Owl’s Portfolio

Leonard linked to You Only Live Once. I have not tried it, despite the only about an hour of gameplay label; I want to call attention to one element of the blurb.

Extremely tactical combat. There is no randomness in combat. You always hit and always do full damage. This means that careful placement is the difference between success and failure.

I can’t decide whether this is a terrible idea or complete freaking genius. (I assume it applies to the monsters as well.)

First I’d like to thank Leonard for taking the time to write two responses to my earlier post about Nethack. I mean to write a response to those responses, but right now I haven’t the brain, so instead I am going to talk about Dwarf Fortress, which an anonymous commenter on the previous post recommended.

Continued…

The voices in my head have decided that I am going to write a roguelike game. They are unlikely to get their way because (a) I don’t have time, and (b) I am not sufficiently familiar with the space of existing roguelikes to do something genuinely new. I’ve played a lot of Nethack, but never ascended; I tried (Z)Angband a couple times but I was severely put off by the non-persistent dungeons and gave up on it. I’ve never even looked at ADOM, and I’m sure there are others.

However, I’m going to scribble down the ideas banging around in my head anyway. Maybe something will come of it. In this post I’m going to concentrate on the virtues and flaws of Nethack, which I know very well. Virtues:

• The game starts off a challenge and remains that way as far as I have ever gotten (killed by a cockatrice after finding the vibrating square but before fighting Rodney).
• The dungeon persists; that is, once you have seen a level, it will be the same for the entire game. This is self-evidently the Right Thing and I do not understand how anyone can stand to play a roguelike that doesn’t do it.
• Relatedly, each level of the dungeon fits on the standard 80x25 terminal. I am of two minds about this one; there are places where one would really like to have bigger levels, notably the Quest. However, it helps the player keep everything straight in their mind.
• It is said that The DevTeam Think Of Everything; that is, just about any action you can think of works and has logical, often useful, consequences.
• There is a huge diversity of enemies, and the enemy AI is pretty darn good, although not as good as it could be.
• The game’s interaction with you is witty and culturally rich.

Not so much virtues:

• The basic game mechanics are borrowed from first edition D&D and are really showing their age. The state of the art in tabletop hack-and-slash is much nicer to work with, not to mention easier to explain to players.
• I lean toward thinking that the class system is also a relic of the past that should go. I like the class specific quests but I don’t like the huge variation in starting abilities (although you could argue that this is handy for replay value).
• It is too damn hard to identify items safely. If I had a dime for every time I’ve been killed while lugging around objects that could have saved my bacon if only I’d known what they were…
• The equipment optimization space has only a few, obvious global minima.
• Artifacts are neither as diverse nor as interesting as they ought to be. Here I have a specific idea: I’d like to borrow the way magic weapons work in Earthdawn.¹ You find a magic item, it does something not terribly exciting, but you can discover and complete side quests that unlock more and more of its powers. Naturally, the side quests get harder as the rewards get better.
• The middle game can get very tedious; lots of trekking back and forth to item caches and altars, exploring dozens of maze levels, etc.

Outright flaws:

• The overall goal is kind of boring — when you get down to it, it’s just a MacGuffin hunt. If I were actually going to write a roguelike this is the big thing I would like to change.
• Starting players are too much at the mercy of the RNG for equipment. Given that you are supposed to have been the chosen one of the god and prepared from youth for the quest, and that it is known that the dungeon is dangerous, you would think your instructors would have chipped in for decent armour, or at least enough food rations that you wouldn’t starve to death in the first few levels. (This interacts with the class system badly, too. If you were some punk kid with no particular skills and no holy mission it would make more sense that you have only the gear you do.)
• The code is a crawling horror, and the DevTeam’s secrecy strictures make it impossible to tell whether there is any ongoing development. I infer from the way the known-bug list on nethack.org keeps growing that there is some life there, but given its size, a bug-fix release is years overdue.

¹ Which I have never played.

Author’s Note (August, 2009)

This is a short story in the form of a lab report for a course I TAed at UCSD. It was originally a handout for the students, demonstrating how to write a lab report that satisfied all of the professor’s requirements, while not being cribbable for any of the actual labs they had to do. I then published it online for International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Wretch Day 2007, a holiday which I wholeheartedly approve of, and which deserves a bit of explanation.

Credit for inspiration and style goes to Girl Genius. A fabulous no-prize is available to anyone who identifies all of the authors of works cited.

I do not now, nor will I ever, endorse the breaded clams.

Introduction

Historically, cromulence was considered an (undesirable) characteristic solely of gizmos. Mbogo (1987) asserts that widgets can also be cromulent when forced to speak at length under time pressure, but Davenport (1993) insists that Mbogo misidentified a particular breed of gizmo as a widget. The gizmo-widget-frobnitz trichotomy is now considered archaic (Nutter, 2004) and there is no theoretical reason to believe cromulence should be limited to any modern category of automata. In this study, we replicate the classic study that established the concept in the first place (Blofeld, 1949), using Mbogo’s protocol for time pressure, and expect to see substantially the same amount of cromulence in all classes of subject.

Methods

Forty-three automata enrolled in COGS 101b participated in this study as part of their course requirements, the author of this article among them. The study was administered over the Internet, so subjects could do their trial under whatever conditions they pleased. The author used his personal computer in a quiet room with no distractions, but cannot speak for other subjects’ conditions. The computer presented Blofeld’s fourteen topic prompts in sequence. For half of them, randomly selected, subjects were permitted to respond for as long as they wished, pressing a key when finished; for the other half, exactly three minutes were permitted for a reply, with a prominently displayed count-down clock to indicate time remaining. A custom Java program measured cromulence in replies; this is not as accurate as a hardware veridicator but should still provide a reasonable gauge. At the end of the experiment, subjects were given Nutter’s standard ten-point survey for categorization of automata.

Results

We measure some cromulence in all categories of subjects, but there are some interesting differences. The author is categorized as a left-ended isoclonic frammistat by Nutter’s scheme. He displayed 13% cromulence in the self-timed condition and 16% in the time-limited condition; we do not have enough information from the survey system to do proper statistical tests but we believe this is not a significant difference. In general, right-ended automata appear to be significantly more cromulent under time pressure, whereas left-ended automata are indifferent to the condition. Veeblefetzers display more cromulence in general, but become less cromulent under time pressure. Clonicity appears to make no difference. See the appendix for raw data from the author’s trial and summary data from the group.

Discussion

As we predicted, all classes of automata display some level of cromulence in their speech. Davenport’s insistence on its being a gizmo-only deficiency has been definitively disproved. However, most automata formerly classified as gizmos would be veeblefetzers under the Nutter scheme, and we observed veeblefetzers to be more cromulent in general, especially when not under time restrictions; perhaps this is why cromulence was mainly observed in gizmos in the past. Strict time limits are, after all, not common for speechifying. Also, we think this makes a nice demonstration of why modern classification schemes are superior. The left-/right-ended distinction we observed would have been completely lost in the old trichotomy.

Although there has been much speculation (Mbogo, 1999), we still are largely in the dark on the causes of cromulence and other such properties, so we cannot claim to know why we see the cross-category distinctions we do. We believe there might be something to the proposal that it has to do with the way the feedback loops are wired. Further experimental work is necessary.

References

Blofeld, E. S. (1949). On qualities of automatic speech. J. Mechanical Life 8, 94–157.

Davenport, D. (1993). Widget cromulence revisited. J. Gadgetry 43, 143–149.

Mbogo, F. (1987). Evidence for cromulence in widgets as well as gizmos. Cogwheel 183, 200-217.

Mbogo, F. (1999). Undesigned characteristics of mechanical thinking engines: a review. J. Mechanical Life 58, 23–71.

Nutter, A. (2004). A Modern Taxonomy of Automata. Frankfurt: Wulfenbach Press.

Raw Data

Cromulence, % — group averages
L–left-ended R–right-ended I–isoclonic A–asynclonic F–frammistat V–veeblefetzer

	LIF	RIF	LAF	RAF	LIV	RIV	LAV	RAV
3 min	16.2	23.3	14.2	22.9	45.1	57.3	43.4	59.5
Unlim	13.3	10.7	11.9	12.8	73.3	68.1	78.1	68.3