butsam
Level: Master Delver
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The ending could be customizable by selecting which rooms to demo, and entering in text that will be displayed by "Beethro" (or whatever his name is in the game) recounting the stories. OK, maybe it's more hassle than it's worth, but just thought I'd throw the suggestion out there to see what people think. Also, there could be some basic flags such as "If room <select a room> has been conquered" to give different endings if someone warps, finds a secret level, etc.

Sam

ErikH2000
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butsam wrote:
The ending could be customizable by selecting which rooms to demo, and entering in text that will be displayed by "Beethro" (or whatever his name is in the game) recounting the stories. OK, maybe it's more hassle than it's worth, but just thought I'd throw the suggestion out there to see what people think. Also, there could be some basic flags such as "If room <select a room> has been conquered" to give different endings if someone warps, finds a secret level, etc.

Well to be honest, in the future I was planning to get away from the demo replay/scrolling text thing. It is hell to debug! Not so much just playing back a demo, or making Beethro talk, but the routines that analyze demos and make Beethro's dialogue relevant to demo events must be carefully thought out with predictions of the many possible things that the player might do. It is difficult to use testing to correct problems because not that many people make it to the end and once they see a problem, you usually have to get their dat files onto your system before it can be troubleshot.

I am considering for the future some sort of media player that will play something at the end of the hold. Possibly a Flash player if I can find good source code for it. Then you could distribute your own media file along with your hold and have a wide range of expression created with off-the-shelf authoring tools. Although, this approach sadly doesn't incorporate knowledge of the player's journey through your dungeon, like the DD end does.

Your suggestion does make me think some more. It might be possible to set up some flags that get passed to the media player if they were simple enough. It is really just the analysis programming I want to avoid. A list of visited rooms might allow for some interesting branches inside of the media player. Maybe, depending on what sort of media player source code we begin from, there would be a way to play back demos from inside the player. I will keep it in mind once we get closer to that part.

-Erik


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butsam
Level: Master Delver
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Hey, that would be cool--just something customizable for it to do when the hold is over would be cool Flash would work And maybe the user could select like, say 10 rooms to see if they were completed--that could be simple booleans--and pass those in. I haven't actually used Flash before so I don't know how easy or hard that would be to program with, but it probably would be fairly easy, I would imagine. All I ask for is something that can be a customizable ending--that would work just fine

Sam

StuartK
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For my preference, I'd like to see something that uses the actual game engine, in-game. Potentially much more satisfying (unless you've got Blizzard level budgets for those gobsmacking cutscenes) Let the game itself be the reward - an end level doesn't just have to be a set of stairs, and message scrolls can tell a story (hmm - how about making scrolls multi-page, with forward/back buttons at the bottom?) Or other things could be developed to do the same, which offer ancillary benefits... Unique tilesets, animation (cycling, or scripted/conditional) offer all sorts of possibilities, customised end of level music/ambient sounds/speech played according to defined conditions would be great. All on a budget of $0 of course...

[Edited by StuartK on 07-20-2003 at 07:07 AM]

zex20913
Level: Smitemaster

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Or, running off of his suggestion, people could do a "choose your own adventure" type story with scrolls. That could be fun, without extra programming.

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