense.  I say Tower Defense because enemies grow stronger procedurally over time, and you need to upgrade your ability to resist them at nearly the same curve.  You have a few tools to do this - Experience from killing enemies gives you "levels", while defense points spent when your defenses are at maximum earns you "upgrades" and coins collected can earn you "equipment."  All of these things are pretty much the same - do you get +1 def, +1 attack, 5% more gold?  Do you get a special ability?

These choices don't really matter much in the early game - but eventually the enemies become quite strong, and if you don't have the defenses necessary to absorb their attacks you'll die very quickly.

It's a fairly bare-bones game, but I quite respect it.  Worth the price tag of free!

Serious Sam BFE

I played and very much enjoyed the first two SS games.  They start out fun, and by 10% of the way through you're thrown into an INSANE firefight with literally hundreds of enemies attacking you at once.  Ammo conservation becomes a real problem, which is especially well-done because many enemies have specific weapons they are weak to, but you just can't switch fast enough to be efficient, so you end up experimenting with inefficient alternatives on the fly.  It's not frustrating, it's awesome.

This new game feels a bit too fast - that might be the way it's programmed, or my settings, or it could just be that my reflexes are way slower than they were 10 years ago.  In any case it's not a dealbreaker.  I love that the default weapon - the "you have no weapon so just fight with your hands" is a ONE HIT KILL.  Your "basic" attack is literally to rip your opponent apart instantly.

This is balanced in some really interesting ways.  Number one, the attack speed of this move is not great.  One-on-one you can dominate with this move alone, but in the midst of a group you need to get OUT of there, not stand by each enemy in turn.  But number 2 - the game has some excellent environmental effects, which basically means you can't see anything nearby for a moment when your opponent's body is showering blood.  Likewise, exploding enemies leave lingering smoke clouds that obscure the dozen or more exploding enemies advancing behind them... this makes movement, position, and weapon choice really important in an organic way.  I'm digging it.

12 years Piracy-free

Like a million other people, I read the fascinating post by David Lowery which essentially argues that downloading music without compensating the artists is ethically wrong.  It's a very well-written and powerfully-presented argument.

I was then directed to Jonathan Coulton's response - which was possibly even more interesting, because Jonathan holds an essentially opposing position to David's but was seriously swayed by the clarity of David's words.  Like most sentient game-fans I'm a big fan of Jonathan Coulton - for his music, his story, and his generally approachable earnest interest in the world.

The core of David's argument - the part which seemed especially relevant to me - was this:

"By allowing the artist to treat his/her work as actual property, the artist can decide how to monetize his or her work. This system has worked very well for fans and artists. Now we are being asked to undo this not because we think this is a bad or unfair way to compensate artists but simply because it is technologically possible for corporations or individuals to exploit artists work without their permission on a massive scale and globally. "

This isn't the whole argument (read the link at the top!  Treat your brain!) but it's the chink in the armor that lets our natural defensive response to our own piracy habits break down.  We know that it's fair for artists to profit from their work - we don't begrudge them the 9.1 cents royalty.  But since we won't get caught if we don't pay it... we don't.  And thus we step off the ethical path.

Economics are Ethics

The idea that our small, intermediary decisions have a real effect on the world is a hard one to swallow.  We all indulge in a bit of candy-eating that we know we shouldn't.  We all skimp on exercise on occasion.  We all skim the assigned reading on occasion.  And in the vast majority of cases we don't get caught - so we feel as if there are no consequences for our lapse.  I certainly wouldn't want to demonize anyone for a lapse!  But these small decisions do have an impact on our lives - so we shouldn't feel good about them.  We certainly shouldn't defend them!

Here's a secret - facing your own shortcomings and admitting your lapses in judgement isn't demoralizing, or a source of weakness.  It's actually really refreshing.

Everything David writes about the music industry applies to other digitally distributed goods, like video games.  Game developers are generally not as individually identifiable as musicians, so it's a bit of a mental stretch, but trust me that there are real people making these games.

12 years Piracy-free

In 1999 the Dreamcast was released, and I bought one.  It was the first console I ever bought - my friends and step-brother had owned consoles which I had racked thousands of hours on, but the Dreamcast was the first one I ever owned outright.  I was working at Dark Horse Interactive, with a very young team.  There was a whole lot of downloading going on at work, and I was introduced to newsgroups where Dreamcast ISOs (images of the discs) were available for download.

I probably downloaded and burned 200 Dreamcast games that year.  This often involved an hour or more of tracking down .rar files, rebuilding corrupted archives, and playing with burn options.  Simply labeling the discs became quite a chore, since for some reason my mind insisted on changing every game's name slightly so that nobody but me could identify the contents of each disc.

I was doing this at work, and every night as I stayed up with my infant daughter (she pretty much didn't sleep, so her mother and I adapted to alternating sleep schedules.)  I was simultaneously supporting myself (and my family!) by making video games for commercial sale.

At some point, after roughly a year of this lifestyle, I realized that I was stealing from my fellow developers.  I was also stealing from their publishers, distributors, and retailers - but that didn't bother my conscience much.  But I stopped stealing games cold-turkey.  I had to satisfy myself with buying only the games I could afford (what actually happened was my game-consumption stayed pretty level, but I stopped doing tons of other things).

I still overeat too often, I still skip brushing my teeth some nights, and I still stay up later than I should sometimes.  But I've been 100% piracy-free for more than 12 years now, and honestly it hasn't been a very big deal.  Reading these articles on compensating musicians reminded me that facing up to our shortcomings can lead to really positive change.  I'm going to try to chalk up another improvement or two.

Considering: Monster Ate My Condo! - A study in design tension

The Free App of the Week this week is Monsters Ate My Condo! - I picked it up, and was immediately impressed with the clever use of design in the game.  I thought this would be a good opportunity to talk about tension maps again (from my article of last year) because they so clearly explain what makes this game so excellent.

Systems in Monsters Ate My Condo

1. Remove colored floors to get matches of like-colored floors.
2. Removed floors go either right or left, and are eaten by the giant monster on that side.
3. If the removed floor matches the color of the monster, the monster is happy.  If it differs, the monster becomes upset.
4. Monsters which become too upset get angry and begin destroying random floors.
5. If you match a series of floors of the same color as a monster, the monster is replaced with a new monster.
6. Matched floors turn into bronze floors.   Bronze floors turn silver, then gold, then diamond.
7. Discarding a metallic floor does not anger a monster - instead it activates their super power!
8. Discarding any floor shifts the tower slightly in that direction - if the tower shifts too far in one direction it topples - ending the game!
9. As you earn points, you increase your character level - which increases the maximum number of floors which can exist at any time.

That's a pretty good set of systems.  Let's try to group them a bit.

Grouping the Systems

#3,4,5,7 deal with the monsters and how they interact with the player.  This is group A.

#1,2,6,9 deal with floor-matching.  We'll call that group B.

#8 is about toppling the tower.  This is "group" C.

Imagine a game with just B and C - you match floors, discarding whatever you don't want.  Your only limit is that you need to keep the tower relatively stable.  That would probably be fun by itself - though there isn't much room for variety.  There also wouldn't really be any reason to favor one color over another.

Imagine a game with just A and C - you appease the monsters, and try to not topple the tower.  That works well on its own, though there isn't much point-scoring opportunity.  If you don't have floor colors which match either of your monsters, you don't have any choice other than angering them.  It also seems to lack a really strong end-game condition, but that could be addressed.

How about A and B together?  This is pretty much identical to the existing game, though it lacks an end condition.  There are other ways to lose the game however - they just aren't as visceral.  But the first few minutes you play, you don't even know about group C, so there is certainly potential there.

This shows a really strong interplay between systems - none of them completely depend on any other system, though they connect to every other system at least peripherally.  This gives a good "spiderweb" - style tension map, as opposed to a "mobile" map where some sub-systems completely hang off of others.

Topple, Match, Feed

Not only are the system groups nicely separated - they compliment one another mechanically as well.  "Don't topple the tower" is a long-term limit to play, not something that comes up in moment-to-moment decision making.  "Match 3" is an immediate call to action, but doesn't really provide much strategic depth.  "Feed the monsters appropriately" is a lovely mid-level strategic consideration.  So the system groups are delineated by time and brain-space as well as orthogonal interaction.

This means that learning the game is a fun process - you give players an immediate goal (match 3), then tell them about the strategic color considerations (feeding the monsters), and let them play.  Eventually the tower will topple, and the player will realize that they could have been optimizing for that as they handled the other two objectives.  That provides an "oh, I get it - now I could do better!" realization, which probably gets them to play the game again immediately.  That's pretty much the gold standard in a mobile game.

Aesthetic Identity

Design isn't everything, and the game has some very cohesive visuals which helps to sell its identity.  The aesthetic isn't much to my liking, actually - but it's so flavorful that I have a hard time faulting the developers.

Week of Gaming #88 - 06/10/12

Ok, even though I've played a fair amount of Diablo 3 this week, and have had a few really good Hero Academy games - there is only one game I want to talk about today:

Endless Space

Endless Space has a few things going for it:

1 - Absolutely breathtaking UI and overall presentation.  Finding information about your space empire is totally effortless, and beautiful at every moment.

2 - An innovative (though, ultimately, not very effective) system of early alpha releases and community feedback.

3 - A pretty fine 4x game - though it is closer to Civilization than Space Empires.

Let's talk about the UI - because it's not just about beautiful art direction - the presentation design goes all the way into the bones of the project.

Beautiful UI

To begin with - the universe is displayed as a rendered galaxy of stars.  The stars you use are all in a 2D plane, but the game fills in around that to create a full breathtaking galaxy.  You zoom in and out of this with the mouse wheel, and the amount of information you see is determined by your zoom level.  At minimum zoom, you see just the Galaxy.  Come in a bit, and you'll see the network of star lanes connecting the important planets.  Come in closer, and you'll see empire borders, and the presence of fleets.  Come in closer, and you'll see breakdowns of how many planets are in each system, whether or not they are colonized, and which special resources are present.

Zooming in and out is so natural - and the information is laid out so well - that this really is the key innovation of the product.  In most cases starting with praise for the UI would indicate that most of the game is poorly realized - but in this case the UI really is fantastic enough to warrant it.

If you click on a star, you zoom in even further - to see the planets orbiting.  This view shows you the centerpiece of the economy - each planet has 6 essential stats: Food, Income, Dust, Science, Size, and atmosphere type (which also encompasses things like gas giants).  Size is the maximum population, and each of the FIDS production numbers are multiplied by that planet's population - so population is often the key resource to maximize.

Guts of the Economy

The economic core of the game is very similar to Civilization, as I've already said.  One cool innovation is that the smallest unit of your economy is the system, not individual planets.  This is awesome from a UI and management perspective, but it makes system combat non-existent, which makes military actions a bit broad - none of the planet-by-planet battles or minefields of Stars!  Food production fills up a supply bar, and when it is filled the system gains 1 population.  Building a colony ship costs the system 1 population.  Increasing population (as well as the tax slider) decreases "happiness" - which acts as a multiplier to your FIDS income.

You build system-wide enhancements, which have an upkeep cost in Dust.  This is all very, very familiar to anyone who spent much time in Civilization IV.  That's not much of a complaint however - since I'm of the opinion that Civ IV was pretty much the best PC game ever created.

Community Design

The first thing that caught my eye about Endess Space was not the game itself - but rather the "community design" system under which it was built.  I myself am planning a project which uses a community-driven model, so I was interested to do some research into such a system already in action.

Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be much community involvement.  There are forums where people discuss the game, but it's very much the same sort of "buff this nerf that" balance noise you can find on any game forum.  I don't see any careful or thoughtful analysis.  There is a system in place similar to Gaia online - where people can agree or disagree with your statements - and gaining more agreements makes your suggestions carry more theoretical weight.  I haven't seen this in action much - mostly because there just isn't much reasonable discussion in the first place.

Ship Combat

Ship and fleet building are decent, though the UI selection is oddly poor for "systems" - you select them from a scrolling horizontal box, even though you quickly have 20 -30 systems to choose from, so there is rather more scrolling than is healthy.  There are only 3 weapon types, and the theory is that each is effective in one phase of combat - missiles at long range, beams at medium, and kinetic weapons up close.  There are also three defense types - one for each weapon type.

Your empire has a command point limit - which affects the number of ships you can use in battle at once.  Initially you may have only 5 ships in a fleet - so you can build 20 ships, but they will organize into 4 fleets, and battles are a 1-fleet to 1-fleet affair.  The problem with the combat design right now is that kinetic weapons are quite effective even at long-range, so masses of kinetic weapons are effective against pretty much everything.  There might be some technologies deep in the tech tree which adjust that balance - but I haven't seen them yet.

I haven't quite figured out how to push fleets or colonies out of a system - the game seems to be mostly  a race to colonize contested systems ASAP, since even new systems seem to defend themselves pretty well, and as they grow they become very strong contributors to your empire.

A Long Road

The real question is - how much more effort will be put into Endless Space before it is considered final?  Will the thin diplomacy selections be fleshed out?  Will the combat be adjusted to favor kinetic weapons less?  Endless Space has the best foundation for a 4x game I've ever seen, so I hope the developers will be improving it for years to come yet.

Week of Gaming #84 - 05/13/12

Well, I finally jumped on the Hero Academy bandwagon this week.  It's very good, but also a bit unsatisfying.  I'll get into why below.

Games of note this week:

1 - Legend of Grimrock

2 - Dungeons of Dredmor

3 - Battle Nations

4 - Titanic Lite

5 - Hero Academy

Hero Academy

The mechanics of Hero Academy are great - elegant mechanics, clean controls, infinite undo - it's all just fantastic.  The art is clean, the game loads fast - there's just nothing wrong with the implementation at all.

Unfortunately, the game falls down quite a bit in the overall design.  I don't mean the battle mechanics - which are well-balanced and tactically interesting - I mean in the way you play the game.  Hero Academy is only playable in asynchronous multiplayer battles.  New teams are available, but you never get to see them without an in-app purchase.

This is a game which I would devour in single-player mode.  I would love to practice and learn how to play the game - experiment with the UI, and play entire games at once.  I'd love to play hotseat with a friend on the same screen.

Since it takes hours (or days!) to play through a game, it is very easy to get 5-10 games going at once.  But this makes it impossible to remember where you are in each game - is this the game where I lost my Ninja early on?  How many attack upgrades are left in my deck?  Have I seen the opponent's super-unit yet?  Without access to this information, games played over days become more like random chess problems than real tactical successes.

If I could pay $2 for a single-player version of the game, I'd be on that in a heartbeat.  And a sample single-player level with each new team would give me a great chance to try them out - and possibly encourage a purchase.  Unfortunately, as things stand now I won't be spending any money on Hero Academy - even if I keep playing it.

Titanic Lite

This is a puzzle game I discovered (like most good puzzle games!) through Tom Cutrofello's excellent blog.  This game has you rescuing people from the water into a series of lifeboats.  The trick is that boats rescue the first drowning person they touch - and can't be moved once they are full.  So paradoxically you keep your boats away from people in the water as much as possible - because you don't want your locked boats to block the future boats.  The game is free, and it's an excellent puzzle experience.  Highest recommendation.

Battle Nations

I'm still very much enjoying Battle Nations - in fact, I'm getting close to buying my first premium building thanks to all the Nanopods I've earned through Tapjoy.  I'm at a point now where my Iron output, unfortunately, just clobbers every other concern I have.  I don't mine stone, wood, or oil at all these days - it's all about iron.  damaged units take around 1000 iron each to repair, which takes most o my supply.

Dungeons of Dredmor

My interest in DoD is waning again, which is natural after 400+ hours invested.  Gaslampgames has announced a new free DLC coming in a month - so I'm sure this will continue to be a great game for me to play in the evenings.  My 8-year-old son has finally started his own character in the game, and he's enjoying himself even though his math skills prevent him from really digesting the game's finer points.

Legend of Grimrock

I'm nearing the end of the dungeon, finally, and I have nothing but respect for what the developers have accomplished with this game.  The only thing I want in Legend of Grimrock is more - much more.  The game doesn't lend itself well to multiple play-throughs (I say when I'm on my third...) and the skill trees sort of cap out pretty early on.  There are some really genius moments - like the Guitar Hero-esque light puzzle, and the Headhunter skill for Minotaurs.  The lighting system, food, encumbrance, defenses - everything is in place to make Legend of Grimrock a really great game.  We just need more of it to love.

Dungeons of Dredmor Strategy Guide Part 5: New Builds for RotDG

At long last, I've updated my four part strategy guide for v1.0.10, so it's high time I also illuminate the secrets of the six new skill sets in Realm of the Diggle Gods - and provide some fantastic new builds to go with them!  UPDATE!  five additional builds for RotDG, and updated to include YHTNTEP content!

Big Game Hunter

BGH is a Warrior skill, so it's a great way to boost your melee damage and HP.  Level 1, before you've put in even a single skill point, will give you +8 xp for every "animal" kill.  (It's actually +16, but it only happens half the time.) That's pretty sweet.  Level 2 gives you the "Butcher" effect, which causes animals to sometimes drop meat.  Not great meat - but it's a bit of HP regen which works all game.  Level 3 is the disappointing "Lure" - which provides a minor debuff to nearby enemies.  Why would you use this instead of just hitting them?  Level 4 gets us back on track with a decent damage boost and bleed effect, as well as a big accuracy boost and stealth boost!  Very interestingly, this damage scales with stealth - giving players a reason to max Stealth.  Combine with Piracy's Mist of Corsair, maybe?  Level 5 gives us the ability to summon 4 diggle "hounds" - which is just as awesome as it sounds.

This makes BGH a pretty good random skill to take and not invest any points in - or a good skill to put your first 4 points in and kick ass with your diggle hounds.  Both totally valid options.

Emomancy

This is probably the funniest skill tree in the expansion.  Unfortunately, the strong humor seems to have trumped utility in a few cases.

The first skill teleports away a nearby enemy.  This is great - much more useful than Mathemagic's teleport, which affects YOU.  The second skill is the FANTASTIC "Cure" - which is a minor heal, but also acts like a potion of purify - it removes all negative effects from your character.  This is an absolutely fabulous way to get around those irritating drawbacks from Killer Vegan or Necromancy!

Level 3 Gives a decent - but dangerous! - chemical AoE blast which doesn't scale well at higher levels.  Next is the Dampening Field of Angst, which does minor damage but mostly acts as an anti-magic fields - to stop enemy spellcasters!  This spell won't get a lot of use, but when it does it is an absolute lifesaver.

Level 5 gives the Sigil of Whatever - a rune which damages and pacifies an enemy.  Pacification doesn't quite work as well as you think it should - enemies will re-target you quickly if you are still nearby.  Level 7 is a bigger targeted pacification effect - if you like the Sigil of Whatever, then you should get level 7 as well.  If the Sigil isn't working for you - it's probably best to avoid it.  Level 6 is a modest self-buff which works against exotic damage, and provides 2 armor.  Meh.

Curse of the Werediggle

This is a Rogue Skill (unfortunately!) and it's a pretty weird one.  Level 1 gives you the ability to transform into a WereDiggle - giving you a hefty damage bonus of +5, dodge +5, armor +2.  However, while in Were-diggle form you lose the ability to use any other skills, and lose all bonuses from any other skills.  This is a HUGE penalty, which makes being a Werediggle, usually, a bad idea.

If you need a throw-away skill, Cures of the Werediggle is a fantastic way to get your first level's worth of XP in absolute safety.  This means mages might flirt with it just for level 1.  It even adds to your Savvy, which helps reduce spell costs.  Not bad.

On the other hand, if you are willing to go whole-hog (whole-diggle?) and base your entire build around it, being a Were-Diggle is pretty cool.  Level 2-8 give a mix of interesting skills, notably the ability to lay diggle eggs (omelettes forever!)  turn invisible, and bash through walls every 2 turns (way better than Golemancy's Digging Ray!)

Killer Vegan

This is, hands-down, probably the strongest skill tree in the game.  It's also a bit irritating to use.  Killer Vegan essentially punishes you if you eat animal products (eggs, cheese, meat) or attack an animal in melee range (animals are about 30% of the enemy types.)  These penalties are severe, and last 200 turns.

In exchange, animals WILL NOT ATTACK YOU - which lets you just walk past a ton of enemies.  This means you don't get XP for killing them, but it also means you blow through areas pretty quickly.  To be clear - you can still kill them, just not with melee attacks.  That's what level 2 is for - it allows you to turn any nearby animal into a pet - who can kill animals without penalty.

The real power of Killer Vegan, however, is the absolutely INSANE stat bonuses it provides.  It gives +9 Burliness and +9 Nimbleness - which is essentially like being 8 levels higher than you are.  You'll also get a +5 Righteous Damage bonus, which is unresistable and applies to both melee and ranged attacks.  And the last skill point gives you an ability which lets you ignore the penalties of breaking your Vegan Pact.  That means you can save your cheeses, eat it all in a big non-vegan binge, then eliminate the consequences for doing so.  Amazing.

Piracy

Piracy is a Rogue skill set, and it's a pretty amazing one.  It doesn't provide any traps skill, otherwise it might actually threaten Burglary for most-useful utility skill.

At level 1 Piracy gives the fantastic "plunder" skill, which gives you a 10% chance of finding a gem on your enemy's corpse.  That's not only a ton of money - it also helps a lot of those weird crafting recipies for which you've been hoarding that ruby all game.  But the real power comes at level 2.

At level 2 Piracy gives you the swashbuckling skill.  This gives you +75 counterattack for 4 turns.  If you have ~10 counterattack already, this basically makes you impossible to hit for those 4 turns.  Counterattack works on everything that hits you - so it can turn a "I'm surrounded" moment into "they all killed themselves" moment.  Amazing, and always worth getting ASAP.

Level 3 has a really useful and thematic spell - Mists of the Corsair.  This summons a cloud which confuses and pacifies enemies - but more importantly gives you +20 dodge and +50 stealth for a few turns.  This works like invisibility for the most part - but it's also just a great way to max out your dodge chance in a tough battle.  Level 4 gives the Black Spot - the only debuff in the game actually worth using just for the debuff effects.  It gives huge penalties to defense, counterattack, dodge, armor, and pierce armor.  Toss this on anyone you think might give you trouble, and watch them shrivel.

Level 5 is a bit of a divisive skill.  I love it, but it's not always a useful thing to bother with.  It fires a cannon, which deals wildly different damage depending on how lucky you are.  The baseline is 16 damage, but delivered in 3 distinct damage packets - so if your opponent has 3 armor you will deal only 7 damage(!).  But then you have a decreasing chance to deal up to 4 additional salvos of damage which, depending on your target's armor, might mean a total of 80 damage (!) or as little as... nothing.  Cannons can now fire in all four cardinal directions - which makes me love this even more.

In addition, this skill spawns a cannonball on your target, which is a pretty decent thrown weapon.

Demonologist

This is a really weird tree - the first 3 skills give you heavy anti-demon powers fueled by righteousness.  But skills 4-7 take away those powers, as you give into demonic forces and become a demon yourself.  This is absolutely a skill you take 3 points in or 6 points - there is no in-between!  This is a Rogue skill - though it buffs your magic, and has a bit of a melee-focus.

Level 2 gives you damage bonuses when you are hit in melee - a nice synergy with Berserker Rage.

At level 3 you get circle of protection - a real high point for the Demonologist tree.  it provides huge bonuses to exotic damage resistance (including fire!), block, armor, regen, and magical defense.

Now things get dark... at level 4 your lose all your Righteous resistance, and instead gain the Abyssal Fire skill.  This is a +2 damage (fire) which also procs burning effects when you hit or are hit yourself.  Decent, but not worth giving up your old skills for.  If you take this it's because you're looking to fall further down the dark path... like to level 5, where you gain the ability to summon a swarm of demon minions!  This puts a bunch of debuffs on you as a penalty - but who cares!

Level 6 gives you the unique (and very welcome!) skill to remove corrution effects from your equipment.  This only happens when you fight certain high-level enemies in melee range.  At level 7 you have fallen really far - to the point where, sometimes, you just turn into a demon.  In this form you get +11 melee damage and +5 armor, but your magic stats take a huge hit.  This can happen when you hit, when you are hit, or when you cast a spell... so it will happen pretty often.  You're really in this skill tree for the demon transformation by this point, so enjoy the huge melee buff!  Oddly, this skill ends up being a bit like a reverse Were-diggle tree, where the transformation happens at the end.

Character Builds

The Strongest One in the World - Maces, Killer Vegan, Thrown Weaponry, Smithing, Berseker Rage, Tinkering, Piracy

This is all about synergy.  Killer Vegan and Smithing give you big bonuses to Burliness - which increases your thrown weapons damage.  Piracy gives you infinite cannonballs - to throw!  Smithing and Tinkering give you thrown weapons - to throw!  Tinkering also gives you Power Limbs, which increase melee damage (and thrown damage!)  Berserker Rage increases thrown damage and armor.  Maces deal knockback, so you can throw.

Get Animal Friend first, so that you can get all the XP from animals on the first floor.  Get Smithing 3, Maces 2, and Thrown Weaponry 3.  Piracy 2 is also a good way to avoid damage.  Once you've made it that far, you can focus on Tinkering for power limbs + trap XP, or get more Killer Vegan power to increase your strength.  You'll find that you can melee fantastically well with this build - almost as well as a dual-wield build.  The difference is that you have weak defenses, so you need to rely on Piracy and your heavy thrown weapons to keep you out of tight spots.  Softballs are 2-hit-killers with this build, so buy them and keep them handy.  Remember that being a Vegan only means you can't hit an animal with melee attacks - softballs are totally fair game.

Go!  Go!  WereDiggles! - Curse of the Werediggle, Berserker Rage, Viking Wizardry, Assassination, Smithing, Archeology, Big Game Hunter

So, being a Werediggle cancels all your stat bonuses, eh?  Then let's take some skill trees which rely on proc effects to do their work!

Viking Wizardry we're only using for the amazing level 1 spell Power of Magic Steel.  Cast it before your first fight, and just leave it on forever.  It's +2 electrical damage, which will help you rip through the early levels.  Smithing and Archeology are skills you use between fights - although the Fedora works great while you are in diggle form ;).  Big Game Hunter, Berserker Rage, and Assassination all give their bonuses while you melee it up as a diggle, so go nuts.

You will suffer from weak defenses eventually, so save your steel to make some heavy armor with Smithing.  Level up Big Game Hunter to gain the ability to summon a swarm of Diggle minions!  BGH and Werediggle form are really the only skills you need, along with a generous helping of Smithing.  Everything else can come later.

Superman - Unarmed Combat, Artful Dodger, Master of Arms, Astrology, Burglary, Big Game Hunter, Perception.

This build makes your faster than a speeding bullet, able to teleport, ambush, and fire EYE LASERS.

Start with 1 level of unarmed combat, for the knockback, and a level of Burglary, for the lockpicks.  Use Suit Up to keep your health regen up as much as possible while you rush to get your eye lasers.  Once you have fiery death at your command, you have three options: go for Knightly Leap, go for Ninja Vanish, or work on Big Game Hunter to get your diggle minions.  You need at least one of those options to keep the heavier enemies off your back so you can work your magic on them.

Remember, your lasers get better as your perception skill increases.  BGH gives you +2, and there are several pieces of equipment which can help you as well.  Is this the strongest build ever?  No.  But it's pretty awesome.

 Next 5 builds

Week of Gaming #81 - 04/22/12

It's true, Legend of Grimrock has pretty much been my only gaming action the past two weeks.  And I'm fine with that.  But I've got at least a few other good tips for those of you looking for something fresh this week.

Games of note this week:

1 - Legend of Grimrock

2 - Battle Nations

3 - Choice of Zombies

4 - Mario vs. Donkey Kong

5 - Kid Icarus: Uprising

Kid Icarus: Uprising

Here is one of the highly-anticipated 3DS titles, one of the three or four (along with Super Mario 3D Land and Resident Evil) which was supposed to really prove out the hardware.  I'm not quite sure it does that, but it's certainly not a bad game.

In simplest terms, the game plays out like Panzer Dragoon - an into-the-screen rail shooter with independent player movement and aiming.  It transitions between ground-based and flight-based sections, but both types of sections map pretty closely to the same archetype.  This is an archetype which has proven to be enjoyable in the past - but the 3DS hardware isn't especially well suited to the necessary controls, so there is a bit of a mapping problem present.  Specifically, you are forced to move with your left thumb, and fire with the left shoulder button at the same time.  This is a bit of a contortion for long sessions.

Mario vs. Donkey Kong

I adored playing through this 6-7 years ago, and was excited when it came back up as part of the ambassador program on the 3DS.  I'm going through it again, and it's still just a fantastic action puzzler.  If anyone missed it the first time through, you owe it to yourself to check out the original.  Don't bother with the sequels - they change the formula around significantly, and lose the tight elegance of the original.

Choice of Zombies

This is an IF game (Interactive Fiction - like a choose-your-own-adventure book) from the studio choice of games.  They have several free books out like this one, and if the quality level is as high, they are well worth checking out.  Writing an interactive book presents several interesting challenges - you really need to worry about pagebreaks, and story breaks in a way that you don't need to in novels.  Names become much more important as well, since you need to actually make choices and take actions for the various characters, so remembering that Kayla is the 8-year-old and Lisa is the gun-nut zombie survivor becomes pretty important!

Battle Nations

This is a pretty popular resource-management game - it gates the content behind "quests" a bit too much for my taste, but in most ways it fully realizes the potential I used to yearn for in games like Ikariam.  The big two innovations are to pit players against AI enemies for combat, instead of having players attack other players.  This makes combat a reasonable source of funds, and doesn't encourage ganking the way so many past attempts at this sort of thing have.

The other big innovation is that "energy" in the zynga sense is totally unnecessary if your economic factors are strong enough.  Battle Nations has "population" as a serious restriction on my productivity, which is interesting.  Here's my current dilemma:

1 - I can only hold 500 of each resource.

2 - Building a warehouse adds another 500 storage for each resources, but requires 8 population to staff.

3 - You cannot "de-staff" a building once it is complete - you must sell it and then re-build it later if necessary.

4 - I've recently gained the ability to make a larger warehouse, which increases capacity by 1000 and still requires only 8 workers.  But it costs 4000 resources, which means I need to already have 7 warehouses, tying up 56 population of my 125 total.

I've been pretty good about anticipating bottlenecks, and smoothing out my experience in the other resources - I've been expanding early, turning on multiple harvesting nodes, etc.  But the population bottleneck is frustrating - it's almost convincing me to buy the premium building which increases capacity by 2000 and requires only 4 workers.  But I shall resist!

Legend of Grimrock

Ah, bliss.

Legend of Grimrock is a lovely, lovely game.  The puzzles, the dungeon, the monsters, the pacing of combat - it's all good.  I really like the skill + upgrade system as well - getting a few stat bonuses here and there as I increase my daggers skill is very interesting.  Axes increase strength, but now I need Dexterity - so I'm thinking about dipping into swords and athletics for that.  Bracers are an armor slot that gives interesting and significant bonuses - +50% poison resist, or +20% regeneration rate, or similar.

The only weak point, in my opinion, is the magic system.  Legend of Grimrock uses a glyph-based system obviously inspired by Dungeon Master.  But in order to learn the spells, you need to increase your appropriate skill - and skill trees alternate stat bonuses and spells to better match the weapon and defense trees.  This means that the total number of spells in the game is under 20, and any individual character is going to get only about 6.  That's pretty anemic for a wizard.  Even worse, mana is deducted when you cast the spell, not when you select glyphs.  This means you have no idea how much mana a given spell is going to cost or - crucially whether or not you have enough mana to actually cast it.  It's very frustrating to open up the glyph pane, select your glyphs, then hit "cast" and have nothing happen, forcing you to manually close the glyph pane so that you can continue combat normally.

I have two parties in the dungeon at present - one which uses magic and one which does not.  I'm finding the non-magic team to be much more robust and fluid in a tight spot.  I wish that weren't so.

Week of Gaming #80 - 04/15/12

Legend of Grimrock.  I wish I could say that this was the only game I've played this week - it's certainly the only thing I've played for the last three days.  Glorious, if you have any sort of fond memories of Dungeon Master.

Games of note this week:

1 - Legend of Grimrock

2 - Starcraft 2

3 - Batman: Arkham City

4 - Waking Mars

5 - Rows Free

Rows Free

Do any of you follow Tom Cutrofello's blog? I consider it to be the authoritative word on iOS puzzle games.  Tom loves no-nonsense puzzling, and Rows Free is one of his recent top picks.  The game is very similar to solitaire SET - so if you've been interested in working that part of your brain, it's a great choice.  You get 4 tiles, and have to place them on a 6x6 grid.  If you get combinations in a row, diagonal, or 2x2 group, they are scored and removed from the board.  The trick is to anticipate how likely each group might be to complete, and keep open spaces in the right areas.  You get 200 points for an all-different group, 300 for 1-same 2-different, and so on.

This means that, for the most part, you always want to shoot for "all-different" groups.  There are 5 shapes, 5 numbers, and 5 colors.  So if you have 3 all-different tiles, then there are 8 possible tiles which will complete that set.  If you have 3 tiles which are 1-same, 2-different, then there are only 4 possible tiles to complete it.  Half the chance for 50% more points is NOT a good bet.  Also, it is very possible to score multiple groups simultaneously, especially if you always go fo "all-different" groups.

The game is free, and though it's not perfect I'm really liking it.

Waking Mars

Here is an interesting beast - a physics Metroid-style gardening puzzle, set on Mars.  I like the controls and the ambiance, but the game has been pretty trivial thus far.  I know I'm way to the "complexity" favoring side of game players, but I keep seeing opportunities for more depth.  Hopefully I'll find it as I keep playing?  Biggest gripe about the game is the fact that I can't load my game without re-starting a new game and watching the intro cutscene every time.  Ugh.

Batman: Arkham City

I thought I was done with this one, but on a whim I went back and finished all the Robin achievements.  Nice.

Starcraft 2

Now that my Protoss and Terran games are solid, I'm enjoying Random plays with strangers more.  Baneling play is still my weakspot - whenever I get burrowed Banelings they do great things for me, but I only get them in about 10% of my games.  What's wrong with me?  I also played a few epic 3v3 games with my regular Monday group - had a game where I attacked and destroyed one player's 5th expansion (it was a VERY long game) with all my drones.  Epic.

Legend of Grimrock

I don't know if I should say a lot about this game or a little - obviously I'm a huge fan of Dungeon Master, and this game is basically a love-letter to people like me.  But I think the game totally holds up as a contemporary game - even with all the strange interface conventions from 1990 in place.  Hoarding meat from your enemies to feed your players - collecting skulls for your Minotaur - learning new spells and casting them with glyphs during combat - everything in this game is epic.  I worry that I won't have enough time to explore it fully during one play-through, so I've already started several.  Most fun?  My all-ninja team which started with Evasion scores around 30 across the board.

I really wish I could auto-load thrown weapons when my current stack runs out - my Throw-master is awesome, but after just a few attacks I have to grab a new stack of throwables from my inventory.  Ammo stacks are automatically picked up after battle - which is AWESOME - but juggling multiple stacks seems like a waste of my time, since Dungeon Master had that problem solved back in 1987...