DescentBB

krom wrote:The more I think about it, the more I'm convinced: Variety is bad. Variety is evil. Variety is the natural enemy of balanced core gameplay.

To be honest, this is why I like rogue-like games. Absolutely no (or very little) story, yet the game is perfect because of the gameplay. Every play through is basically the same, but with different experiences due to randomization of rooms, enemies, and pickups. I envision that a "rogue mode" would do great in a Descent game since the gameplay is already awesome and the classic SP is already repetitive. A rogue mode I envision would have multiple randomly generated mines that you would explore just like you would do in D1/D2 then destroy by blowing up a reactor. Each new mine would have it's own color palette. you only get one life and your score is recorded upon death. You would only get a quick save file that deletes when you make another save. When you restart again, you start from scratch. I imagine that this would foster it's own leaderboards as players compete to get high scores...

...all this from a repetitive cycle of awesome gameplay. sure I imagine it would be fun to add a non-competitive "for fun" version in which you can visit certain seeds, tweak some parameters of the game, or even play co-op (for fun or to get a high score).

There's no need, IMO, to add a bunch of bells and whistles to make up for the absence of good gameplay. Just fix the gameplay. Make it stand out in a way that isn't gimmicky. Sure, RPG unlocks and things like that are cool, but once you unlock it all, you'll quickly lose interest (at least I do). Having a rogue mode with no unlockable weapons/perks/powerups/whatever forces players to realize this moodd is purely about skill

Have a look at sub-level-zero on steam. It isn't out yet, but the ludum dare version is great fun. I'll be getting it the instant it's released because it promises just about everything youve mentiined here.

Oh yeah, I'm aware of that. In fact, I made a thread about it in the "Other 6DoF efforts" forum. I'm just saying as an additional feature in full descent release that would be cool.

sdfgeoff wrote:Have a look at sub-level-zero on steam. It isn't out yet, but the ludum dare version is great fun. I'll be getting it the instant it's released because it promises just about everything youve mentiined here.

Where do you get the ludum dare version?
I want to give it a try.

I don't think variety is bad itself for games because it keeps things from getting boring, but I think a lot of games today try to put too much variety into their singleplayer and end up with a disconnected mess. The type of variety that's done well looks like Descent 3 Mercenary (not so much the main campaign) or one of the Half-Life games... you need to have a framework so the game makes sense and can be balanced. Once you have that, then you go outside of it a little bit at a time, and make sure you go back into it before you go outside it again.

About half-way down this page:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/225 ... index.html

Thx

I've played it... and I'm so buying the full game. I can't stop!

I actually have one of the developers on my Twitter and Skype. He's totally cool XD he's really good with answering my questions about the game as he is curious about SolC.

Well, let him know that usother descenters like his game....

Lol I'll just send him a link here lol