More dungeons in the sky

Great Dungeon in the sky is a lot of fun, and a really well made game. But that won't stop me from picking it apart - that's fun too.

The first thing worth noting is the balance of the weapons. In GDIS every character has zero to three weapons, and every time any weapon is used, you get a delay until you can use any other weapon again. So, if you fire off your super spell, you have to wait ten seconds before you can hit something with your staff, but if you use your staff, you only have to wait one before you can use your staff again. There are four broad types of weapons, melee weapons, ranged weapons, spells, and other stuff.

Melee weapons recharge relatively quickly, and generally hit whatever is in front of you for a small amount of damage. There are a few exceptions, charge for instance has a really long recharge time but also knocks someone back. And peck has no recharge time at all, but never does more than 1 damage. As enemies typically have 25 health, that means you have to be really fast with your fingers to make it effective, but it can be.

Ranged weapons are slower than melee weapons, but have the distinct advantage that you aren't right next to what you're attempting to kill. As every attack in the game acts a little differently, you'll have to understand how your attack is going to move before you rely on it. Bows usually fire in arcs, bullets fire right ahead, and rays shoot based on how you're moving, and bounce off walls.

Spells are more varied than other things, but follow the same sort of rules. They can fire off multiple projectiles, restore your health, paralzye an enemy, summon a monster, go invisible, change your shape or a lot more. Typically though, all spells have a long recharge time, five to ten seconds. I'll get into why this is a problem in a moment.

other stuff is exactly as you might guess. Things like putting up a rope, dropping a bomb, super jump and, er, making toast. They rarely do damage on their own, but are useful in other ways. there are areas you can only access by super jump or flying, though. their recharge rates vary, but are typically fairly long.

After playing the game for a long while, I've decided that the best thing to use is melee weapons, as the recharge rate is the lowest. enemies will attack fairly slowly, so if you're quick with your fingers, you can kill things before they have a chance to hit you, and you can hit multiple things in one swing to boot. the best melee weapon is the staff, as it hits for 8 damage, twice, and only has about one second of recharge. The best ranged weapon is shock, because it seems to do the same amount of damage as every other ranged attack, but recharges slightly faster. It's a ray too, so it bounces off walls and you can aim it downwards to shoot at monsters below you. The best spell is healing, which isn't much of a contest because it's only got a five second recharge time, and nearly all other spells don't do half enough damage as to be worth their weight in salt. ten seconds to wait after shooting three 8 damage rays (two of which are into the air - where no enemies stay), when i can do twice as much damage in one second with a staff? I don't think so. The best other ability is... well, I haven't found one. Then again, now that I've found someone with flying and a staff, I hardly need to be able to jump extra high.

That brings me to the other factor in the characters you select, their attribute. Most characters don't have any, but some do. They include fast, slow, flying, strong to fire, and no combat. While the other options make for a more challenging game, you need flight to actually unlock a bunch of the content - so there's no real point in picking any attrubute other than that until after you've unlocked everything. Especially, because that means you no longer have to worry about all the tricky platforming bits. Okay, sure they're fun, but as I've said there are something like a hundred levels, and missing the same jump thirty times flight is glad to have - it's just being able to jump even when you're in the air.

the best character I've found is the birdman tribe leader. He flies, has a staff, and a three-ray spell. there are a lot of other good options, all depending on your play style, but strength wise it's birdman tribe leader, all the way.

I’d also like to put props to the music in the game. I normally play games without music, as I play most of my games in a room with other people and they get annoyed, but the music and sfx in the game are wonderful. There are a half-dozen tracks that shuffle so you never listen to the same one twice in a row, and it both fits in with the game wonderfully and loops perfectly. I’m thoroughly impressed.

Great Dungeon in the sky

Hey guys, I haven't dissapeared, I swear. I'm working on some other projects, but until I actually get a goal figured out, I want to keep it quiet on here.

For now, I'll just talk about another more-less procedural game, the great dungeon in the sky. It's an online flash-based game, too. Which is awesome.

GDIS, put into one sentance is a platforming game where you select one of... oh, about two hundred characters each with around three of... about five hundred abilities and run through... about a randomly generated hundred levels. That's a lot of content!

What makes the game so fun is not that you have so much selection, but in fact how that selection is unlocked. In order to play as a particular character other than the starting ten, you have to defeat him in one of the maps. Not so hard, until you consider that with three hundred characters that's a lot of guys to look for.

There are a handful of map types, each with a particular pattern. There is a small cave to the bottom left, a series of collums to the top right, and so on. each map is different and difficult in it's own way, some moreso than others.

Each map also has a number of spawns, each of which can spawn one of a certain number of creatures. For instance, in one map you start off facing against an animal over a hole in the ground. This animal is randomly selected from the twenty or so in the game (every one with a unique sprite, too), and that's what you see. Then you drop down to a random selection of orcs, then you fight your way through several mages, climb the stairs to fight a ghost, and the level is done.

No single level is too long, you can run through a level in three minutes, but each of those encounters can be fatal if you're not careful. One of those orcs might be a shaman, who can paralyze you - and then the warriors can take their time cutting you to bite-sized bits. The ghost might happen to be a strage cube of redness, and transform you into a red cube. It's different every time, but the strategy is always much the same. Get to the end, watch for ambushes, and win. Also, every type of map has different types of enemies in it - one is always full of various soldiers for instance, so not only do you have to survive, you have to fight everything to unlock them.

There are also a few more-secret type areas that are harder to get to, with a more powerful selection of monsters. If you climb up those pillars to the right, you'll reach a small plateau with a powerful monster. If you delve into the cave to the bottom right you can fight a powerful elemental. (okay, fine, except for the citrus elemental.)

But then there are a few even *more* secret areas that can only be accessed by the small group of characters with super-jumping or flight abilities. these characters are more special characters to run across, like the green knight or the baby boy - just fun and challenging to collect them all.

While there could be a lot more to the game - some sort of random map generator would add a little more variety to the game, but I wonder if that'd even be nessicarry. there are enough maps to add variety but few enough to breed familiarity with them, so you never know quite what to expect, but neither are you totally surprised. A good balance as it is.

I'm quite enjoying the game, and you should look into it too.

Rescue: The Beagles

'Rescue: the beagles' is another randomly generated game passing under the guise of procedural. I should go into more detail at some point about the difference between the two of them, but for now, onto the game.

Rescue is a platformer at it's heart, wrapped around a kernel of advertising the inhumane treatment of animals. You know the type, like that game where you clear forests in south africa to grow burgers for mccdonalds and such. The thinly veiled criticism of society as a whole linked arbitarily to a fun little game.

In Rescue, you are given three paths to traverse, one at a time, and your goal is to collect all the beagles. Fairly simple, press up to jump, down to drop through to the next layer, and left and right to move approprately. Space shoots owls at marketing executives for points, too.

The three paths move randomly up and down relative to one another, within certain perameters. The top path is always between one height or another, as are the bottom, and middle restricted in the same way, they never touch. Beagles, enemies, and powerups - ropes, parachutes, and owls, all appear randomly on the right of the screen and move forever to the left. Miss a beagle, it's game over.

Really, the gameplay is simple, and while it's mostly fun there is one real problem. Some of the jumps are higher than your character can survive, but there's no real way of telling which ones short of memorizing the distance you can move. Coupled with the fact that you can move side to side at ludicrous speeds compared to falling, you really have to know exactly how to control your character to actually get a good score.

There are two big improvements that need to be made to this game to make it more than just another advergame. The first would be to remove the auto-scrolling. This would change the dynamic of the game a lot, but mostly it would make it so you're able to actually pay attention to what's on screen at a given time. Frankly, all I know at the rate the game currently moves is avoid big white spots, touch everything else. There's no strategy. The other change is make the differences between the layers more pronounced. When the fall would be lethal, make the ground rocky or something, it's not that hard. It'd stop players from rage-quitting when they;re just abou to collect the last beagle and move to the next randomly generated map.

Self Destruct

Heck shooters, amongst not having a real consistant name within their own genre of top-down ship-based shooters are proably one of the best genres for procedural generation.

Self Destruct takes these two styles and marries them nicely together, creating a nice heck shooter. I've never been good at heck shooters, and they're not terribly common so for those of you who don't know what it is, I'll explain.

Top-down ship-based shooters are ultimately descended from Galaga, where you have a single ship at the bottom of the screen, and waves of various types of enemies descend from the top, whereupon you shoot at one another until one of you is dead. Heck shooters take that formula, and kick it up a notch, where enemies don't fire occasionaly, they fire constantly, and from all directions. Typically, you can regognize a heck shooter by the number of bullets on the screen at once, if there are more than there are ships, that's a probably a heck shooter.

In Self Destruct, you're given simple controls, and a simple goal. Reach wave 250. The good news is that most waves only last three seconds. The bad news is that's because the enemies are shooting down the screen so fast that you need to apply every reflex you've honed over the years to avoid being blown to smithereens in the first few seconds.

Unlike Probability Zero, Self Destruct is procedural rather than random. The guiding distinction? Pregeneration. Ships don't just randomly shoot from the top of the screen, they come in particular waves and combinations of waves. Sometimes you'll see a wave of fodder ships protecting a wave of attackers, sometimes it's a wave of explosives. Sometimes, the fodder ships will be in the shape of a V, other times an X, and sometimes there's just a huge thick line of them. The waves and their contents are randomly generated, but not the specific waves themselves. That's procedural.

Now, the look of the enemy ships were dfferent each time you loaded the game, that'd be awesome.

Probability Zero

You might have guessed, but I've gone on a bit of a procedural game downloading binge lately. The lastest is probability Zero, a prodcedurally generated falling game from a game design competion some time ago.

The idea is as simple as any; you start at the top, and climb down a procedurally generated maze of blocks and foes until you lose, then you get a highscore, rinse, and repeat.

But, at it's heart lies it's true form - procedural generation. One that reveals under closer speculation that it's not procedural at all, but merely random. Which is unfortunate, because the game is fairly fun if not for the few issues that plague it, revealing the crunchy random center that tries to pass itself off as Procedural.

You see, a procedural falling game would base what randomly appears next on what the character's curren abilities are. The enemies that shoot out from under things would wait until you've unlocked the horizontal attack, longer drops would generate more often when you buy the increased falling distance upgrade and so on. But it's not the case. The game doesn't (seem to) care whether you can fall X distance wthout taking damage before it adds it to the map. It doesn't care if it generates two equally likely looking paths, and then seals one off beyond your ability to jump out of the scrolling screen.

Okay, the last one is probably a bug that would crop up in a truly procedurally generated game of the same type, but only because the screen scrolls. Still, there are too many times you simply have to give up and wait to be crushed because the path you chose is one tile too high to jump out of, and has been revealed as sealed off on the bottom of the screen.

The one thing that would reveal the game as procedurally generated instead of random would be the existance of pre-planned jumps. Your character can always move within a certain parameter of speed and height, and while it might change as you improve it's not like it goes outside certain boundries. Pre-programmed jumps are blocks that are in an exact relative location to one another such that a player can jump between them using their expected abilities. Maybe it's one space up and two over, maybe it's three over and two down, these are jumps the player can make if they know how to jump, but they're not impossible, ever. Probability zero has no such set of jumps, it's not designed for the player to fel like they're playing a scrolling game aginst the clock, running an endless gauntlet until you mess up, instead it feels like you're playing against a computer hoping it doesn't generate a too high jump for you to make without getting stunned by the fall then shot off a cliff by a nearby enemy.

So, it's not really procedural, it just pretends to be. Sure, that's good enough for most people who don't know the difference, but maybe that's why it didn't win the contest.

The only other question to ask is, 'is it fun?' to which the answer is 'once you get the hang of it, absolutey'

Paradise Fort

Paradise fort is a small downloadable game with much the same concept as the name implies. You build a random island using the generate button, and then you build a fort on it.

The game is a side-viewed 2d platformer type game, and despite it's unintuitive controls (cancel outside of a menu is confirm in a menu, and vice versa) is a fun little procedurally generated game. You start off with only an island, a guy and a pickaxe and you have to defend yourself as long as you can from seagulls, the military, and forces of nature.

Frankly, the seagulls are the worst danger.

The island itself is about twenty tiles wide by ten tall, though it varies, and and the center of it is usually hollow. The ground of the island is made of varying parts of trees, rocks, gold and... coal? These three resources, plus fish you can kill are all you have at your disposal to build a fortress that will defend you for as long as you can survive. It's harder than it sounds.

You use your limited resources to build a few cannons, floors and ladders. Then the milirary arrives, intent on blowing you up. I've never seen such angry balloons or helicopters. Each only takes a half-dozen shots, but they have a variety of weapons at their own disposal as opposed to your fixed 45 degree peashooters. You've got to plan your defences carefully, because if an enemy arrives from the side of the screen you're not expecting, they could knock down your entire fort before you know what hit you.

The contents of the game is procedural, and as you get more resources from blowing stuff up, the stronger type of enemies are more likely to appear, and you're more likely to take more damage.

There are other challenges, like meteors that you can't shoot down and are as bad as bombs, the rain that can flood your fortress and drown you if you're not careful, and the birds that can damage you, knock you about, and your automatic guns totally ignore, you have to kill them by hitting them with a thrown rock. Since the ground is water, they knock you in and you're not paying attention, you're toast.

Dwarf Fortress Builds

Eventually, you set out with your dwarves. You'll jump right into play with a wagon sitting there on the ground, and your seven dwarves milling about aimlessly.

Typically, you drill into the side of a wall, start hollowing out bedrooms, dining halls, workshops and such. Sometimes you have to drill straight downwards because you're on flat ground. On rare occasions, you'll be forced to build upwards because of wet ground, but the concept is much the same.

But I'm not really going to cover the gameplay much here, more the procedural stuff.

Depending on where you settled down, you might get goblins or other monsters wandering your map on a random regular basis. They're not such a problem, before long your fortress will attract attention not from enemies, but from other dwarves. Depending on how much you send off as trade with the caravans that pass by, the game will start to calculate migrants to show up at your doorstep. You can't say no, you can't send them away again, you just get more dwarves. They each have a random selection of starting skills, typically a few conversation peices to let them interact and one or two related skills of note.

They might not be useful skills, like sope-makers who are trained in something that's not actually implemented yet, but they will have skills, and they'll start work if there's anything to do. Otherwise, it'd be better to assign them to the army.

The army is nessicarry, because once you get about eighty migrants, you run quickly into other things taking notice of you. You'll fall under attack from some of the neighboring groups, often goblins, elves and humans but perhaps even giants, dragons, or zombies. They surround your fortress and simply wait for an opening to attack.

Seiges add an important and interesting aspect to the gameplay, because they forcve you to think of a lot more than just profit when building a fortress. Doors, traps, defendability. They're not too simple, either. Depnding on the type of enemy you're fighting they might come with archers, or be able to smash down doors, or if you're lucky they'll be too heavy for your drawbridge. Once the seiges start, then they keep on showing up regularly until you've been wiped off the map. Sounds fun, huh?

There's another aspect of the game outside of gameplay worth mentioning, dwarven economy. Once you hit a hundred dwarves, dwarven nobles will start showing up, and dwarves will stop acting as an anarchic community and more like a proper city. They'll need to be paid, they'll want to buy things, they'll have mandated items to make/not make and so on. It adds a whole new dynamic to the game when you stop mining new rooms and your miners suddenly can't afford to pay for their rooms and are forced to sleep on the floor.