Dungeon Master
Posts: 162
Joined: Sunday, 29th May 2011, 10:18
Abyss Redecorating
1. Provide an exit/stairs based on how much the player has explored. As the player sees new tiles, the counter decrements. When it hits zero, stairs appear when an unseen square enters LOS. My goal here is to reduce the variance in the time to exit the abyss. Currently Abyssal exits make up 1 in 7500 tiles on Abyss:1. This is basically sampling from a Poisson distribution, which has a high variance and should lead to some excruciatingly long trips to the abyss.
2. Convert the lower branches into dedicated rune vault levels. There's currently no reason to go to Abyss:5. I would strongly prefer to create a single instance of a rune vault and have it appear repeatedly as the player wander. The frequency with which the vault appeared would increase with level. As the player goes deeper, the vault would appear with greater frequency. Abyss:3 might have 200-tiles between vaults (these are just off the top of my head), while Abyss:5 could have an average spacing of 80-tiles.
3. Expel the players from the Abyss once the rune is taken. This will requiring revisiting vault design.