Randomly generated Demon skills

[Seth]

Hello Ferret. What do you think about adding some (more) RNG to Demon's skill generation? I love playing this game, but when you do many runs it kinda gets to the point where you know exactly what to expect on every floor, and more importantly the skills you have access to never really change. In my opinion this is a fatal flaw for a roguelike game, as they're typically heavily reliant on randomly changing gameplay (even in the first couple floors) to maintain replay value.

I get that enchanted demons are probably meant to represent this, but they're generally too rare for them to be a major defining gameplay feature (other than when you get "that one pack" and die horribly), particularly from a character building standpoint. To my knowledge they don't even appear prior to floor 1 1/2, and from that point onward you get around one pack every other floor. The packs all generate with the exact same bonus skills, so technically speaking you get access to 2 random skills every other floor.

I think the number could stand to be higher. Demon has no equipment/spellbook mechanic, which is arguably the single largest source of randomly-generated replay value in a typical roguelike. Demons are already a more interesting sort of spellbook, but they're not very random. The brute force remedy would of course be to add so many demons to the game that runs go completely differently, but I do have a couple of alternative suggestions:

1- Split up enchanted Demon packs (barring exceptional cases like Vikhor and Turdak's crews), instead of rare enchanted packs have semi-rare individual demons mixed into regular packs, perhaps bring back fully enchanted packs in deeper floors when they won't be so uncommon. This might actually make them harder too, as in many cases you get extremely redundant groups like a pack of Cursed physical attackers who all cast the same debuffs and have crippled physical stats.

2- Give all (or maybe a reasonable share of) demons a single randomly-generated skill defined by their standard trait. (IE, generate goblins with one Violent skill, Gandayahs with one Lifegiver, Wisps with one Profane, etc)

Theoretically the second suggestion should make both the player and the demons stronger. If a demon generates with a powerful skill, you need to be able to survive and capture it. Similarly, if an enemy in another roguelike generates (or picks up) a powerful weapon, you need to not die to it before you can use it yourself.

I get that you're probably really busy with other mechanics, I just thought that this might be worth bringing up now since it's the kind of thing that can be harder to implement further down the line.

[Ferret]

Hi Seth. Thanks for playing, and for signing up and posting here on the forum too.

You refer it to as the brute force method, but expanding content to the point the selection becomes much harder to predict actually is sort of the current plan, at least in part. That said, it is going to take awhile to get there, so I can agree maybe I should open the faucet a bit more on modified characters, maybe even on Tower:1-2 (you're correct btw, the feature is turned off on these two floors entirely), or at least, I should give it a shot and see what happens.

"Enchanted" demons can happen one of two ways, generally speaking. Each dungeon floor has a % chance to make one individual demon unique, and also a % chance to make up to four members of a group of demons unique. When the group variant happens, every demon gets the same modifier and same two abilities. (Certain uniques, if present in a group, adjust these chances as well. West always appears with enchanted zombies because he has a +100% to the group enchantment rate.)

I could experiment with some adjustments in the next build: namely, increasing the individual chance while reducing the group chance (with the goal being more modified demons in general, but less of them applied to groups.) That would address your first point pretty well, and I agree it's an experiment worth trying.

The second point is... a bit stickier though. Some abilities are really important to know whether or not they're present. If every demon had 1 ability chosen at random from a set, you would be obligated to inspect every demon in every encounter, or risk a possibly very unpleasant surprise. It's okay when it's on relatively rare (and clearly marked) enchanted demons, but I'd be nervous about making it universal.

Anyway, since most of this is just tweaking a few knobs, we can try it out in the build that adds the Anomaly.

I'll also think about turning on the feature again for Tower:2... but Tower:1 may just be too mean. The wrong mod could easily kill a player right out of the gate (i.e: Echeneis with a magic mod that gains a nuke of a type you or your demon is weak to, for example.) with no real recourse. I know many roguelikes are okay with that sort of thing in the very early game, but I'm not sure I am. Let's see how Tower:2 w/ mods goes and I'll see if Tower:1 feels doable.

Thanks again for the feedback and suggestions.

[Seth]

No problem, and thanks for making this game. Out of the roguelikes I've played this is easily one of the most unique, and I'm looking forward to seeing what you have in store.

Brute force may have been a poor choice of words on my part. You really can't go wrong with increasing overall game content, I was mainly just trying to say that you may be able to decrease your overall workload by introducing or increasing RNG mechanics for existing demons (because, after all, it'll ultimately be randomized anyway at the spawning phase). And even that said, I'm mainly looking at things from a skill access standpoint - the actual challenge of the demons presented by the floors seems to be pretty good.

This is actually something I failed to clarify in my original post, as it's a really tricky thing to specify: The player's skillset is defined by their encounters, and in my opinion that skillset could use more variety, however the encounters themselves are good and the difficulty is fine. However, increasing the variety of skills available to the player would make the player stronger, thus necessitating stronger encounters. The main reason my suggestions included giving the new skills through demons the player twas under my possibly-naive assumption that the difficulty would balance out naturally.

To put it another way, the 2nd floor ukobach/huoshu pack at the end of a long corridor encounter, or the getting jumped at a corner by Vikhor on floor 4 encounter are both still plenty interesting even after having it happen multiple times, just the skills they actually offer can get mundane after a few runs. (Except Vikhor because I only manage to actually get and capture him once in maybe 5 runs).

Now that I think about it, I've been completely neglecting the existence of a mechanic already in the game which offers randomized skills to players without doing it directly through encounters: Matrices! Matrices are awesome, however they seem to be quite rare. I only seem to find one every few floors and on my last (and admittedly only) win I found like 3 of them across the entire dungeon. It would be really nice to see them more often, or even possibly made into a centrally defining gameplay mechanic? I may be getting ahead of myself there though.

I admit, in retrospect, that my suggestions of randomized skills and first floor enhanced demons were probably heavy-handed, especially when the same goal can possibly be achieved by tweaking mechanics already in the game (and to think, I was talking about workload efficiency ). I have a bit of a "why not" attitude when it comes to RNG and early difficulty spikes because a lot of roguelikes seem to do fine with it. The thing with dangerous first floor mobs is that in the earlygame you haven't really invested anything yet, so dying shouldn't be a big deal unless it happens very often or you're playing for streaks (and even then it's not like there's anything on floor 1 you can't run away from, unless it's possible to roll a speed-boosting ego like Dancing on random demons or Haste on Blessed). The thought process behind individual mobs getting a random skill was more or less that there are certain cases (big examples being TOME's unique creatures and spellcasters in DCSS, and some others) of creatures getting semi-randomized skillset without adding much examination tedium into the game, and the skills being picked from their given trait would keep them appropriate in terms of theme and power level.

But then, any change that would make Raichos generating with shocking ranged attacks possible probably needs to be second-guessed.

[Ferret]

More abilities available doesn't necessarily make the player stronger, or at least, I hope it doesn't. Early on this is true somewhat because your party still lacks access to the fundamentals (ranged attacks, healing, status removers, etc.), but the ability system in Demon is designed to be somewhat CCG like: they're meant to be new options more than new power levels.

Matrices are definitely awesome. They're also definitely rare. If anything drives me to put the currency system in sooner than planned, it will be wanting to regulate access to this mechanic better than matrices as random drops does. (In the currency system, several mechanics will be converted to things you purchase, at any time, by powering your relic using the currency you find throughout the Tower. I haven't decided which mechanics will and won't be converted for sure yet, other than matrices is probably a certainty to be converted.)

The "it's early game so it's okay to be a little unfair potentially" bit is definitely common in other roguelikes, but Demon's already a jerk in so many other ways I'm reluctant to embrace that particular trend.

Re: random abilities, TOME and DCSS basically do it about as often as Demon does roughly speaking, and with about the same amount of warning since it's limited to specific ranks or types of monsters (depending on which game you're talking about.) There's a difference between knowing every Ogre Mage can have one of 4 unique spell lists to say, finding an ant hill in Lair and knowing every ant can have a unique ability. Even if those abilities are limited to just, for example, bite attacks, if one of those is a paralyzing bite, you had probably better find out about it before you engage... which brings you to having to examine all of them as you encounter them (and then keep track of, somehow, the one with the paralyzing bite.) I don't mind increasing the number of enchanted demons a bit... but yeah, I'm not sure letting every demon have a random ability would be fun in the end. (And yeah, people already loathe modified Raichos of any kind. I can only imagine the howling if all of them had a random extra Electric ability.)

[Ferret]

Because everyone loves seeing Raichos getting killed, here's an encounter from a test run of the Anomaly build.



Frosty the Snowlich and his evil forest friends opened the battle with Poison Breath and Rattling Cry. Raicho are a lot less scary when they're half dead, inaccurate, and rapidly dying.

I posted it in this thread because I also implemented the changes to modified demon rates discussed above in this build. It's... definitely changed things. It feels like it might be a little crazy, but I'm willing to let it out in the wild and see what happens.