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Probably my favorite style of game implementation is Roguelike. There's two things I've always wanted to be able to implement but couldn't work out how:

1) A roguelike that is online and multiplayer in the same environment. This doesn't work in my head because of the nature of roguelikes. Their turn based where the turn is controlled by the player. How do you allow multiple people all to control the turn without slowing the game down to a crawl (one of the other nice things about roguelikes, the game pace is set by the player)

2) A squad based roguelike. Again this seems fiddly because traditionally rogue likes are played via keyboard control and a single character - this is so the focus doesn't change alot.

I think (2) is approachable but I'm not sure about the turn flow. This is what I was thinking about implementing:

1) Environment is displayed, player units and the are that they can see is displayed.
2) Player uses the mouse to select units and give orders
3) Player uses space to advance one turn, in this turn:
a) The player's units take one step, or take a shot, or whatever their orders allow them to do.
b) The opponent's forces take one step

So, pressing space gives your a roguelike turn. So, the game play once you'd got used to the controls would come down to:

- Give Order
- Press Space
- Press Space
- Press Space
- Ohhh, something happened (unit attacked, new enemy seen). Change some orders
- Press Space
- Press Space
- etc..

So, does this work as a game? Is it still a roguelike? Does it give anything over a traditional turn based strategy game?

My feeling at the moment is that with the right scenario (say sci-fi shooter, or ww2) it could be fun. I think it could be played (by an experience player) much faster than a normal turn based strategy game. It also makes me think you'd feel more in control since you had step by step control with minimal fuss.

WDYT?

Kev

Well, one idea for handling an online multiplayer Roguelike is to take a page from the Final Fantasy series and have all of the turn-based interaction happen separately from the main, real-time game. That way players could run around separately and fight any monsters they find in a familiar turn-based fashion without pausing the world for everyone else.

I can already think of a few problems, such as people "tying up" monsters for someone else to come along and fight, but I'm sure there's creative ways around it.

One problem with a squad-based roguelike is that you go from a binary turn order to an n-ary turn order. Binary orders are easy to manage conceptually: either it's my turn or it's his. N-ary ones are a little more tricky, especially if you introduce the ability for faster characters (i.e. thiefs/rogues) to have more turns per unit time than slower ones (plate-wearing fighters). This is a pretty common balancing mechanism, because in it's absence the fighters are at a distinct advantage by default.

Again, my suggestion is to take a page from final fantasy (ten specifically) and show a stack off to one side of the "turn order". As each turn happens the character who just acted is removed from the stack. This gives a pretty easy sense of who is acting, and also gives you a place to display the duration of any "this happens for X turns" effects.

About the controls ... why the need to press space? You can detect mouse and keyboard events, why not have the turns rotate at a fixed speed with the space bar to start and stop them? This might take away from the visceral feel of mashing the space bar as your guy tears through his enemies, but it also might make things much less repetitive.

Edit

Forgot to mention what I thought of it. Generally I like the idea. I've played Muds before, and I think it would be interesting to see that general concept done as a roguelike.

My immediate thought when I saw this was that having a player-managed universe would be awesome. Since your "art assets" are piles of ascii characters with the right setup your players could build their own homes and defend towns of their own invention. The "outside world" could be created algorithmically and be just about truly boundless. I don't know if you've ever played Dwarf Fortress but it's where some of these ideas are coming from.[/i]

There was a roguelike in development called "Guild", which had you controlling a party. Looks like the links to the game have gone dead and a quick search didn't reveal anything. I played it once, basically, you controlled the "lead" character, and the other characters followed you around in the dungeon. You could switch which character was in the lead, and you could take control of the individual characters as well.

Multi-player could be done with timed turns. There's been a bunch of discussion over the years about multi-player roguelikes on rec.games.roguelike.development:

http://groups.google.com/group/rec.game ... this+group

I would also suggest timed turns. For example the monsters move every 3 seconds OR as soon as one player moves. Player moves could be received and triggered every second for example.
You could also make the monster movement time frame part of a difficulty setting (easy = 5 seconds or 2 seconds when player moves, medium = 3 seconds or 1 second if player moves, hard = 3 seconds and immediately whenever player moves).

But multiplayer roguelike sounds cool in general
It's also one of my favorite game types. I played Larn around 86 or 87. I ported Moria to our company's UNIX system (a paid job because my boss loved Moria!!!). I also played Nethack and ADOM and am now playing StoneSoup (based on Dungeon Crawl).
And of course I loved the graphical real time roguelikes Diablo and Diablo II

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Guild has a new website if anyone wants to check it out, its a group based roguelike that I mentioned in my earlier post:

http://www.roguetemple.com/guild/

I was toying with the idea of designing a game that is basically like a cross between a MMORPG and a roguelike. All the multiplayer roguelike games I have seen only work over a LAN, so I think a MMORPG would actualy be something new here. The game would have to be more action based then turn based.

It could provide interesting gameplay. Think multi user raids involving strategies to clear them. Online communities for guilds and item trading. Basicly all the good MMORPG elements in small program that doesn't require a killer video card or monthly subscription.

Maybe have something like a 45-60 seconds (or until both players pressed "turn done") turn where both players submit their orders (which may contain more than 1 action per character, think Jagged Alliance, XCOM or Fallout 1/2 style action points) which are then executed simultaneously.

That might reduce frustration caused by waiting for the other player to play their turn, because you are playing your turn at the same time.

Of course you have to work out how to execute the commands at the same time (e.g. player A ordered his knight to go to player B's archer and swing his sword at him, but player B have his archer walking somewhere else this turn), but I think it's doable & not too hard of a problem.

Ever played NWN/NWN2?

It's turned based, but in real time.

Basically each turn is 10 rounds (60 seconds).
Each round is 6 seconds.
Each tick is divided into 12 'ticks' (2 ticks per second).

In those six seconds the player has X amount of attacks (depending on skill) or can run Y amount of space (depending on how fast they are).

It flows very good, feels like a real time game; but everything is calculated in rounds.

Basically Player A will take his tick, Player B will take his and just loop though that.

Actions are set up ahead of time. You say "Attack" and it auto attacks for you till you cancel it. Skills/spells/items can be hotkeyed for quick access.

i've been thinking about how something like this would control for some time, and what i've come up is that it may pretty well work if it's not just commanding the squad (which would happen by mouse) but also participating personally in the battle (using standard roguelike keyboard controls), as the movements of the player would progress turns (while commands to other units can be given in-between with mouse, when player character is not moving).

it would give you comfortable, quick and effective control over squad(mates), but retain the responsive, pacing-defining roguelike step-controls.