Crypt Cleanser
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Joined: Saturday, 12th December 2015, 23:54
Clock Brainstorming Thread
The previous system added time to the clock by pressing E while you had food items in your inventory. This sucks for interface reasons, but the underlying idea, explore to find an item that adds time to the clock, is actually fine. The item should be goldified and not involve player interaction; there is no need to feed the meter. You have to regulate the number of items that spawn pretty closely because you want each game to have about the same amount of time, not only as a whole, but to clear each section. One option is to cut out a step and tie adding time directly to exploration. You could also use xp, but that has scaling problems. XP per monster varies by three orders of magnitude throughout the game, and it's not trivial to normalize that into a clock that makes sense. For any clock that adds time as the game goes on, you need to be careful about how much time the player starts with and how big the 'chunks' are. Bigger chunks make it easier to scum the hard part of the game and then go a little faster later on, and it's harder for less experienced players to budget a large chunk of turns. Clocks that start you with all your time and just run down are not good for an overarching all-game clock.
DCSS used to have a per-floor clock as well (the OOD timer). Clocks that are active over one floor or one branch of the game prevent the player from accumulating a lot of extra time early and then using it to scum later, but given the DCSS difficulty curve I'm not as concerned about that as I am the ability to scum the earlygame. There are some pretty big drawbacks to a single floor clock in a game that permits backtracking, so if you're not going to bite the bullet on linearizing the dungeon then you have to work around those drawbacks somehow. Capping the maximum time you can add onto an all-game clock is a really bad idea for obvious reasons.
The food clock killed you when time ran out. A new clock doesn't have to do that. It could instead apply an increasing penalty (rot, skill drain, dangerous summoned monsters spawning) once time is up, which would make the player either temporarily weaker until the penalty is worked off or permanently weaker. Penalty clocks like this tend to be more intrusive for normal play, assuming they have any teeth at all, and could lead to "death spiral" scenarios where you can't win the game anymore because you're too weak but the game doesn't have the decency to just kill you. On the other hand, not dying instantly from taking too long might be desirable if the clock is intended to affect normal play.
The food clock generally didn't affect normal play very much, aside from the brief stint of chunkless crawl before doubled rations. I believe that dev consensus is to avoid putting much pressure on normal, non-scumming play. A new clock will not be able to address luring unless it reaches speedrun levels of forcing players to go fast; luring is often net-positive for turncount over not luring because you take less damage. Time pressure on normal play could make the game significantly harder, at the expense of making players do annoying things because the game is harder (not autoexploring, carefully planning their shopping trips, trying to minimize damage against trivial monsters). But if you want crawl to be hard, then a more aggressive clock is one way to get there.
So here are some more fleshed out clock options:
Bring back a "foodlike" clock but apply it to all species.
You can flavor the clock and items in such a way that it makes sense to apply to mummies; maybe you need to charge up a fragment of Zot or the dungeon will violently expel you or whatever, I don't write the lore. Has a lot going for it in terms of simplicity and ease of understanding, and to be frank I don't think it's that bad of an option as long as you goldify/automate and regulate the number of items dropped.
Tie the clock directly to exploration.
Pleasingfungus has a design doc for this that increases the clock with exploration and penalizes the player via rot when they take too long, though of course you could use a different penalty or just kill them. This loses something in terms of simplicity and understandability (why does revealing tiles make number bigger?) but has an even better interface than goldified food since you don't even have to pick shit up. You could even tie the clock directly to entering new floors. That might encourage weird diving strats but could probably be made more understandable, and provides very regular chunks of turns throughout the game.
Bring back OOD spawns.
So in order for this to work, the spawns need to be durable summons (so you can't scum them) and they actually need to be dangerous. Ideally it'd be easier to learn about than the old ood timer, too. The old version of OOD spawns managed to prevent scumming early D, and it wouldn't be too hard to extend to other branches. However, you do have to do something about the other problems of per-floor clocks in a game with backtracking.
Merge hellcrawl into master.
If you eliminate backtracking, then a clock that resets on every floor can work just fine. Floors take variable amounts of time to clear, so it's by no means perfect, but it's pretty functional. Hellcrawl's worked by spawning a bunch of very nasty durable summons every ~20 turns after 3000 turns elapsed. I might simplify it these days. Naturally, you could use some other gradual penalty instead and can freely adjust the turn limit to whatever you want it to be. 6000 turns wouldn't pressure normal play on any floor. I 100% don't expect this to happen because the amount of work involved to remove backtracking is very large and it's a more significant change to DCSS than anything that's happened in like 15 versions.
That's the end of my clock post; feel free to post about clocks here.
- For this message the author Hellmonk has received thanks:
- Octopode-monk-of-XOM