Yesterday I was worried we might have to cancel the contest because there were only two entries. We finished with
twenty-one. These are listed below in a random order, for which I used the website random.org.
Standard voting rules apply. Contestants are encouraged to vote 10 for their own entries as it makes the contest fairer if everyone does this. Remember that you are voting for how
awful the requested features are (the more awful, the better) and how
entertaining are both the requests themselves and their presentation. Voting is open until 2am GMT, 22 January.
* * *
#1 Player role: floor tile
This entry consisted of the above text alone.
#2 Nazgul
Nazgul - a sort of Wraithwing king. Like a Roach queen, the Nazgul does exactly the opposite of what a WW would do in his current situation. So, if he's more than 5 squares away from Beethro, he flys away, but if he's within 5 squares of Beethro, he attacks. When there are other WWs or Nazgul closer to Beethro, he will take them into account just like a WW, but then do the opposite. Every 30 moves, he spawns new WWs over any pit that is adjacent to him (like a roach queen laying eggs, but he only lays new WWs over pits)
#3 Puppet
Preplaced on a room tile. When the player touches it, they link the puppet to a monster, using a similar interface to placing a mimic.
When the puppet is destroyed, either through sword stab, explosion, falling, etc., the linked entity also dies.
Destroying a puppet that is not linked to anything has no special effect.
Variant
* You can use your body or sword (with non direct thrusts) to push the puppet around.
#4 Backwards Serpents
These look just like regular serpents and have identical movement preferences, and die when caught in a dead end
EXCEPT
the head and tail of the serpent are swapped
and they move backwards (i.e. in the direction of what originally was the tail).
Puzzle Potential: I don't know really. Makes a change from 1x1 monsters, I guess.
(Fully backwards compatible with earlier versions of DROD).
#5 Hunger
Thorough the series it is often implied that Smitemaster utilize the dead corpses of all the monsters after completing the job, in Beethro's case to start a restaurant. It is never mentioned how Smitemasters spend the lengthy amounts of time in holds and not die of hunger but we can easily guess they eat the monsters' cadavers.
I propose to include this in the game mechanics in the following ways:
- Beethro, or any other character, will have their hunger tracked. Hunger track is not reset on room exit, it is like scripting variables, global to the whole hold.
- If hunger track gets down to 0 you die permanently. You need to restore your progress to continue playing.
- Each player role has different hunger track limits, so Beethro can stay alive longer without eating than Citizen.
- It is important to set the hunger track limits to reasonable levels to not break backwards compatibility. This will require a considerable effort to replay all of the holds, but is worth it.
- The hunger track is restored partially each time any monster is killed.
This mechanic adds a new strategical dimension to DROD, something never before heard of. It forces the player to not only carefully wage each puzzle, but also each move wherever they go requiring them to keep in mind their future plans for hold completion.
#6 A Horrible Feature Request
A Horrible Feature Request
TO ALL WHOM ARE CONCERNED,
Imperial (Architects') reports state that a new type of creature has been discovered. Is a monster that, moves like a goblin, explodes every 5 turns, dropping its self, on the 8 surrounding 5' X 5' tiles. If the 'explosion' is blocked, blocked tiles (Walls, Pit, Water, etc.) will turn into standard floor. They are unaffected by Decoys, Brains, Briar, Hot Tiles, and Explosions. Their only weaknesses are Swords, and Pitfalls, for they cannot fly, nor swim. It should also be noted that Guards and Stalwarts are ignored by these creatures, and vice-versa. Its prime objective is the delver himself.
The monster was most probably made by people who were on drugs. These include Labrat(s), Philosopher(s), Unka Beethro, Archivist(s), Receptionist(s), Imperial Student(s), Census Technician(s), and The Caravel Team.
Most recent investigations have shown that this is most likely the work of Artist students, working with Biologists. Correctional action to happen soon.
SIX HUNDRED FIFTY-FOURTH INFORMATION RELAYER
#7 Beefro
The fact that you play the whole game with only one character, with one skin color, one hair color, one sex and one haircut is, to simply put it, politically incorrect. It's like glorifying only one person type and saying "
Look, that's how hero *has to* look, if you're different, well, bad for you!"
.
To accommodate for that, there should be an option to play a black-haired, afro female Beefro with non-gray skin. Also, to forfeit from propagating negative social roles, Beefro should conquer the monsters using the power of love, happiness and equality, where monsters don't die and instead join you in the quest of spreading love.
It's *absolutely necessary* for each and every room in each and every hold to not-only be completable by either of the characters, but also Beefro should solve them MUCH faster, so both adult and young players know that no matter what your skin color is, no matter what your sex is, your hair color or haircut, you can be a hero and the power of love is stronger than brutal force.
The submitter of this entry requested this link to be included "to the original inspiration, as credit has to be given when due".
#8 Murderous Moss
After a particularly nasty tar-stuff clean up, many of the Empire's lead researchers in this kind of stuff decided some thing must be done. About cleaning difficulty. Splicing a slightly uncommon underground moss with a oddly flammable flower, some malevolent minerals and adding just a touch of that blasted Briar, a new tar-like organism was created, and promptly put to use. All involved were demoted once this new plant escaped to every crack in the Empire. Rumors of involvement by corrupt Gardeners are now under investigation.
Murderous Moss is a type of tar-stuff, in a manner of speaking. However, it grows much more rapidly. Once every five turns, to be precise. Luckily, while it grows at rate illegal on most roads, it can be cut anywhere, and it must be directly connected to a Moss Mother to grow. Of course, it has a nasty tendency to creep into broken Golems and reanimate them as Moss Golems. Black Doors wait for Moss to be cleared before opening.
Moss babies are dumb like Gel babies, and can also reanimate Golems to create Moss Golems.
Moss is also highly flammable, which is its only redeeming feature. A Moss mass hit by and explosion will rapidly combust, burning up all connected moss. Any squares with moss on all four sides will also be affected by an explosion. Since plants don't have brains, moss will happily grow onto hot tiles, which will ignite it, unless a Brain is in the room. Aumtlich beams also ignite Moss.
Moss dropped into water will break up into Moss babies, which can float. Moss killed in shallow water will leave a Moss Patch, which takes five turns to grow into a Moss baby.
Moss babies are also be killed by hot tiles, but the Golem part of a Moss Golem will be unharmed, and the Golem will active move towards any hot tiles in a four tile radius.
Since a rolling stone gathers no Moss, Rock Giants have decided that they are sort of rolling and kind of stones, and as such can destroy Moss by moving through it. Regular Golems lack the mental power required to link rocks to stones, and rolling to movement. Moss Golems are partially controled by Moss, and will therefore not crush Moss.
Due to DNA type reasons Briar that grows onto Moss will mature instantly. Fun times.
Since Moss is a dumb plant, it will grow even when the player is invisible.
Moss that attempts to reanimate a Construct will simply be ground by the moving parts.
Finally, Moss isn't good eating. Adders will stop for a turn eating moss, like anything with a sense of taste. All other monsters which have a nose or sense of smell will not move directly next to Moss unless no other move can be made.
Moss Golems are just like Golems, except they are kind of greenish.
We now apologies if Moss no longer seems like a word.
#9 The double edged sword.
This weapon lets the player have a sword pointed both in front of them and behind them. But true to the namesake, it has some nasty downsides.
Since this double edged sword is so unwieldy, it takes twice as long to rotate the sword. So a haste potion sword rotation would essentially take as long as a normal sword rotation without a haste potion in effect.
It also cannot go onto walls or obstacles such as rock golem remains. This can sometimes be advantageous, since this lets the wielder quickly turn the double edged sword, rather than taking twice as long.
So imagine the sword's 'front' blade is pointed northwest(and the other blade southeast, of course). Moving north where the sword's new position is blocked would result in the 'front' blade pointed west, with the 'rear' blade pointed east. If, however, either the west or east squares of the new position are blocked, the player is prevented from moving north in this instance.
This also means that when faced with a one tile wide corridor, the player must either face forwards or backwards in order to go through it.
But what if the player tries to directly run into a wall? Due to the unwieldiness of the double edged sword, it results in death. So if one blade was pointed north, running north into a wall/obstacle would be deadly. This particular downside is also shared with an earlier prototype of the double edged sword, a sword designed to be held by the tip of the blade, created due to the misunderstanding of a request for a 'backwards blade'.
#10 Portable teleporter
(see picture)
#11 The Vat Thing
One of the most longstanding rumors in The Empire tells of a mysterious being lurking in the deepest pits of the Beneath. The most common retelling of the story describes a creature who keeps on watch for someone they find interesting, and when it does find one, it calls out in a booming voice that echoes across the walls of whatever cavern it decides to make its presence known in. Supposedly, nobody has ever seen this creature, though each new Gossiper who passes it along tries to embellish it with their own interpretation of the creature's appearance, ranging from the mundane to the grotesque to the otherworldly.
Most citizens of the Empire dismissed these tales as the ravings of paranoid delvers or senile old men who had spent too much time in some of the darker recesses of the beneath, but one day 23rd Chemist claimed he had been called upon by 'The Pit Thing'. From that day forward, his entire demeanor changed; he neglected his duties and locked himself away in a long-abandoned section of the Holding Vats.
After a long time had passed and the memories of 23rd Chemist had faded in all who knew him, several builders were sent by 1st Archivist to inspect and report on the condition of all of the Holding Vats. When they destroyed the door to the area 23rd Chemist had locked himself in, they were shocked by the sight of hundreds of shattered vats and trails of slime everywhere. The bravest of them decided to venture into this forboding environment, only to find his progress slowed by the sticky slime on the ground, far stickier than the concoctions that had spilled over earlier in their inspections. As soon as he was out of sight, he let off a bloodcurdling shriek and a giant moth appeared in the doorway and chased the remaining builders out of the area.
When a team of Slayers was sent to inspect the area, they found nothing but the following manifesto from 23rd Chemist:
"
'Vat Thing' Design and Documentation
"
The Vat Thing is made in the image of my interpretation of the Pit Thing and is the nemesis of anything that gets in its way.
"
It camouflages itself depending on the environment it is in and the lightining and as such it is nearly impossible to notice any distinguishing physical characteristics. This is perhaps fortunate because whenever a human looks directly at one it will become fully visible and scare them into a petrified state until the Vat Thing moves out of their line of sight. The one time I experienced this, I happened to catch glimpses of what looked like tentacles writhing in every direction.
"
When the Vat Thing moves it leaves a trail of incredibly sticky slime behind it that vanishes fairly quickly but will prevent anything caught in it from doing anything other than rotate in place before it dissipates. This is the best way to track its movements, which appear to be somewhat random although they seem to be drawn to things that move.
"
Every so often it will spawn several giant moths which seem to alternate between the orthogonal positions and the diagonal positions. The speed of this process is about the same as a tarstuff mother's attempts at expansion. The moths will move straight in the direction they were spawned until they strike something. Anything they strike and anything underneath will turn into mothingness, or a bottomless pit for those not familiar with the canon. This will even work on held weapons, though for some reason it will fail to work on walls, doors, or obstacles.
"
If the Vat Thing moves into a pit, it will disappear completely and randomly destroy any creature on a trapdoor or platform hanging over a pit (destroying the trapdoor or platform segment in the process), or simply flying above the pit, one at a time. Actually, that's not entirely true, it will first destroy every Wraithwing in the room regardless of position one by one because like me, it must hate anything more random than itself. On the other hand, it seems to avoid water at all costs. After it has eliminated any of its possible prey here, it apparently has about a 50/50 chance to either destroy another trapdoor or platform, or to emerge from the pit tile in the room that is closest to a creature chosen at random.
"
Every monster I have seen get adjacent to its suspected position has disappeared without a trace, even enormous serpents! However, with all the monsters I brought along for testing gone, I am the only living thing left here aside from my creation. I shall see if humans can brave the Vat Thing's grasp myself, I suppose the results of this will be evident to whomever may read this. Regardless of the outcome, I'm just glad that the great Pit Thing inspired me to create something cool and exciting rather than abide by all of these 'predictability' rules and regulations that the Empire can't even abide by themselves!
- 23rd Chemist"
Upon reading this, the Archivists collectively decided to sweep this one under the rug.
*The Vat Thing's on-land movement uses unbrained goblin pathing to the first other non-Vat Thing creature of character in the room. However, instead of following it completely, it will move either in the direction specified or the two adjacent directions (if it says to move North, it will move either N, NW, or NE). It will also not flee from swords. Brained behavior is no different from normal behavior. In addition to monsters, players, etc., the Vat Thing will also destroy any adjacent weapons, force arrows, orbs, pressure plates, potions, tokens, fuses, bombs (without exploding them), mirrors, stepping stones, tarstuff, and briar. The Vat Thing is a required monster.
#12 Restaurants.
The thing DROD lacks above all others, the gaping hole, the empty chair, the missing link, the unsated yearning, the metaphoric unfulfilled wish ... but I must not wax too lyrical, for fear of taxing your gentle patience. What DROD needs - really needs ... is food! ...
There simply must be,
by a regal decree,
places where one can eat,
(for killing roaches
in teeming hoaches
is apt to leave one weak),
where commis can bake
a fermented snake
wrapped in fegundo ash
and ripe spoostlefish
can be cooked in a dish
of roach and pepper mash.
Aumtlich fizzers
make tasty sizzlers,
when served with sauted spider,
and fit for a king
- with a gourmet zing -
fermented brain in cider.
Then sugar crafters,
for tasty 'afters',
(and striving for near perfection)
soak salted neeps
in honeyed seeps,
for further cul’nary delection.
There must be stalls
where fried eyeballs
are sold to the hungry masses,
where wraithwing pasties
and other such dainties
feed Eighth-ish lads and lassies.
Smitemasters should
stoke up on good food
when deep in a dungeon they fight
with a Really Big Sword;
they must eat like a Lord
to give them courage and might.
So listen all DRODers
who like goblin trotters
or rattlesnake served in batter -
a restaurant fine,
wherein we can dine,
is the only thing to matter.
#13 Roachburger
Standard Roaches always seemed a little too easy to smite, so this should be a way to mix things up a bit.
Context: While the shadowy actors of The Eighth were plotting to destroy the Roasted Roach Grill, one resident of the Empire realized that if the Empire's pursuit for total knowledge was genuine, they could not afford to potentially lose Beethro's famous Roachburger recipe for good, and definitely not because they liked them or anything. Moved by this reasoning, the recipe was silently removed from the back room hours before the establishment's destruction. It became an overnight hit in the Empire, much to everyone's surprise, enough so that some careless architects have been known to leave them behind after building...
Mechanics: The Roachburger is a stationary single-use item, much like a potion. Roaches are a bit strange in that they have no problem living next to piles of hundreds of slain comrades, but if they see anything eating one of those, they fly into a frenzy. Beethro should know better than to eat food found on a dungeon floor, no matter how appetizing (though I'm sure it's fair game for a monster player role), but when they do the following things happen:
Every roach will get an extra turn for each one of the player's. Another extra turn will be added for each burger eaten.
Any roach queens will instantly lay eggs. Any existing eggs will immediately hatch. (This does not change the roach queen spawn timer).
A roach will spawn in every available floor tile around each tunnel in the room. If there are no roaches or roach queens in the room prior to eating the burger, roach queens will spawn instead and will attempt to lay eggs that turn.
Roaches and roach queens, recognizing the scent of the burger, will always be able to see the player, and will attack a player role that does not cause monsters to target it immediately.
Roachburgers are very greasy, so if your character currently has a weapon, if they want to rotate it, they will have the opportunity to either wait or rotate in that direction again. If they rotate again, the weapon will fly out of their hands until it hits something, which will cause the standard effect of that weapon to whatever it hits and afterwards the weapon will lie on the ground as a one square obstacle the square in front of whatever it hit until the player reaches that square and picks it up. This greasy effect will continue until the player reaches shallow water to wash their hands.
Finally, since nobody knew this about roaches before now, there has been a retcon to how Adders work. When an Adder eats a Roach or Roach Queen, the same effect, save for the greasiness, will occur. Sadly, they will still go after you instead of lining up to be eaten by the Adder. Huh, have fun with older holds!
#14 Divider
This is a new type of serpent (cf: "
the adder"
, and the new FR "
the subtractor"
).
These look just like red serpents, except they are green (or blue).
They eat just like adders, but do not lengthen when they do so.
Every 30 turns their length is divided by the number of monsters they have eaten in that period (i.e. if they start off at 30 tiles long and eat 3 monsters, they become 10 tiles long). This is either rounded up or down (with 50:50 chance of each) if the result is not an integer, and the tiles are taken off from the tail end.
Therefore they are killed once their length becomes less than one through this process.
(Oh yeah, you can also kill them with your sword)
Of course, if they ingest no monsters within a spawn cycle, DROD crashes.
Puzzle potential: because there is an element of randomness when the result of a division is not an integer, there is more replay value for a given room. This is something sorely lacking from DROD, as currently every time you play a room it just plays out the same.
#15 Mind control potion
When drunk, you select a monster in the room, with the mimic placement interface.
After that point, you control the monster, overriding the monster's motions with your own, like a mimic.
#16 Ortho-triangles
Ortho-triangles permit movement onto or off them in three directions: for example, N, SW and SE. However, because cos 60° = 1/2, moving at one of the diagonal angles puts you halfway between squares, and you remain halfway between squares until you cancel it out by stepping onto an ortho-triangle diagonally and off it orthogonally (which may be on the very next turn if there are two ortho-triangles touching each other).
So, what fun and crazy things can do you with this?
* Teeter on the very edge of a pit. As long as you are on the edge of a pit tile, you get to watch a continuous teetering animation, accompanied by a suitable grimace from the avatar and melodious groans appropriate for the current player role.
* Step past orthogonal aumtlich beams without being hit. (Do I hear a clamour for this feature to be ported to DROD RPG?)
* Stroll along shoulder-to-shoulder with a mimic. Aww, look, they really do love each other. (Wait, did Beethro just cut the mimic in half? ... I guess that's just how they show love in their culture.)
* Play absolute havoc with wraithwing AI, because we all know it isn't nearly complicated enough.
* Drop two trapdoors at once. Yes. Isn't this the most incredible thing ever? You can drop TWO TRAPDOORS AT ONCE!
* Walk right through the middle of a bomb maze as easily as walking over open floor. Of course, this makes it all the more unexpected when your mimic sets the whole thing off and... okay, I rescind the idea. We don't want any valiant smitemasters dying of a heart attack.
#17 The Phantompinion
The Phantompinion, a close relative of the Wraithwing (and some believe, of the Spoostlefish). As such, it is a cowardly creature. However, it's somewhat dimwitted nature causes it to be afraid of everything that doesn't look like a Phantompinion. A short list of things that look like Phantompinions but are not:
- Wraithwings
Similarly to the Wraithwing, its movement algorithm is a little complicated. For each space adjacent to it, do the following:
+1 for each non-pp (or ww) within 4 squares (this has the same effect as looking for creatures within 5 squares of the pp, so it's Flawlessly Consistint)
-2 for each pp (or ww) within 4 squares
+1 for each square it is from Beethro
+1 if it's a pit (they're afraid of heights)
-1 if it's a hot tile (they like the heat)
+1 if it's adjacent to a monster (this always occurs; any space they could move to is adjacent to itself)
-1 for each burning fuse within 4 squares (again, they like the heat)
+5 if there's a monster in that square (killing that monster if that square is chosen)
Then, the Phantompinion moves into the square adjacent to it with the lowest value. If there's a wall in that space, it doesn't move. If the lowest valued space contains a monster (including itself) it will kill that monster. This monster will make for excellent puzzle potential, especially with WWs, as it will tend to move differently than any other creature (and they'll tend to clump).
We need it because there hasn't been much complaining about wraithwings lately: we've mastered them. To keep the challenge alive, we need a monster we don't fully understand.
#18 Subtracters
These yellowish serpents shrink as they eat due to their low matabalism.
put a subtracter in with an adder and a rattlesnake in a pit and watch the battle commence!
or you can just put a bunch of soldiers down and watch them get eaten by subtracters while the subtracters slowly die and suffer just like the soldiers...
Oh umm... was i saying that out loud?
#19 Limit undo to a single move.
We've all played that sort of so-called "
puzzle"
game.
The sort in which every potential bump and scrape is removed from the player's path.
The sort in which the text box saying specifically how to solve each puzzle is finally removed for the last 10% of the game in a desultory shadow of a final challenge.
The sort in which jumping in and flailing around will generally solve any puzzle, independent of any understanding on the player's part.
The sort in which even the competitive aspect of solving the puzzles most efficiently degenerates into mindless trial and error, as the player makes and undoes moves a few at a time to brute force his or her way through to what in stronger hands could have been an elegantly planned solution.
Save trial and error for casual games. The necessity of planning ahead, of studying a room and truly understanding it, is crucial to the very soul of DROD. Therefore, to preserve the player experience, a -GAMEPLAY FEATURE REQUEST- seems critical:
Limit undo to a single move.
This would enforce the need to study a room and plan one's approach, while still allowing a small amount of buffer room to guard against a single stray keystroke erasing hours of work. While still allowing a small degree of last-minute trial-and-error, the small margin provided is unlikely to make significant reworking viable, and is in any case outweighed by the peace of mind afforded, as well as easing the introduction of novices, accustomed to the aforementioned distant approximations of puzzle games, to the intricacies of goblin and slayer manipulation.
I strongly believe this would provide the needed differentiation of TSS in the crowded market that is PC indie gaming.
#20 FTL mode
Every 5 moves, there's a 1 in 5 chance for any monster in a 15-square radius to teleport to a random square next to you.
If there is no monster in that range, you will be sent back to the stairs, with your progress in the level reset.
#21 Tiny Rooms
There seems to be a trend in gaming lately where novelty gimmicks are what sell (Portal, the Wii...and "
Crayon Physics Deluxe"
wins the IGF?!). So, here's a great gimmicky element that is probably terrible in DROD. The best name I can put to it at the moment is "
tiny rooms"
. The tiny rooms work like this:
Each room in a hold can optionally belong "
inside"
another room. When designating a room as such, I would add interface for specifying the room and tile coord where the room is placed. The containing room would have a special tile placed at the indicated location on the floor layer. On this tile, a realistic, tiny version of the room located at that point would be drawn:
When the player moves onto this tile, they would enter that (tiny) room from that direction, if possible (using the regular room entrance constraints). On entering, there would be a zoom effect showing the small room getting larger until it fills the entire room space on the game screen. The player would enter at the centermost open tile along that edge of the inner room.
When the player steps out of the internal room in a direction where no room exists in that area of the tiny room's level, they would exit back to the containing room in the direction of exit (with accompanying zoom-out effect). The mini-map would somehow indicate valid exit directions into container rooms.
There could be multiple tiny rooms nested within a room, one to a tile. When tiny rooms are adjacent, moving out of one tiny room would enter the next tiny room in that direction instead of zooming out to the containing room. For instance, an entire level might be laid out as a region of tiny rooms inside a single containing room. When standing in the container room, the entire tiny level would be visible, although it could be partially or fully obscured by other game elements.
Room nesting could occur multiple times, like Russian nesting dolls. There's no reason why a room couldn't recursively nest within itself, too.
This would work best when rooms are square -- matching the ratio of the floor tiles -- and without too many tiles per room. So, it would fit DROD RPG-style rooms, but would require a hack to work in classic DROD rooms. For instance, maybe it fills a more proportional room area like 3x2 or 5x4.
____________________________
50th Skywatcher
[Last edited by Schik at 01-08-2014 05:21 PM]
