Arena about javelin HOT 16 CLOSED

javelinRL 2 points 4 hours ago

Hey OP I can't play the game because it's Windows-only but I'm coming up with an arena location soon for my own r/javelinrl and I'd love to hear from you what makes this title so unique as an arena-focused game! One of my goals with Javelin is to learn from the best games out there and there to mix-and-match into the game as possible.

If you have the time and want to go on a bit about how the game works and what makes it so special that you've created this post here you'll certainly have my attention!

from javelin.

c--8[S] 2 points 3 hours ago

Sure bro. Just off the top of my head since it's been a few years since I played this a lot.

Even if it's real-time, it made good use of cooldowns. I'd still love to see a turn-based one.
It has a nice array of classes(with specific skills) and races(with specific passices) for you to mix and match for your team.
It had multiple modes.
The achievements, I'm unsure about. It's nice because with achievements, you get unlock points for the unlockables (more classes, races, arenas) but that's just it. Once you unlock them all, the replayability kind of takes a nose dive. It differs a bit in roguelikes where it's different every time you execute it.
There's still a progression of sorts in the modes (league, I think) where your team fights in a league or tournament. Every fight you earn gold and exp to strengthen your team. This is what I like the most about it. If only it had something like an out of the combat gameplay where you can train your team, do some other stuff, change party members, class change a la ragnarok online, etc. While still focusing on the arena, of course. Kind of like in Baldur's Gate's Arena expansions! Yeah. This game just tossed you to battles after you're done upgrading. Then again that's it's focus.
I thought the AI was nice. The way you play it is you have 3 characters in a party, and I think you can switch from who you control, while the AI takes over the others. I'd still have loved it if it locked me to one character. Lots of time my party members have a higher score than my main lol.

Wow that's a bit convoluted. I'm not sure if it'll help you at all lol. I hope it does. I gotta admit this is the first I've heard of Javelin, and from the looks of it, I might be enjoying it soon.

I don't know much about it yet, but here's what I'll say based on my arena preferences and assumptions.

If it's an arena location, consider an event/storyline/questline where the player is trapped in the arena. Unlike the arenas in The Elder Scrolls, where a fighter can come and go as he pleases. It'd be a pain to other players, but that's what I'd want if I'm gonna be fighting in an arena.
Consider having the player start from scratch in the arena. I mean, if you're gonna have level 50 gear only to fight wolves... I guess you still can run it like that but have the option to skip the small fry. Heh.
Maaaybe even have them and their humanoid enemies pick from a preset pool of equipment.

Honestly just mumbling now at this point. Really, I'd probably play it regardless of how you make it. I'd love to give it a shot when it's ready! Good luck!

from javelin.

javelinRL 2 points an hour ago

Glad you were up to writing about the game! I thought it was more likely I would get ignored :) (you know, most people are pretty lazy when it comes to writing up long comments)

There are a lot of good points in your reply, I'll make sure to use them when designing the Arena location in my game! I especially like the idea of accruing in-game points (achievements) that you can put to use (instead of purely cosmetic achievements).

It had multiple modes.

Do you remember which ones? Watching an episode of Battlestar Galactica today I though it would be super fun to have a battle mode in which you go around freeing prisoners to help you fight as the battle evolves!

How did the game handle death and recovering HP? Are the units fully healed after a fight? In Javelin Towns sometimes host Tournaments. They are simple fights, some with special rules but nothing too different. In these Tournament fights (called Exhibitions) every unit that becomes seriously wounded (or gravely injured or close to death) is removed from the battlefield. The reasoning for that is that people don't really want to see death in a sports tournament (like boxing or fencing in real life) and that the player wouldn't want to enter a difficult tournament fight if he could risk losing his units for real. I'm guessing though that the Arena could be the real deal - fights are to the death or until a unit passes out, the (imagined) public too is there to see real blood and life threatening situations! I'd love to hear how RoV handles this sort of thing and am open to new ideas too!

From the way you're describing it I think I'll make the Arena a starting location in Javelin. This means it is guaranteed to spawn near the player's starting location - this way players can pretty much ignore the entire rest of the game and focus only on arena battles if they choose to! If you think you'd like to help me test and design this location on my game let me know and I'll make it a development priority and send you an alpha version as soon as I can! Sounds like a great way to make the game have more reach towards players who are not interested in the entire campaign mode and just on quick and dirty interesting combat (at least at first)! I'd even advertise it as one of the "selling points" of the game (which is a weird term since Javelin is 100% free lol).

Almost everything else you mention sounds pretty doable as well - but in Javelin's way, not necessarily exactly as you describe here, but hopefully close enough! Just finished reading and hearing you'd like to help test and see how it turns out! I'll make it my second-next priority, can I contact you through here when a first version is ready or would you prefer an email? If so let me know your address in a PM!

Your message did help out a lot! I had pretty much no idea how I was going to go with the Arena place, I just knew I wanted one in the game - like you see on many other classic RPGs! Instead of having to design it from scratch you pretty much handed it to me on a plate :D I think it's really precious when a game sticks to us for so long - making you create this post all this time later! If I can capture even a hint of this in Javelin's Arena I'll be very proud of myself! On this note, let me know whatever other details you can come up with about what made playing RoV a great experience for you!

Final note: do you usually delete your comments? Some people do periodically (usually through some sort of plugin) to protect their privacy. Let me know because if you don't I'll just save the link to this post and refer back here when creating Javelin's Arena - otherwise I'll have to save the replies somewhere else.

from javelin.

c--8[S] 2 points 42 minutes ago

Hey man. Yeah, I'm guilty, I do like churning out long comments when I can.

Regarding the modes, nothing too diverse. If I remember correctly, it's mostly :

Quick Battle - You build your party and they get max(?)/enough skill points to play with. Equipments I'm not sure, maybe just a default, you never get to equip stuff in this mode.

Tournament - You build your party like in quick battle, and fight tournament style. Every fight you gain 1 skill point per character. I can't remember if there were equipment options here though.

League - This is the most fleshed out of the modes. You start out at level 1 with your team (you get to name your team lol) and just fight in a league. Your rating drops/improves as you play, and your opponents get stronger/weaker depending on your rating. Fights give you money and exp so you can buy equipment and skills.

a battle mode in which you go around freeing prisoners to help you fight as the battle evolves!

This sounds interesting. The closest thing in RoV are the powerups that spawn. Most times the AI will make a beeline for them. Would be interesting, like say you start out alone and the prisoners you free would fight with you.

How did the game handle death and recovering HP? Nothing too intricate. They die and get healed. Of course, there are healer classes, but their heals only matter in combat. Your system is way more interesting.

I guess you could either keep the arena simple with purely fatal fights or weave in your exhibitions system by allowing a fighter to concede before he dies. Could also prevent low health characters from fighting as a result. Really up to you. So far it's all so interesting anyway.

If you think you'd like to help me test and design this location on my game let me know and I'll make it a development priority and send you an alpha version as soon as I can!

Sure thing, man. I'd probably be playing Javelin's campaign too so I'd be familiar when the alpha's ready.

I'd prefer being contacted here. I check this more than my email heh.

Aaaand I do delete my comments occasionally, whenever I boot linux up. Should save it somewhere else to be sure.

Thanks, man. Hope to see it soon!

from javelin.

javelinRL 1 point 22 minutes ago

weave in your exhibitions system by allowing a fighter to concede before he dies

Definitely - the game already has a Flee system which could be used with ease. Would be the same as conceding.

Reading you reply it really sounds like the possibilities are endless! I'll be counting on you for feedback as I create the Arena - this way we can play it out and try different things until we reach that sweet spot!

One thing I'm thinking of right now is that it would be interesting to keep your Arena characters and normal party characters separate. On one hand this is less intuitive and limits your abilities to use you own characters in the arena. On the other hand it allows us to be more free with whatever we want to do inside the Arena, knowing that players won't be able to abuse the location's system to "break" the rest of the game - for example we can have faster upgrading and access to items, which would be overpowered if the player could just take those items and characters back to the normal game. Something to think about and weight the pros and cons over time...

I'd prefer being contacted here. I check this more than my email heh.

I know what you mean! Though I don't use reddit very much anymore you'll probably find me more often on other sites than checking my personal email, unless I'm expecting to receive an important message, in which I case I'll leave it open...

I'd probably be playing Javelin's campaign too so I'd be familiar when the alpha's ready.

Sure thing! Let me know if you've got any feedback as you get to know the game!

Hey that sounds like a little fun project for me :) I'm pretty sure the Arena will be one of the highlights of Javelin 1.7 when it comes out (if not the major one)! I've been wrong about my deadlines before, especially since Javelin is just something I do for fun and it can take a lot of work sometimes but I'd be happy to start working on the Arena in at most a week from now and hopefully get an alpha out a week after that. Sometimes I get lucky though and manage to do the work I think will take a while in a single sitting - it mostly depends on if I have technical difficulties with some part of the code in specific (usually as it relates to other parts of the game) and if I have to reiterate over the design a few times before "getting it right" or if I nail it first time... Well, let's see, I'll keep you posted anyways! The Temples thing featured in 1.6 was something I thought it would take weeks to a month to get right and I literally did it in 2 days of work in a weekend with a lot more stuff than I originally planned to do - so here's to hoping the Arena will be similar!

from javelin.

from c--8 via /r/roguelikes sent 7 hours ago

One thing I'm thinking of right now is that it would be interesting to keep your Arena characters and normal party characters separate.

This is how Baldur's Gate handled it. Granted, your characters from the main campaign never came across the arena anyway...

Here's my idea for that. You can have your main party "buy" or "sponsor" a gladiator team. That's your separate arena party. And with their achievements in the arena, your main party gets their prizes, too. Say, they won 5 fights? Oh cool, here's a potion of moral corruption for you. You can even expand on it, like you can donate equipment (limited, of course) to your gladiators. Spitballing, but I think that's viable.

Hey, no rush. I'm crap at programming so I know how difficult things could be, and even more so when it's rushed.

from javelin.

javelinRL 1 point just now

My thinking was that you could use money to "buy" an arena team (and even get a starting kit for free, probably just one). Once you're set up you can engage in battles and win "tickets" upon victory. These tickets would allow you to do anything from buying gear to recruiting new arena fighters, to upgrading your guys, etc... then I was thinking that for modes you'd be able to spend some tickets to "allow surrender on next fight" or "allow prisoners to be freed on next fight" and whatever mods and modes we can come up with. Also of course you could bet your own tickets on your own fights, loser takes nothing, winner takes double - and possibly on CPU fights as well for the "league" mode (though that could be trickier to do, we'll see). There would probably have to be a cap on how many tickets you can bet at once though, otherwise a smart player could just double his total amount every time - and you can see how that would be too powerful. I think half the encounter level of the most powerful party in battle would be OK, rounded up - this way you'd able to start betting around 1 ticket at most when you start and 10 tickets at most on higher levels, resulting in a reward of 20. This needs to be fine-tuned, of course - and you always win 1 ticket for a victory, even if you don't bet anything.

I'm not sure about taking items from/to the arena but of course there needs to be some interface between the Arena world and the game world to make it worthwhile to players who are not going to focus solely on Arena-style gameplay. So, in this sense there is probably going to be necessary to offer something... but it's a tough call because:

If it is too powerful or exploitable if could likely break the "normal" game, and that is really not good since the main game is what Javelin is about (even though I think some people would rather just do Arena instead, which I hope to support).
#1 here being a no-no I would, instead of trying to fine-tune it just make the rewards system very biased towards unproductive but then it beats the purpose.
I almost want to go with the "pure" route and say to keep the Arena and normal game entirely separate but that would be giving up without trying.

Right now I'm thinking of a "redeem" system. From the get-go you're shown a list of rewards you can trade tickets for. Probably a list of 10 powerful artifacts that you can think of as long-term rewards for playing in the Arena, while the short-term goal would be having fun in a more "configurable" environment.

I think this would work as an initial design though let me know if you come up with more stuff - especially if while playing the game you get more ideas! I'll be making a list up of things you could do with extra tickets so I don't end up forgetting it later:

Add a new temporary ally to your team (this would allow you to create massive fights for low price, which should be fun!). First you select the ally level (5 tickets = level 5 ally) and then the number of allies to add (4 level 5 allies = 4*5 = 20 tickets). You can do this as many times as you want per fight. This would allow you to participate in absolutely massive battles even at an early-ish level.
Define the map type (1 ticket). Javelin offers over 22 randomly-generated maps so this would be a nice feature. Maybe make it choose a random type whenever you select this option? Would give it more of a "roulette" feel.
Lock your own characters (gives you a number of tickets to spend equal to half the unit's level): you then need to free this guy during battle before using him. Maybe implement this via the Sleep spell (Combatant#ap=Float.MAX_VALUE) or a custom Condition.
Have a spell pre-cast on one (or all) of you units. (Level 5 spell = 5 tickets). Javelin has 49 spells, ranging from faster movement speed to boosting your stats, to making you ethereal, etc. So why not?
Buy items/upgrades/new units - but this is outside the "battle setup" screen.

One of the complicated things would be the "league" system - should we scale the enemies to the player level? Maybe have novice/seasoned/veteran/epic leagues and generate enemy teams in the appropriate range? I think its better to create the basics first and only then move on to this, which could be our "holy grail" lol Sorry for writing so much, I'm pretty much using this space to write up my design notes. Feel free to add to anything here - and I would love to hear alternative names for "tickets", which sound pretty bland.... Arena coins maybe?

from javelin.

from c--8 via /r/roguelikes sent 5 hours ago

Everything sounds good.

One of the complicated things would be the "league" system - should we scale the enemies to the player level? Maybe have novice/seasoned/veteran/epic leagues and generate enemy teams in the appropriate range? I think its better to create the basics first and only then move on to this, which could be our "holy grail"

Yeah, of course. When you get to this part though, you could implement a rating/ELO kind of system. Might be complicated, but that would make sure the team stays in their right range without locking content (like if they plow through, they'd land at a high level, only to get shot back down because it was a fluke)

Or yeah, I like the novice-epic leagues. Like don't allow the team to get on the next league without finishing at the top in the previous/weaker league.

Coins do sound better. Credits? Favor? Maybe you can "free" one/some of your fighters to join your party via coins or winning the big leagues lol

from javelin.

I'm glad you had the patience to read all of that, I'm sorry - as I said I'm as much chatting with you as trying to develop my own ideas. Here is what I'm thinking about the league system so far, feel free to add or criticize. You start by selecting the team members you want to put on a starting league championship. For this you need to make a team based solely on your own gladiators. Javelin/d20 has its own way of determining the difficulty (encounter level) of a group of units but here are the general guidelines: a team of 4 rookies would enter the novice league (level 1-5). The same applies for seasoned (6-10), veteran (11-15) and epic (16-20). You can't have a team of higher level than 20 at first in a league (though it's fine on other arena matches). Javelin does all the math for this already so you can have any number of units in your league team, as long as in total they don't get over level 20 as an encounter group (actual numbers will vary once I do the math properly but this is the starting point). In case you wanna read the system for yourself check out the "Encountering encounter levels" appendix here https://github.com/tukkek/javelin/raw/master/doc/Upper%20Krust's%20Challenge%20Ratings%20v5.pdf

Now that we know which league you're in the games start - you of course have to fight your own games but you can choose to watch or determine automatically the CPU vs CPU ones. Skipping or not you can still bet on the winner on all games. Unlike other Arena matches you probably won't be able to spend tickets to change the fight parameters since that would give you an unfair advantage (that is fine during normal matches because the game can create a suitable group of monsters based on your choices while in the leagues the opponents are predetermined). You'll still be able to upgrade your characters, buy items and such during the tournament though.

The number of teams in each league is important because it determines how many fights you have to go through to become the champion. I'm thinking 8 or 16, which would result in 3 or 4 combats per league for your team to become champion. Is that too few? I'm thinking elimination bracket but we could do round robin or some other style, as long as it's not too complex to program. It's interesting to not have too many teams at each league though because the player will have to choose to watch/skip/bet on each match even if his units will not be participating.

The enemy teams are going to be generated in the level scales above (so all teams in the novice league will be generated between encounter level 1 and 5). This means a level 10 seasoned team will have a better chance of winning it's league than a level 11 veteran team but since the enemies are generated randomly on that scale and the AI is not as good as a human player this doesn't mean that a level 11 veteran team won't have decent chances of winning the veteran league, especially if you consider the player can have coins stocked beforehand to spend as the tournament progresses.

Entering a tournament costs 5, 10, 15 or 20 coins according to the league you're in. The prize will be a pool of all these values summed up and divided 1/4 for the second place and 3/4 for the first place - this way the second place gets double the investment back and the first prize wins 3x that, which sounds pretty good! Making the math here it sounds like 8 teams per league (needing to win 3 matches to become champion) would be nice. But that sounds like too little? At least it would be fast enough for players to be able to finish it all in one sitting... I'll start with that and it shouldn't be too hard to change again once the first version is working.

don't allow the team to get on the next league without finishing at the top in the previous/weaker league.

This sounds way cool! Even if you have stronger units you'd have to become champion of the earlier leagues before joining the stronger ones! Sure as hell will give the players something to fight for - since the prize pool of the epic league is a whopping 120 coins that would certainly be worth the trouble! Just imagine, with 120 coins you can literally put 120 weak units (like half-orcs) into an arena fight! That's a lot of orcs! Thinking about it this would also be a good way of gauging the redeemable artifacts prices (the prize pool of the epic league's winner) that you can take out into the normal game.

Maybe you can "free" one/some of your fighters to join your party via coins or winning the big leagues lol

Exactly what I was thinking just now. For example, it could cost you exactly 120 coins to take one of your guys out from the Arena into the normal game. It could be game-breaking but if you actually went through all of the trouble of winning all of the 4 leagues I guess you're entitled to that, right? Based on that I'll add a few more things you can do with coins to the list:

• 120 coins: free one of your guys out onto into the real world
• 90 coins: hire a new gladiator of level 11 to 15 (a random list is shown and you get to pick one out of 5 or so, this could apply to other items here as well)
• 60 coins: hire a new gladiator of level 6 to 10
• 30 coins: hire a new gladiator of level 1 to 5
• 120 coins: acquire a level 1 artifact to your normal game party (what exactly constitutes a level 1 here is to be determined)
• 240 coins: acquire a level 2 artifact to your normal game party (and so on)
• 3 coins: acquire a minor item (like a potion of cure light wounds) for your arena mercenaries
• 6 coins: acquire a medium item for your arena mercenaries
• 9 coins: acquire a grand item for your arena mercenaries
• 12 coins: acquire an epic item for your arena mercenaries (again what's in each tier is to be determined)

from javelin.

from c--8 via /r/roguelikes sent 11 hours ago

Hey, looks like you have most of it figured out! That's awesome. The only thing I can add to is the tournament format. Pretty much stuck with RR or elimination since anything more complex is overkill. It's either gonna be RR with fewer teams or elimination with more teams to balance out the fights (if I understand it right.)

If it was up to me, I'd go with elimination. To me it has that tournament feel, more than RR, really.

If you wanna go do both though, here's an idea:

Since (in universe) there probably would be more weaker teams than the strong, start with many teams at the weaker leagues. As they go up in rank, there would of course be fewer teams.

You could go purely with elimination for all leagues, or elimination for the weaker leagues, round robin for the stronger (fewer teams) leagues. Maybe elimination for the absolute final sets. Or really just elimination for all, as long as I get to bet on matches lol.

Just imagine, with 120 coins you can literally put 120 weak units (like half-orcs) into an arena fight!

I think I just heard my computer shudder...

Also hey, if you're going with D&D anyway, maybe add a Wish, with high cost, of course, to at least make a high-profile incentive for re-playing the arena. Could be a way to slip in Wish if you haven't already.

Hell, maybe if you have enough content to have lategame/endgame content, you can use the arena as a gateway to it i.e. 999 coins for a portal to another world or something.

from javelin.

javelinRL 1 point just now

looks like you have most of it figured out!

Well I do need to sort the details out before starting to code the thing, which is what I'm doing :D You'll be a great help testing the concepts during play to see if they work out and telling me when it doesn't, or where it could be improved - especially based on your experience with Rings of Valor!

If you wanna go do both though, here's an idea:

The problem with having both is that I have to code both.. and coding both is a lot more work than coding each of them separately. I'll start with elimination since it's what people generally think of when tournaments are involved. If then you think creating RR is actually gonna make the entire thing more fun I'll certainly look into it!

As they go up in rank, there would of course be fewer teams.

This is nice, good idea. The only problem here is that to have "more teams" we pretty much have to double the amount - for example 8 teams for epic, 16 for veteran, 32 for seasoned and 64 for novice. Having to watch/bet/skip 63 fights before you get to yours would be really obnoxious. I'm thinking just have 8 teams for the top leagues and 16 for the lesser? Other problem with more teams is that it would double the coin reward, but that is fine if limited to the lower leagues (lower prize pool).

By they way I think the standard bronze/silver/gold/diamond name scheme would be better, what do you think?

I think I just heard my computer shudder..

Yeah hahaha the Arena will do us a great favor in this regard - Javelin was largely done thinking of those awesome mass scale battles you see on tabletop wargames but you don't get to see them until very late in the game. The arena will be a place players can experience this a lot earlier (and even realize a lot earlier: "hey with enough coins I can have super massive battles here! Cool!"). With enough coins each player will be able to select their own armies and size - suited to their own style and computer power.

I'm also thinking it would be nice for players to spend normal gold on Arena coins but I'm not sure how to do it in a scalable manner. Gold in d20 is exponential so while $50 for a coin is very expensive in the early game, a player on level 5 would be able to buy dozens with ease. Maybe better to avoid that entirely, at least at first.

Could be a way to slip in Wish if you haven't already.

I like that. Wishes are pretty open-ended though, what sort of wishes did you have in mind? (note for myself: could offer same Wish on Haxor too)

if you have enough content to have lategame/endgame content, you can use the arena as a gateway to it

There are a few, just not sure how it would tie in. I'll make a draft here, let me know if you come up with more ideas if you decide to try out the game!

60 coins: acquire 1 ruby (Haxor)
120 coins: Wish
7x120 coins: unlock all Temples

from javelin.

How to handle death and injury in leagues? Probably better to assume fighters are fully healed and resurrected between fights, which avoids having to think of how to deal/scale monsters dying on CPU vs CPU matches.

On normal matches, outside of leagues death would be important to give the player a sense of danger. Would be interesting to remove units who get injured though instead of the usual wounded for friendly battles.

from javelin.

you could even add those animated graphics that moves the representations of teams whenever they win..

That's something I'm not very good at.. but remind me when we're done with the first version and we'll see what can be done!

You could put a DnD feel to it by replacing them with DnD metals

I'm taking a look at this page but having a hard time finding names that would make a natural progression and be easy for newcomers to "get"... let me know what you come up with!

Maybe make the conversion exponential as well?

I'm trying to figure out here a system that will work both gameplay wise and as in-game canon. Here's what I got so far: the Arena keeps all of your coins and you have to personally make the bets and transactions so as not to have a parallel coin market. As long as you have less coins in store you can upgrade your total to X with the following formula (from the doc I've linked you to before): x_x_x*7.5. This means that if you want to have a single coin you pay $8 but if you want to have 10 it's $7500. Note that you don't buy individual coins, you just upgrade you coin bank to that value (otherwise you could buy 10 coins individually for a total of $80). There is no redeeming coins for cash or instead it would be super easy to abuse the system: I pay $8 for 1 coin and get $60 if I manage to redeem 2 coins... Instead normal people would redeem coins for food, season passes, promotions, common items, even furniture lol or entry to raffles and such but that is not something the players would be interested in so it's left off-game.

I'm thinking just having this coin system in the first version of the Arena would be fine for testing as far as rewards go, then it could be expanded later with the other ideas so far.

I think you're on the right track with your Wish idea but I feel like it would be better for us to try to make it work with features that already exist in the game.

from javelin.

Half of this is already on the current development version - more advanced stuff, like the tournaments could go on the next release.

from javelin.

Arena would probably be better leveraging kits instead of manual upgrading.

from javelin.

Unfortunately this vision for the Arena, even though it was implemented and fully functional, turned out to be way too complex, with too much UI code to be ported and of marginal benefit for the game. The same "diluted" style of gameplay can be implemented much more easily with a new Scenario type (and largely, the Scenario mode itself does just that).

This has been completely scraped prior to release and currently a new Arena concept is in branch 1.7, based more on MOBAs than pure Arena-style gameplay, adding a layer of strategy and battle dynamic to the matches that is thankfully a lot more interesting and simple than the original idea. It also supersedes the "Dungeon Rush" mnigame that was also fully implemented - because it does most of the concepts there (but better as well).

from javelin.