Dungeon Master
Posts: 1531
Joined: Saturday, 5th March 2011, 06:29
Demigods feedback and help wanted!
Since there was a lot of support for the idea (in the Implementables thread) from Tavern posters, I thought it might be useful to brainstorm here: particularly for minion names, but also theme ideas in general, for these minions. Obviously there's an obvious theme for some gods; but others (Xom? Nemelex?) are a bit harder. And it'd be nice to come up with various random naming schemes for different races and gods.
For reference:
Wiki Discussion - https://crawl.develz.org/wiki/doku.php?id=dcss:brainstorm:species:demigod
Mantis Item - https://crawl.develz.org/mantis/view.php?id=3046
Gods - Zin, TSO, Kiku, Yred, Xom, Vehumet, Okawaru, Makhleb, Sif, Nemelex, Ely, Fedhas, Chei, Ash
Names:
Currently, Crawl has two ways that it generates random names for monsters. The first (make_name) is used for Pan Lords, unidentified scrolls, and a few other things. The second (give_monster_proper_name) is right now used exclusively for Beogh-blessed orcs. Actually, it's a very extensible text file system (same as randart names, etc.) - you can see the current version here: http://gitorious.org/crawl/crawl/blobs/master/crawl-ref/source/dat/database/monname.txt. As you can see, it only includes orc names at this time.
My idea for making the minion names somewhat distinctive is to start adding new races to monname.txt; it can be used for those races, falling back to the random name generator if a particular race isn't found.
Rather than this effort benefiting Demigod players only, it might have other uses. Actually, give_monster_proper_name is already used for certain monsters in Zot Defence, so this will be immediately noticable there. It'd also be possible to make the function available in Lua, so a vault designer could use it to generate a name for a special monster in a god-themed vault (maybe the entire minion generator). Maybe it could be used to roll random names when you start a new game (these are just ideas).
Certain races might have templates for their names, which can be job-customised, e.g.: @human_forename@ @human_surname_hunter@ - Derek Ratcatcher, Jo Yaktrapper.
The more names we have, the better - we don't want them repeating too often!
Minions:
Minions will largely be player races and backgrounds, with appropriate themes for their gods. Kiku sends necromancers, liches; Sif sends wizards; Trog sends ogres and giants; Fedhas sends centaur hunters (or perhaps wandering mushrooms); etc. The wiki discussion has a pretty thorough list - there's enough to be getting on with and have distinct classes of worshipper for the gods, but I'd love to hear any more specific ideas or themes.
They need to scale right up from something appropriate to a low-level character, to something that could still present a challenge to an XL:27 player who just got the Orb. The minion code can handle scaling HD, HP, etc. but it'd be nice to have some more ideas about appropriate ways to scale the threat.
Something to bear in mind; these are semi-uniques, not uniques; they can have the same abilities as existing players, monsters, gods - nothing unique or new. I'm thinking about using randomised player dolls for the tiles, perhaps recolouring some existing ones; if any graphics artists have any good ideas, that would be welcome, but I think properly unique tiles are best reserved for actual uniques.
Minion Speech:
Using monster speech text files, we can give different gods' minions lines to randomly shout out. This is how existing Crawl speech works; and you can have different messages for different statuses (confused, frightened, casting a spell, etc.) For Nemelex minions we can have have "The foo draws a card..." (where you'd normally see messages like 'The monster's eyes start to glow").
The speech file already has god-specific dialogue I can use - but actually it's not hugely varied, so this is somewhere else where a few new ideas couldn't hurt. Also certain gods are currently omitted from this.
God Speech:
Finally, we need lines of dialogue for the gods to announce when they've sent a minion to defeat you! They might also have something to say when you either kill the minion or run away (other gods might comment on such things also; e.g. gods taunting each other on failures). They can even comment and taunt you throughout the fight.
Thanks for any contributions!
- For this message the author mumra has received thanks: 3
- dassem, TehDruid, Yet Another Stupid Noob