Lurking II: A Madness (In Development)

oklabsoft · May 2, 2017

Lurking II: A Madness is an old-school cRPG currently in development. The project began in September of 2016 and the game is a sequel to Lurking RPG.

Teaser 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SS7BxhzX3kI

Teaser 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIlXd5SftEg

I wanted to open this thread to get some input on various topics that will help us along in development...

oklabsoft · May 2, 2017

oklabsoft · May 2, 2017

My first question is... death is a very integral part of the story. Although not a rogue-like, we plan to make character death permanent as for it to not be so would really detract from the impact of the story. So would it turn you off if character death was instantly saved to permanent or would you rather have the option to restore from a previous save before the death occurred? Thanks for taking the time to give your opinion. -oklabsoft

Corwin · May 2, 2017

I for one NEVER play any game with perma-death; life's too short, especially at my age. I refuse to replay large parts of a game because my character died. Thereofre, if this is what you decide to do I wouldn't buy, or play this game.

Pongo · May 2, 2017

Permadeath as an option is great. Permadeath as a mandatory requirement would put me off.

oklabsoft · May 3, 2017

Thanks for the replies. Based on opinions so far from this discussion and a similar one on another site, it seems like the best option would be to allow the player to restore from the last saved position if they desire. We will simply document our design that death is death and let the player decide their course of action and game experience. It probably seems a strange question but I think those that play the game to completion will understand this question better in the end. Long way to go yet but we are working.

fadedc · May 3, 2017

I don't have a problem with perma-death, but it really has to be the right kind of game for it to make sense. Games like FTL would not have been anywhere nearly as successful without perma-death, but in the standard RPG it generally makes less sense. I think we'd need to know more about why death is so important, and why you feel this game requires perma-death. If I go into a crypt that's too high level for me, my party dies, and I need to restart the entire game because of it, I'm probably not going to like that. If it's somehow woven more strongly into the plot, or there are ways to recover from deaths that are well built into the game, that's going to be different.

crpgnut · May 3, 2017

Like Corwin, perma-death is a total no sale for me. I don't even read past that word when deciding on a purchase. I don't care about the Dev's reasoning. My reasoning says I'm not replaying the same area over.

Roq · May 3, 2017

The problem is that party RPGs are largely about gathering up a group of characters that you can become attached too. If they drop like flies, due to RNG, then that doesn't work so well. For instance, Darkest Dungeon is a good game with lots of nice ideas, but I do find myself tiring of it and just don't feel like loading it up after a while, cos I have no real investment in my characters. OTOH I can remember the names of the characters from RPGs I played 30 years ago

.

One thing I do dislike though is the save/load spamming cycle. A wipe should definitely have consequences (otherwise there is no tension), but not so much that you need to resort to a save game or else have to start over. Wiz1 (and some subsequent games) had a single save mechanic where you had to go and rescue your chars from wherever they expired and that was lot of fun tension, although would no doubt need to be tamed down a bit for contemporary players.

Jaguar · May 3, 2017

I like permadeath a lot - but if the content is not procedurally generated and you have to play the same series of events over and over, it can get tedious. I like a high challenge level in games.

oklabsoft · May 3, 2017

Thanks much all. I appreciate all of your points. Faded touched it when mentioning death being strongly woven in to the plot. I don't want to spoil anything though but your points have given me what I believe to be a great way to handle this.

fadedc · May 3, 2017

Roq said:
Wiz1 (and some subsequent games) had a single save mechanic where you had to go and rescue your chars from wherever they expired and that was lot of fun tension, although would no doubt need to be tamed down a bit for contemporary players.

As a kid I have fond memories of keeping my hand on the power switch for the device my Apple 2 was plugged into, so that I could be ready to turn off the computer if it looked my party in Wizardry 1 was going to die. That kept it from recording the wipe when it happened and let me recover from the last saved point back in town.

From a modern perspective, I like permanent death in some games, but I'm not sure that a Wizardry type game is the type of game that I'd want that. Of course you could send a backup party to rescue your old party, but that was a really long and tedious process. CRPGaddict has some interesting articles where he tried playing some of the wizardry games without loading saves.

oklabsoft · May 3, 2017

fadedc said:
As a kid I have fond memories of keeping my hand on the power switch for the device my Apple 2 was plugged into, so that I could be ready to turn off the computer if it looked my party in Wizardry 1 was going to die. That kept it from recording the wipe when it happened and let me recover from the last saved point back in town.

Right there with you. For me it was Control-OpenApple-Reset when I died in Ultima III (unless my memory fails... which is entirely possible).

Anyway, in L2 you can save your progress during any moment unless in combat mode. My idea is to record the death and if the player chooses to resume from the last saved moment, build it in such as that character (or characters) says something in the game narration like: "Thriftis appears shaken. Thriftis: I have had a vision of my death! But it has passed, let us go." and maybe add an ample reduction in experience making it more challenging to level up the next time.

Any thoughts?

fadedc · May 4, 2017

Hmm...it's really hard to judge that without knowing more about the game and exactly why you feel that mechanic is necessary. If it was a traditional RPG I'd find that mechanic to be more annoying than interesting, but I'm not sure what is different about the game your working on that might make it different.

oklabsoft said:
Anyway, in L2 you can save your progress during any moment unless in combat mode. My idea is to record the death and if the player chooses to resume from the last saved moment, build it in such as that character (or characters) says something in the game narration like: "Thriftis appears shaken. Thriftis: I have had a vision of my death! But it has passed, let us go." and maybe add an ample reduction in experience making it more challenging to level up the next time.

Any thoughts?

oklabsoft · May 4, 2017

Also... Found a great poll and discussion of this very topic in a Tactica thread.

oklabsoft · May 10, 2017

Some additional new game tile art…

oklabsoft · May 24, 2017

Began messing with implementing a 'map' function designed to show a zoom out of surroundings provided your party has visualized the area in their travels. The following gives an example of what it looks like if the surrounding area has been completely explored. Not yet sure how exactly I will incorporate it and for what areas (over-world only and have to find maps of The Depths or whatever). Just experimenting.

oklabsoft · September 28, 2017

Update:
o Good chunk of quest specific mechanics done.
o NPCs at 300 and climbing will probably reach 500... All with complete (and many secret) convos.
o Utilized tiles at 500+
o Battle quality = L1 * 50
o Over 300 items of weapons, armor, clothing, etc... Many unique and secret.
o Puzzles and secrets galore and growing.
o Detail... Oh my... Detail.
o We recently scored $4 from L1 so probably a pig Latin version... Seriously though looking into cloth map production.

Hope some out there are looking forward to playing this as much as we are looking forward to it being played. Thanks!

oklabsoft · October 13, 2017

Here is a sample of just a few character look possibilities resulting from Lurking II’s ‘paper doll’ system…

https://oklabsoft.itch.io/lurking-ii-a-madness

YanBG · October 21, 2017

Have you thought of doing HD art after the engine is finished?

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