*Finally* finished, and it hit the ticalc.org archives today:

http://www.ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/452/45229.html

I'm rather eager to see if anyone will beat it without cheating in some form or another. I myself have gotten to the final boss but have yet to actually kill him without cheating (but it can be done). I'm just miserable at planning ahead and tend to spaz out when I get surrounded by baddies

Hopefully, at least *someone* out there will enjoy it

This should be featured on TICalc.org o.o I almost emailed Ryan Boyd before I realised who it was >.>

I'll have to send that lazy news editor a strongly worded e-mail, ensuring that Chambers goes down in history as the greatest achievement since the space program

I tried out Chambers, and I like it. I really like how it sucks you in quickly and has a very obvious flow to it, not to mention your grayscale sprites for everything. I do have a few suggestions for the game, though:

- I would LOVE to have a Quicksave feature, a la Phoenix (press a key to save your game and quit the program, and come right back to it later).
- The Flare / Darkness mechanic is nice - you should keep it. However, since the Flare takes up one of your five precious inventory spaces, it should also do something else. Perhaps the flare could be a "disenchanter" that also gets rid of the toxic gas (which there is currently no defense against).
- Holybomb is too weak - I often find that the monsters next to me (the ones I wanted to kill with the Holybomb) don't die like I want them to. Perhaps the chance of destruction should be 100% to adjacent monsters and decrease with distance (P = 1/d, where d is Manhattan distance)
- Teleporter's animation is too long, and considering as you only have five items in your inventory, it should always work. In fact, it should be a safe teleport like BSD Robots (not adjacent to any monster if possible)
- Berserker is a nice weapon - and I like the inversion of the gray buffer you use to create the effect. Keep it as it is.
- Strength Up is also nice, although I don't know how useful it is because I don't know how far I am from the next level - a gauge on the bottom right might help.
- Medkit works wonders, although I noticed that you can keep using them indefinitely, past the HP you got from level up. When you level up, does it automatically set your health to some value, or does it accept the higher value if it exists?
- It is not immediately apparent that you have to kick container several times to open it. Perhaps they break immediately in the first room?

But overall, great job on this. I sure hope it gets featured!

Thanks!

I'll address each of your points in order:

-The reason that I didn't mess around with implementing a quicksave is mainly because it's such a fast-moving gaming. Deaths come very quickly, and victories can take a bit longer. It is certainly something that I have been kicking around with implementing, however, and may be added later.

-I completely agree, which is why the flare *does* do something else. But it's a secret (you're on the right track with the "disenchanter" idea...)

-That's not a bad idea, actually. I went for a straight-forward randomness for the sake of simplicity, but I like your idea better.

-Thanks on the bezerker

-The lack of knowing how close you are to the next level is intentional. That means that using a Strength Up item takes some careful weighing of attention before using. It's good to use in a pinch when no other options are available, as well as using *immediately* after gaining a level through battle to kind of piggypack off of the victory and slingshot yourself up a bit without worrying about throwing away EXP

-This is true with the medkits. I definitely have taken great advantage of the "no cap on medkits" feature to kind of buffer up when I enter a room with a lot of baddies. When you level up, it does set your health to a set value, although if your health is greater than this value, you keep your "boosted" health

-I had played with different options with the container. I agree that it might not be obvious to some people that you should keep kicking it to bust it open. I opted for the "more work at the beginning" for two reasons. 1) The easier opening later in the game implicitly reflects that your character has grown stronger and 2) Since the earliest rooms in the game are scaled back, I wanted people to have to do a bit more planning around containers over just cracking them open to get the sweet, sweet candy inside. I have actually died in earlier levels a few times from getting greedy and going for the containers at the negligence of eliminating nearby enemies, and I felt that this is a decent way to convey this. I do think that perhaps some text reflecting that the player should "keep trying" is appropriate though, and I appreciate the suggestion.

I forgot to add, about the toxic gas rooms...

One of the items *does* reduce the damage dealt in the toxic gas rooms, but that's a secret too

At one stage, I had made the flare "ignite" the gas, dealing damage to anything in a "fire" space as well as destroying the gas, but removed it since I did not want to make the flare overly valuable as an item and did not want to add a separate item just for this purpose. I found that when this was the case, there was an over-reliance on keeping at least 2 flares in inventory (1 to use at a moment's notice, and another "just in case" flare), and it really broke the flow of the game and inventory management.

Thanks for commenting on that. I understand about the quicksave, strength up, medkits, and container. I think it would help to have some explanatory text in the readme saying that some of these items have secret functions (of course not saying which ones!). And about the holybombs, I think they should also open containers as well in a similar way, not just kill monsters.

And something else I should mention: don't double post within 24 hours of yourself. If you want to add more to a post before then, edit it.

Yeah, I think that I'll add something to the readme encouraging some exploration. Ultimately, I want learning to occur through experience and sharing of information as opposed to handing information over to the player.

I definitely want the holybombs to destroy, making their application necessarily used for either strategy or necessity. They do have a 50/50 chance of destroying containers, as well as items on the ground, when used. I have ended up in multiple situations where I *really* needed containers to have an item in them, but ended up having to use holybombs in order to save my skin, destroying things that I wanted/needed in the process. Definitely served to successfully create some "NOOOO!" situations.

I also forgot to address the point about the teleporters earlier. I do think that the animation is longer than necessary and will probably shorten it up at some point. I had also toyed with this being something where you could *choose* your destination point and you could telefrag, but this too made it overly valuable in the game. It's another one of those "hold onto it in case I *really* need it" kind of items that just might save you or ruin you. In the hundreds of times that I've used it, I think that it has only failed to teleport me *maybe* three times.

Definitely do that. And I agree that most of the learning in this game should be done by exploration - definitely increases the game's replay value. Another thing that really helps replay value is that a single game tends to last 2 or 3 minutes.


I can see that - destroying containers and items. Also, about the holybomb, I don't like how it shares animations with death. If you implement the destruction scheme I suggested, I'd suggest making the animation an expanding diamond that highlights each of the affected spaces in turn - starting from Manhattan Distance of 1 and continuing out - and applying the destruction on each draw of the box instead of all at once. Does that make sense?


Perhaps you could draw more of the Serpinski Triangle per frame so that the animation only takes up a third of the present time. I definitely agree that choosing your destination point would be too powerful, but I also think that it should always be safe to teleport if possible (i.e. it won't teleport you to a spot adjacent to a monster).

An easier way you could implement quicksave is a la Super Mario: when ON is pressed, you switch off the screen (using the LCD Axiom) and put the calc in a low power state that waits for the ON key, after which you turn the screen back on again and resume as before.

EDIT: Something else I observed while I was playing: the variance on monster attacks seems too high: for instance, a monster might do 1 damage on its first attack and then immediately follow up with 12 damage. In fact, the whole experience of thinking you're good on health and then immediately getting killed is just too much of a downer, especially if you had a good run earlier. I think it would be nice if you could only get killed when you were at 1 HP - if you start a turn with more than 1 HP, the lowest you can go during the round is 1 HP. That way, you know exactly when you need to act to save your skin.

Also, something else I noticed playablility wise is that the weakest demons (btw, do you have names for these things?) look too much like the player, and I often confuse them for myself when I try to move. Perhaps the weakest demons should have some grey on them like all the other ones do?

There is an updated version waiting in the archival queue at ticalc.org with a faster Sierpinski triangle animation that goes for maybe 2 seconds now, along with an item feature that I had switched off in testing and forgotten to reenable in its release version.

I lean somewhat heavily on the holybomb animation for a few reasons. The most important one: I like it... a lot. It succinctly and implicitly signals dissolution and entropy -- destruction. Playtesters understood it immediately and there was no confusion about what was going on when the bomb was used, or after the first death. It also was (obviously) very easy to recycle it for multiple uses, saving on the space necessary for alternative animation routines, etc.

The distribution of monster attacks is, both within and between monsters, positively skewed in shape, increasing in skew as monster level goes up (which is hidden, even within monsters). This was carefully constructed and the numbers were played out in multiple distribution bootstrapping techniques as well as with playtesters . It's exactly where I want it and why. Again, learning happens through experience. Encountering a new monster means that you're not sure what its upper bound is. Through multiple plays, you start to get an intuitive feel (implicit learning, especially with such short plays) for what the general damage dealt by any monster is going to be. You also learn quickly which monsters are going to be more likely to wallop you with a powerful hit. The distribution of monster attack damage of any given type actually is rather parallel to that of your own character (not considering special circumstances). You are just as likely to wallop an equally powerful monster as it is likely to wallop you. This also means that for greater likelihoods of success, care must go into whether or not you're going to take on a monster of any given type, especially after you've started to learn which ones can really sock it to you. There are a couple of exceptions, which can be learned through playing repeatedly and taking note of patterns that emerge. The patterns shift a bit due to other randomization factors, but there are well-established systematic bounds to the entire battle architecture; it's not just a simple "randbetween" setup. Monsters of the same type may vary slightly by level and HP, but you can always rely upon the positive skew. Again, the degree of skew (ranging from about +.25 to slightly under +1, e.g., "little" to "considerable" skew) is shifting based upon certain generation numbers, but has a pattern if plotted out across dozens, hundreds, and up to hundreds of thousands of trials.

Many of your suggestions are quite good but, in my opinion, would apply better to a game designed with a goal more along the lines of a more linear progression. Chambers is a tiny package, meaning that there are necessarily more extremes in a smaller space (lot of ups and downs) in the range of battle outcomes. In my personal playtesting and having others playtest, I had included a debug option that allowed a full-blown "retry this room" once per room. This was highly useful for showing non-roguelikers that 90% of the time, they were dying as a result of their *choices* rather than the game simply being stacked against them. That is to say, however, that sometimes the game will simply be stacked against you and victory will be nearly, if not entirely, impossible. I won't lie to you or to myself by pretending that my number systems are "perfect" and that there are enough checks and balances to have everything be expertly tuned on every single playthrough. Based upon the nature of the game, it is possible that you may experience a few sequential playthroughs that are just plain cruel. For every string of those game generations, however, there will be three times as many that are, generally speaking, balanced within the guidelines that I strove to accomplish.

Many of your suggestions would, in my opinion, make the game significantly easier to complete, which runs against my goal in making this game. The victory condition(s) is difficult to accomplish, and the game itself is very carefully designed to reward those who play enough to learn when and where to pick their battles. Running away and carefully consuming specific items are sometimes (and later in the game, very often) the best options.

It's certainly a steep difficulty curve, and the game is most certainly not for everyone. It's a game that takes a certain degree of dedication to start reaping benefits, and there are going to be those times where the player just gets flat-out slaughtered. I'm alright with this

I do like your ideas about the holybomb and quicksave and, when motivated and in possessorship of some free time, will consider implementing them. There are a *lot* of other ideas that didn't make the final cut in the game thus far, so time will tell. At this point, and when I eventually do have time to pick it all back up, I'll have to decide whether to try to cram even more features into Chambers or start on a new project based upon some of the other ideas that I've been tinkering with.

That being said, a difficulty setting of some sort might be nice for those of us with very little rougelike experience--this game is tough.