The NetHack sidescroller production project.

Oh yes, and less mook grinding and cannon fodder, and more Boss Rush. Have it so that if the game finds you grinding mooks, it will send an Elite Mook your way.

ALL CREATURE WILL DIE AND ALL THE THINGS WILL BE BROKEN. THAT'S THE LAW OF SAMURAI.

Possibly something along the lines of Beat 'em Up. This project may result in a whole lot of Genre-Busting.

Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation? Tell me, if you understand. Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know! ~ GOD

A Beat 'em Up Roguelike? That would be an interesting idea...

And I like the Anti-Grinding idea, as it encourages players to not to prey on the weak. Also, would you put a time limit before something bad happens to you, ala Spelunky?

Last Defense Line.

Kinda offtopic, but this Net Hackvania sounds like a beautiful idea.

Everything is better as a Dunkleosteus.

I love the Beat 'em Up idea. Pure brilliance <3

ALL CREATURE WILL DIE AND ALL THE THINGS WILL BE BROKEN. THAT'S THE LAW OF SAMURAI.

Ok, so a Beat 'em Up Roguelike, in the styles of Castlevania, Metal Slug, and Metroid, with Boss Rush and Real-Time with Pause. So far this seems to be a rather unusual breed of Ninja Pirate Robot Zombie formed by pasting together a bunch of epic games. If that's the case, can anyone think of any awesome games to mix in? I can think of a few off the top of my head, since this project is already so over the top, I might as well add some totally random games in for thought...

• Elona: Perhaps the dungeons of doom are in north Tyris or one of the other continents, it kinda makes sense.
• Yume Nikki: Completely out of nowhere.
• Chzo Mythos: I needed something inspired by HP Lovecraft.
• Cave Story
• Metal Gear: Again out of nowhere.
• I Wanna Be The Guy: ...to a limited extent...
• Final Fantasy
• Tou Hou: I haven't the foggiest how this would fit in but... oh well.
• Mugen: Making it possible to easily modify the game would be a plus. (Chuck Norris and Hiroshi Fujioka class, anyone?)

Ninja Pirate Robot Zombies can be awesome when done right.

edited 11th Aug '10 8:30:43 PM by TheMightyAnonym

Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation? Tell me, if you understand. Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know! ~ GOD

...I like the direction this is taking now. It seems to have moved slightly away from nethack and more of its own entity, which is a good thing.

One of my few regrets about being born female is the inability to grow a handlebar mustache. -Landstander

I have had inspiration; here is the model I dreamed up for it's development:

By having the game easily modified, there could be a core version available; from this, people would produce content that the moderators will work on and compile: i.e. someone uploads a patch that adds the beholder as an enemy, and the folks with the necessary permissions will compile it and release it as a new version. How would a setup like that work? Or is there a superior way? And what programming language/piece of software would be best? (Still no gamemaker.)

edited 12th Aug '10 10:25:58 PM by TheMightyAnonym

Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation? Tell me, if you understand. Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know! ~ GOD

It would be workable, but you would be limiting yourself to c/c++ as the engine language with some sort of scripting language such as lua for the mods.

That's good to hear, once I start a thread on tig source I will begin to put this together.

Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation? Tell me, if you understand. Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know! ~ GOD

I'm just one person, but I really dislike the Boss Rush idea. I'm all up for no worthless Mooks, but spending 5 minutes in every room just to kill 1 ant sounds tedious. I like the idea of a medium: Have every room contain a handful of Demonic Spiders or something. If you're not on your game, even 1 can kill you easily. But you won't spend 4 or 5 minutes just to kill a gnome. Nethack was never a boss rush. But that's only my opinion.

I like that. You're saying Demonic Spiders and That One Boss over Metal Slime and a Marathon Boss, eh?

edited 15th Aug '10 10:07:28 PM by Deathonabun

One of my few regrets about being born female is the inability to grow a handlebar mustache. -Landstander

Pretty much. This is a roguelike; most of them have at least 1 enemy/boss that the players curse. Nethack has soldier ants, Crawl has Sigmund... so who will ours be? *evil grin*

^^ I concur. You should probably have a few Death Or Glory attacks too, for both the player and the bosses.

ALL CREATURE WILL DIE AND ALL THE THINGS WILL BE BROKEN. THAT'S THE LAW OF SAMURAI.

Ant Sigmunds.

A whole swarm of them.

We will harvest our player's tears and use them to attain immortality.

One of my few regrets about being born female is the inability to grow a handlebar mustache. -Landstander

^^ Yes. Maybe a bit of Kaizo Trap too; if you give the boss (i'm warming up to the bossrush thing but would still like to keep the fights short-ish) a chance when they're at critical HP they could launch an attack that goes like this: You dodge: You win. You get hit: You die... Do you want your possessions identified?

I can think of a few ways that would work...

Boss attempts to tackle both of you off the stage, boss uses self destruct, boss destroys arena floor and you must jump on to a nearby rope...

One of my few regrets about being born female is the inability to grow a handlebar mustache. -Landstander

On the idea of level structure: I'm thinking a few rooms of Demonic Spiders between each boss, enough so it's not purely bosses, but few enough so you still get plenty of boss action.

Edit: There should be a shop very occasionally though. Of course, Shoplift and Die is in effect. And I think that the simplest form of Anti-Grinding is this: Enemies simply don't respawn.

edited 15th Aug '10 10:55:44 PM by jamosup

How about a boss that shoots bullets that bounce off walls? You'd have to get in some strange crouching positions around platforms to avoid that attack.

Thank you very much.

During the first few levels in Nethack, there aren't that many enemies; and about midway through the game, most enemies (unless called by the RNG) can be defeated by a couple of hits. Even really powerful opponents only take a few attacks to go down. So my thinking is this: the battles are both difficult and very short 10-120 seconds would be the range, also Nethack is more about preparing for battle, so Castlevania-esque exploration and min-maxing will be key, but punctuated by the occasional tough enemy out of nowhere (which will leave the player in a state of utter shock). The latter half of the game is when combat becomes more and more prevalent until a whole lot of demonic spiders cover the screen whilst you rush toward the altar hoping that your hours of gameplay don't go to waste.

edited 16th Aug '10 12:42:48 PM by TheMightyAnonym

Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation? Tell me, if you understand. Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know! ~ GOD

If you still haven't figured out coding, I think I can give some advice. I'm not entirely sure what you plan to do visually, but if you want a cross-platform library, SDL is the way to go. It's available for C, C++, Ruby, Python, Haskell, and just about any other language you can think of. Plus, if needed, it has support for Open GL, which is more complicated, but at the same time is hardware accelerated.

edited 16th Aug '10 2:15:47 PM by thawkins

YOU LOOKED!

If you want openGL support go with SFML. It pushes all the nasty parts of openGL behind a nice c++ interface, with avaliable bindings for c, ruby and python as well. Available on Linux,Windows and Macs. Users will need a graphics card to run SFML.

I think you guys are forgetting what makes Roguelikes great. Yes, give your bosses desperation attacks, but not "Dodge this or die" attacks. Give them "Dodge this or some of your equipment gets trashed" desperation attacks. And give nastier enemies those attacks normally.

As for the super hated enemy, don't try to make one. He'll evolve naturally; just don't axe him once you find him. They aren't all that for the same reason after all—Nethack ants do it via a combination of speed, AC and swarming that leaves few options, while Sigmund possesses very nasty spells before you have good ways to deal with them, and those Yeti from Spelunky just have an attack that's got a good chance of killing you in one mistake and the dart traps are fast, do heavy damage and are and hard to see  ^*

I doubt the writers intended any of those to be the meat grinders they are, but since there are reliable ways to prepare for/cope with each they didn't go back and change things.

((Says the guy who's never once been killed by Sigmund... but has been done in by orc priests more times than he wants to admit despite them being even more beatable.))

PS: I'm now totally picturing Misery as a miniboss, should you take the Massively Multiplayer Crossover route. Maybe hiding behind a pseudonym like "Sorrow" if you don't feel like seeking permission since stealing outright from Pixel would be just plain evil. Certainly, we will be including Sigmund as a boss, though not necessarily a meat grinder boss.

This is sort of mutating into an all out fighting game now, interesting... and as for making it a Massively Multiplayer Crossover, the aforementioned system of working on the core while people make stuff should handle it. Perhaps once it's started, I could put out requests for certain additions to the project?

Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation? Tell me, if you understand. Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know! ~ GOD

Tig source is out the realm of usability for now, every time I try to register it says: "An error has occured". I need to find an alternative, it seems.

Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation? Tell me, if you understand. Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know! ~ GOD