Idea for a coffee-break dredmor option.

I generally find that the first 3 levels are the most fun. Usually by then you have the necessary skills and at least enough gear to get by that from then on the game goes into auto pilot. The problem is, floors 4-15 even with no time to grind takes hours upon hours to finish. It's pretty easy to take over an hour per floor. Heck it can take an hour to clear a zoo!

So what if there was an option to have the game end on floor 5 or so? By that point you've encountered just about everything. You probably have a few pieces of really solid gear. You've come across plenty of consumables. You've also maxed out a skill tree or so and hit about level 15.

Why not just have a coffee break mode with the level 10 dredmor on floor 5? I'd love that! Plus taking on dredmor at that point in the game would be really challenging.

After floor 5 or so I find that I start to lose steam on my play through and get bored. While this really wouldn't be a coffee break dredmor (the best way to do that would be to throw a level 5 dredmor on floor 1), this mode would take only 3-6 hours or so to beat.

But you know, a mode that ends on floor 1 might be fun too. The first floor is the most fun...

I think if you guys port to the iPad you might want to look at putting in a game play mode that is very short (30 minutes to an hour) and challenging.

 

The only thing I don't like about this is that some of the most flavorful floors (ice level, lava level) wouldn't appear in the game. Other than that, it's genius.

I won't say I get bored with the game at any point (especially now that 1.0.10 and the new DLC improve the lowest floors), but I certainly find my play gets sloppier on the lower floors, and also sloppier if I play for more than 2 hours in one day. All my character deaths beyond the first floor have happened several hours into a long play session; I never seem to load the game and die a room or two later. Limiting myself to 1 or 2 hours per day seems to avoid character death due to complacency or foolishness, but it can result in the game taking several weeks to play through. Given how fast the game (and mods) are updated, it's sometimes hard to finish a character before something comes along that makes you want to start a new one.

 

If such a thing were added, there really should be an option for middle of the road character level and gear, starting on a lower level too. Say start on level five with ten levels in your character waiting to be spent, and gear appropriate for the middle of the game relevant to your skills?

This would require a bunch of work. But would be an awesome addition for DLC 3.

 

For me part of the appeal would

For me starting on level 5 doesn't hold a lot of appeal. I think this game is at its most fun early on. Where every piece of cheese, every potion, and every frothy beverage could spell the difference between life and death. By DL 5 the game has long drifted into auto-pilot. By then the character is more or less complete and far stronger than the dungeon. The only thing left to do is point the dungeon wrecking ball you've created towards the next floor.

Part of the appeal of a shorter play through would be taking on dredmor with less skill points and less resources.

 

Then check this mod out:
http://community.gaslampgames.com/threads/lord-dredmor-2-0.2798/page-2#post-27769

 

What Mr. Bergstrom said. If I play too long in one sitting, my play will suffer. I'll get lazy, or sloppy, or overly hasty, and I'll make mistakes - one of which is bound to be fatal, sooner or later.

This is compounded by the fact that my brain will not allow me to move onto the next Floor until the current one is 100% explored and looted. Even using + to go into Double Speed, a Full Clear and Dredmor Kill can take 8-12 hours (30-45 minutes per Floor, usually), and if I don't split that up into several play sessions, well, the Full Clear becomes a Congratulations, you died! Run instead.

 

The beta traps will make this even worse. They are brutal! Speaking of that, I have a bug to report...

 

I have an ambitious project going to kill Dredmor on DL 15 without topping CL 20. I have yet to complete that project. But it does require a certain exercise of will to go down those stairs without looting the whole floor. If you can't do that a DL 5 Dredmor would do just as well. But I would recommend scaling him down just a tiny bit...

 

Cut his HP in half and leave everything else as it is. That should be close enough to fair. (Bear in mind I think he needs to be much harder anyway. There are many ways to effectively neutralize him for almost every build.

 

If you can do 5 levels in your coffee break then I think your employer is a bit lenient!

I think this is a good idea, though.

 

You can solve that by randomizing tilesets/rooms for the five floors. You won't be able to randomize monsters (obviously), but random rooms and tiles shouldn't be too big of a mechanical gamechanger, just a visual one.

 

I only get bored if I'm playing Elvishly Easy or Dwarven Moderation. On Going Rogue it is much more challenging. Maybe the other difficulties should be turned up a little?

 

While I only play on Going Rogue these days, I don't really like the idea of making the other two difficulties more like GR. The lower difficulties make the game more accessible to new players. The more you crank up lower difficulties and make them like GR, the less need there is to even have multiple difficulties.

What would be nice is if you could change difficulties mid-game. Select from the Menu the difficulty that is used the next time the game generates a floor. When I first realized that I wanted to change to GR going forward, I had a character on floor 8 or so. At that point you don't want to abandon them because you're over half way, but if it's a little too easy you'll grow bored. On the flip side, sometimes on NTTG I find the RNG is just too cruel and I'm lacking essential equipment (bolts, eggs, pants, etc). I'm not sure I'd actually scale the difficulty down if that happened, but it might be interesting to have that as an option.

Perhaps I miss-spoke. What I love about the lava level, for example, is not the bright red walls. I love that your choice in character build and equipment causes that floor to be more or less dangerous, depending on whether or not you're prepared for and . I'll agree that the frozen level looks amazing, but wouldn't be nearly as cool if it didn't have cold carrots, snow baals, etc to reinforce the visual theme. The fungal level doesn't just have bonus Mushys, it also has more round rooms (shaped kinda like the way fungus root structures grow) than any other floor. Swapping tiles randomly would almost water-down the experience, I think.

 

No, no, you keep the rooms, just not the monsters. Still, thematically, you're probably right. Without scalar monsters, that's not really an option.

 

Then again, it's not like one can't just make more variants of the rooms for the coffee-break variant and make each of those floors spawn some theme-relevant monsters.

 

Currently, there's no way to have rooms that only spawn at certain difficulty settings, or only on NTTG or Permadeath or whatever other factor you'd like other than "have I downloaded RotDG". Including alternate rooms in a coffee break version only, would probably require some extensive modifications to the level-generating code, not to mention all the XML work on the alternate rooms and monsters. Which would be awesome, but perhaps somewhat less likely to ever make it on to Gaslamp's already quite extensive "To Do" list. The bigger and crazier the thing we're proposing, the less likely Nicholas will randomly decide to make it happen.

Counter-proposal that might be easier to code, but might not, I dunno : Make coffee-break be a version where you get the first floor NTTG sized, but replace all the stairs down with Mysterious Portals. A weaker Lord Dredmor is spawned in one of the mysterious portal floors (ideally the last one, but I'd settle for one chosen at random). Then game over. Just a thing you can explore in under two hours.

 

What about a "Dredmor Minute," where the game is still turn based, but you have a 1 minute counter rolling. Killing a monster or collecting gold adds a certain amount of seconds back to the clock. However, when the timer reaches zero, Dredmor immediately spawns to combat you. If Dredmor slays you or you die before he spawns, your score is equal to half of your zorkmid total. If you actually kill him, your score is equal to the total zorkmids you accumulated. The amount of seconds given back on kills and zorkmids would need to be adjusted so that it starts to become very hard to keep the clock ahead in an attempt to make each run short.

 

I think 5 levels sounds great. What if we just start on level 1, but then skip to 3, 5, 7, 10? That would be sweet.

This just requires an adjustment to the stair code - should be a snap to implement!

 

what if the game just picked 5 random floors and scaled monsters/equipment accordingly? I'd feel bad for the floors left out otherwise...