[Game] The End [alpha v1.0.4]

[Yvanhoe]

Eran, I'd love if you said if you have a specific goal in mind with that game, to know which advice are welcomed. I assume the atmosphere and setting is what you are focused on and need help with the game mechanics but please do tell if this assumption is wrong!

I really like the atmosphere you created and even Wuzzy's flying fortress look awesome in that setting. Reminds me of The Forge in Loom actually.

I think a lot of people making games with minetest are too scared to touch two of its core mechanics and that tend to break regular games: mining and building. Both are actually hard and long actions in real life, but in the regular game, they are super fast. Digging a tunnel is normally a team achievement. Setting up a stone wall is harder than dropping a pebble in the ground. In a typical zombie game, building defenses faster than they are broken is typically the focus.

I think you can solve the walling-off problem by making building much more difficult: Remove the possibility to place nodes altogether except for a few designed exceptions: a bunch of sticks can make a small, weak barricade node (can be broken when hit, can burn) and nothing can be built over it, so it is necessarily one node high. It can still almost block a two blocks-high tunnel.

Maybe add the possibility to upgrade the barricade with more wood, planks or sticks, making it go from weak to medium, to strong. Allow to build a weaker type over a barricade (you can build a weak barricade node over a medium one). At one point add stone, mortar to reinforce it, etc... I think it would also make sense to have HP for the different nodes.

To make mining harder, it would not be fun to require one hour of mining to get one block, but you can make tools break more often, add a lot of hard rock like marble, forcing players to mine around these (or use explosives!)

One of the things I wanted to experiment with, to make things more realistic and to make mining more logistics-intensive, making carts an actual necessity, would be to continue allow a huge inventory for objects, but forbid to have more than a few blocks in it, maybe starting with forbidding to stack mined nodes.

With these, maintaining an attacked barricade, where some people would mine for stones and pebbles, other making mortars, other protecting the repairers, it can become more of a team game!

In such a situation, I think the most effective strategy becomes to create a very deep moat, (floodable with lava for extra fun!) which starts to be more realistic.

[Eran]

Eran, I'd love if you said if you have a specific goal in mind with that game, to know which advice are welcomed. I assume the atmosphere and setting is what you are focused on and need help with the game mechanics but please do tell if this assumption is wrong!

My goal is to make some sort of binary: Either you're feeling like you're getting overwhelmed or you're feeling like you're kicking ass. A good suggestion is one that makes me want to work on this, that gets me excited. This probably works best when they're vague but I get that you yourself get excited too and want to work out something elaborated. I don't think I need help on gameplay that much. Rewriting or replacing the pathfinder and improving mob spawning will propably already do wonders.

I don't want to make building hard because I want people to have epic castles (like Wuzzy's, just with mobs that can still threaten it) to defend. Making mobs break walls faster is needed though.

Or you teach mobs how to find players anywhere. This will feel much more natural than any artificial “punishment”.

How can you know how it feels if I haven't made it yet? Having one or multiple catchalls doesn't mean there can't be specialized events to react to certain tricks, but making events for every trick is propably somewhere between very hard to do and impossible.

[Wuzzy]

The placable hand might be a bug in Minetest. Can you please report a bug?

https://github.com/minetest/minetest

[Yvanhoe]

Hmmm, I see what you mean, ok. Can be pretty cool actually, I tend to dislike the classic zombie games! So you would spend the day prepare for epic battles then? I like it!

How about simply having mobs throwing projectiles that have the effect of TNT then? Something like a fireball, or siege weapons. That would counter well the effect of quick building and force the players out to destroy the source of the projectiles.

There is also a pretty straightforward use of gold and diamond then: magic, like Stix proposed earlier. I can imagine staffs that would run out of charge and need to be recharged during the day by finding more and more diamonds. Could make for a pretty sick survival game forcing you deeper and deeper!

Right now if we dive into battle it is too easy to get overwhelmed, making it natural to use some traps instead, and run projectiles on the bad guys from a safe distance, which is probably not the kind of epic battles you are thinking about. But playing with push back mechanics, mobility, temporary shields/barrier could bring some very interesting battle dynamics.

What is your position on multiplayer? Do you want it to work well as a solo game? If you expect people to play together with friends, there are tons of flanking and shield-wall tactics that can really be fun to do together.

[Eran]

Hmmm, I see what you mean, ok. Can be pretty cool actually, I tend to dislike the classic zombie games! So you would spend the day prepare for epic battles then? I like it!

How about simply having mobs throwing projectiles that have the effect of TNT then? Something like a fireball, or siege weapons. That would counter well the effect of quick building and force the players out to destroy the source of the projectiles.

There is also a pretty straightforward use of gold and diamond then: magic, like Stix proposed earlier. I can imagine staffs that would run out of charge and need to be recharged during the day by finding more and more diamonds. Could make for a pretty sick survival game forcing you deeper and deeper!

Right now if we dive into battle it is too easy to get overwhelmed, making it natural to use some traps instead, and run projectiles on the bad guys from a safe distance, which is probably not the kind of epic battles you are thinking about. But playing with push back mechanics, mobility, temporary shields/barrier could bring some very interesting battle dynamics.

What is your position on multiplayer? Do you want it to work well as a solo game? If you expect people to play together with friends, there are tons of flanking and shield-wall tactics that can really be fun to do together.

I really like the idea of siege weapons because dwarves and monsters could hijack them from each other. I'll propably look into magic too.
Ideally I want this game to work well both alone and in multiplayer but that'll propably be kind of hard.

I have done some refactoring of the mobs mod so I'll hopefully have an easier time making mobs smarter. Apart from restructuring I've only done small improvements so far like making the botete spit more goo and making sarangay launch players when charging at them. I pushed this to a new branch.
I also really need to start writing unit tests so when I break something I notice more likely.

[Red_King_Cyclops]

Do plan on making more map? It could be interesting if the dwarves had to defend an abandoned dwarven city.

Apart from "making your end more expensive," could there be other goals? For example, what if the dwarves had to survive waves of monsters before being rescued at an extraction point? Or what if the dwarves had to kill a monster "leader" to win the game?

[Eran]

The game should already support having multiple maps unless it's bugged. But before I make more maps and, more importantly, a guide on how to make maps I want to improve how loading and storing works. Most importantly I want to stop storing ores in the schematics and instead generate them after loading the map to make compression more effective and decrease file sizes. I'll also have to delete terrain outside of the map's bounds, especially since maps propably won't all be the same size. Having the ability to load naturally generated terrain as map would be cool too.

I am not going to add a win condition. This doesn't necessarily mean no other goals though, but they'll be more like side goals.

[Eran]

Mobs are now a lot smarter on the develop branch, mostly because pathfinding re-enabled. I've also started experimenting with swarm intelligence to supplement pathfinding, but both approaches still need a lot of tuning.

[jeremyericson]

Hey so when i do/time its always exactly at 6:00 it never changes, also inot a single wave will come, i dont even know what a monster looks like i've been waiting for nearly 20 minutes and no monsters have apeared at all please help
also when i use my sword it gives some weird error

[Eran]

Hey so when i do/time its always exactly at 6:00 it never changes, also inot a single wave will come, i dont even know what a monster looks like i've been waiting for nearly 20 minutes and no monsters have apeared at all please help
also when i use my sword it gives some weird error

To fix the sword error, update to minetest 5.1. On earlier versions it crashes because it moves the player.
Mobs are not spawning because it doesn't become night. The problem is I have no idea why the time would be stuck. Try updating minetest and if it doesn't fix the problem, message me again.

[Lone_Wolf]

Running /set time_speed 72 ingame might fix the time issue

[Kalabasa]

This is awesome! Brings back memories.

Sorry about the slow and messy pathfinding code. It's based on dynamic navmesh. I really don't know how to optimize that further.

Comments on my first play:

Great atmosphere! There was really a sense of impending doom. I like the ambient music.

I was overwhelmed on the first night, a group of bats came in and I was dead in seconds. Maybe slow them down a bit? It's very hard to hit them. Or increase the flee timer.

It should be expensive to create the fortified walls, and there should be a cheap but weak material for walls that is easy to erode, like "cobbled stone" (???).

On the floating fortress strategy: The botete (flying pufferfish thing) should be the solution for floating fortresses - first it will spit acid goo, then the goo will puncture a hole in your fortress, then bats should swarm into the hole.

The next enemy I was planning before I abandoned minetest_defense was an "earthworm" enemy that digs through stone - it should be the solution for players that try to seal themselves into a hole. So there is no safe space anywhere.

My vision for minetest_defense was not defense from a hole in the wall though, more like a fort in the middle of a forest - enemies should come from all directions, and players always watching their back.

Anyway, great work! Keep it up!

[Lone_Wolf]

Played a local server with some friends today, few crashes

• Game crashes when one player hits another player
• Mobs stop spawning when one player dies. With a message in chat saying 'Dwarves lost'. Maybe only end it once everyone dies? Maybe a reviving mechanic?
• Game crashes saying something's wrong with line 210 in the_end/mods/gameplay_mechanics/status_effects/effect.lua (I can't find the error because it isn't in debug.txt and my terminal was broken at the time so I only caught a glimpse of the error)
• Is there a way to restart the game, bringing everyone to the main menu again?

[Lone_Wolf]

You have a PR https://notabug.org/NetherEran/The_End/pulls/1

[Eran]

This is awesome! Brings back memories.

Thanks! Nice to see that you like it.

Played a local server with some friends today, few crashes

Game crashes when one player hits another player
Mobs stop spawning when one player dies. With a message in chat saying 'Dwarves lost'. Maybe only end it once everyone dies? Maybe a reviving mechanic?
Game crashes saying something's wrong with line 210 in the_end/mods/gameplay_mechanics/status_effects/effect.lua (I can't find the error because it isn't in debug.txt and my terminal was broken at the time so I only caught a glimpse of the error)
Is there a way to restart the game, bringing everyone to the main menu again?

To be honest I haven't really tested multiplayer yet. The dwarves are dead thing is only supposed to appear when everyone is dead and it's also supposed to automatically return to the main menu. Maybe a way to force it would be nice too though. I'll look into it. I'll also take a look at the status effects error, it seems like it's trying to index a nil value.

Thanks for the PR, I've merged it.

[Lone_Wolf]

Found the effect.lua problem
name (Declared with this: local name = players[timer_count] is sometimes nil and causes a crash

[Lone_Wolf]

Looks like I only fixed one of the bugs halfway https://notabug.org/NetherEran/The_End/pulls/2

[Eran]

Thanks a lot, but today I realized that there's a problem. A while ago I switched the weapon code to something that uses raycasting and I haven't pushed the changes yet. I'll try to do it soon.

[Eran]

Alright I have pushed my changes to the develop branch. There is now a character creator in the pregame menu, mobs should be a bit smarter and hitting things is different.

[Lone_Wolf]

Alright I have pushed my changes to the develop branch. There is now a character creator in the pregame menu, mobs should be a bit smarter and hitting things is different.

Awesome!
You have 2 new PRs. One of which does this:

(May need a little polishing before it's merged. If it is merged at all. I guess we'll see when you review it)

The other PR is a boring one, just adds support for luacheck