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Ideas to make DoomRL even faster and furious'er

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Kornel Kisielewicz:
Ok, I've followed this thread for some time, and yeah, it got nasty :). I'd like to remind people here, that DoomRL's *main* objective is to create a *fun* experience for *everybody*. The difficulty system is in place exactly for that purpose -- so die-hard players can challenge the Nightmare, while casual players can enjoy the ITYTD smooth gameplay.

That said, the differences between the difficulties will get more noticable in the subsequent (and DRL2) release. My aim is to (and I know not everyone will like it) provide a different experience on different levels of difficulty -- up to the possibility of streamlining the mechanics on ITYTD and HNTR. This will be especially noticeable in DRL2, but also DRL1 will get some of that as a staging area. Stay tuned. And, addressing the ideas in the first (and some subsequent) posts, this might appear as an option/default on lower difficulties. Nightmare gameplay (and probably UV) assumes you know what you are doing, and nothing will change here. Except that I might push it even more forward, by removing some of the prompts.

Now, I'll experimentally reopen this thread, but please keep the discussion free from personal attacks. Everyone has their way of playing DoomRL, and everyone's way is different, but by no means less valid. I won ITYTD twice, and *once* HNTR. Seriously. Still, I consider myself a hardcore gamer, who in the day won UFO: Enemy Unknown on Superhuman using Save/Load only to take breaks. One may seek hardcore play in DoomRL which doesn't make him enjoy "press X to dodge!" anyway less. And on the opposite, one may play Dwarf Fortress every day, but seek a fast and light experience in DoomRL instead of careful N! Diamond hunting. Anything goes, and everyone is welcome.

And as far as it is possible, I'd like to accommodate both extremes of the experience in this game. And I welcome any ideas to do so -- just keep in mind that any changes need not to detoriate the experience for the other end of the spectrum.

Play nice, write nice.

Matt_S:

--- Quote from: Kornel Kisielewicz on April 01, 2012, 07:50 ---And, addressing the ideas in the first (and some subsequent) posts, this might appear as an option/default on lower difficulties. Nightmare gameplay (and probably UV) assumes you know what you are doing, and nothing will change here. Except that I might push it even more forward, by removing some of the prompts.

--- End quote ---
While I would welcome improvements, I believe making it difficulty-based is really a step in the wrong direction.

It shows where our ultimate disagreement lies: you accept that punishing the player for inadvertent actions is part of difficulty, and I think difficulty should be from requiring important decisions.  My idea isn't to stop players who want to walk onto acid from doing so because they might not know it's dangerous.  I want to let players tell the game, "I know there's some acid pools lying around, and I just want to walk around without melting, without wasting more time than necessary."

It may not seem like a lot of time, but I'd say for someone like me who already plays slowly, having to take that extra time to check the screen for enemies, see where all the dangerous fluid is, and check what keys my fingers are on, could probably add half an hour to my play time for a win.  And I think that's a conservative estimate, based off my time when I rushed through a game on ITYTD compared to when I would take it slowly; it might be as high as an hour on higher difficulties where I would have to be careful for longer before clearing a floor.  That's an extra half hour of me just looking around before either proceeding to do what I already wanted to do (the most common result) or noticing something dangerous (the much rarer, but admittedly much more important result).

The best way to summarize my position is this: if I make a list of reasons why the diamond hunters are awesome players, "they don't accidentally walk into lava sometimes" won't appear.  I don't think that's the sort of skill that people work hard for.

raekuul:
Yes, but take a look at how long the diamond hunters spend on a game with a diamond. They. Don't. Rush. They take their time and observe. From what I've read of the thread thus far, the main complaint I've been able to gather is that some people equate "Fast and Furious" with "Safely Ignore Environment." You can't do that in any game, because that gets you walking into an Arch-Vile crowd/flying into the Eiffel Tower/running face-first into Bowser.

Having said that, compared to every other Roguelike out there, DoomRL *is* fast and furious. No, it's not perfect - it won't be until 1.0 has gone Gold Platinum Diamond - and there are problems with the interface. But here's the thing. The interface appears to be low-priority in comparison to the actual engine. Improvements to how Run works, Safety Mode, Keyboard-Pathing... Yes, those are all nice things to have, but (1) we've all been playing well enough without them, (2) it's still much better nowadays than when I first discovered this place back in 2008, and (3) there are more important things to fix, such as applying damage from explosions before calculating knockback (this was an issue in 0.9.9.5, but I haven't deliberately checked to see if it's been fixed yet - and that's really neither here nor there anyway).

Matt_S:
I don't consider myself to be someone who rushes.  I routinely take 2.5-3 hours to finish a game, when I see some people finishing with the same feats in half the time.

Murkglow:

--- Quote from: Matt_S on April 01, 2012, 11:36 ---The best way to summarize my position is this: if I make a list of reasons why the diamond hunters are awesome players, "they don't accidentally walk into lava sometimes" won't appear.  I don't think that's the sort of skill that people work hard for.
--- End quote ---

Actually yes I do think it would be though likely in the form of "paying attention to their environment and not rushing."  I've read a number of posts talking about how the player saved the game and took a break from it to help keep themselves from becoming impatient and making mistakes during runs (which is exactly the kind of thing talked about in this thread, being impatient and making foolish mistakes).  And again we're back to differing opinions on what makes a game (which is a far cry from the interface needing to be "fixed" which is something that was said a number of times here).

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