Time Lord

Wouldn't he be too easy to abuse? He's a guaranteed save point in a perma-death rogue-like. Just tame him then betray him when things get ugly.

In the spirit of IVAN, we've got to make that a double-edged sword.

Well you'd have to betray him and kill him all while also continuing to fend off whatever it was that made things turn ugly. Probably pretty hard to pull off!

And you'd lose all of your progress when it reset which could potentially be a lot

Keeping him tame could be potentially annoying depending on his stats.. if he ends up getting killed by enemies pretty easily and perpetually returning you back to a certain point in the game

Depending on how things turned ugly, it might be as easy as putting your tamed Time Lord between you and the problem.

Losing progress, no matter how much, just doesn't compare to losing a character outright, which is why I say it's too easy to abuse.

Which is why I say we've got to make it a double-edged sword. There's got to be enough downsides to keeping him around to balance out the potential abuse.

Potential solutions:

* Make him a high-tier unique enemy. Thus encountering him is rare and taming him is pretty difficult.
* Reset his save point every time you change floors. This should make it a bit easier to fight him and a bit less useful to tame him.

Wait, by reset do you mean he creates a new save point on every floor? Isn't that even easier to abuse?

Hm, true. There would need to be some very specific rules when he creates his save point.

I think a cooler way to do it would be to have his special power to temporarily change the elapsed game time which SPOILER ALERT. Click here to see text.? Make it change randomly forward or backwards. If backwards , already dead uniques are available to re-spawn , and if forward we get to see what the enemies look like when its jumps from day 5 to day 243.

Holy smokes Batman that's brutal.

That's pretty cool! SPOILER ALERT. Click here to see text.

So, I've mulled it over. I quite like Batman's idea, so here's some suggestions. Generally it's along the lines of weaker=common, stronger=rare.


Weakest: Time Mages as just another type of enemy.
Time Mages can cast Haste or Slow. Time Magic is difficult!
Elite Time Mages can additionally +/- a day. They have perma-haste.
Unique Time Lord has perma-haste, teleport + control, with the power to +/- multiple days.

Medium:
Named Time Lord is either a unique that can respawn over and over, or a pseudo-unique that is named but keeps spawning like a regular monster.
The idea being there's multiples of him from different timelines.
He has perma-haste, teleport + control, with the power to +/- multiple days.

Rare:
Named Time Lord. He can spawn over and over and doesn't leave a corpse.
The idea being he traverses different timelines by himself.
He has perma-haste, teleport + control, with the power to +/- multiple days, as well as doing a forced reload of your last save if you can't insta-kill him.

Strongest:
Like the above, but neutral.
He may not be hostile, but the day changing will mess with your game.
Will follow you around and randomly make/delete saves.
If you can't insta-kill him, he'll force load a random save.

Is changing/deleting saves feasible programming wise?

I don't like the save loading idea, I think that was a joke suggestion anyway. That could really piss people off

But I do like the moving back and forth in time, if done right that could be really cool. Question is how exactly it would work

If jumping into the future:
* would the player's hunger be affected?
* would food they're carrying spoil?
* would things that are on fire burn up?

if jumping into the past:
* would the player teleport back to where they were at that point in time?
* would mobs that had been killed during that time come back to life?

Being able to track and restore their state would mean it would have to be limited to a certain number of steps... but I think that's better anyway. It would be much more clear to the player that they're jumping back in time - I'm thinking something like Dr. Strange fighting Dormammu where they get frustrated having to fight him over and over again (but are also forced to try something new each time, since the pseudorandom seed would be the same, repeating the same actions would result in the exact same outcome). How cool would it be if we could actually animate things "rewinding"?? And if you encounter him above ground being able to see the light change as the sun rises/sets.

Also, an idea to keep him from being overpowered - his time traveling ability could be limited to a certain number of uses, it could even be a "staff of time travel" that he uses, and then if the player manages to kill him before he uses all the charges, they may even be able to time travel by their own choice!

off/on topic , is it possible to die of old age in IVAN like you can in other games? It would be cool if he zapped you and you became and old man or a child like the ones running around the cities.

Impossible right now, no entity has a tracked age, but that would be indeed cool.

That's basically what I intended with messing with the saves. Reloading a save is basically going back in time.

Oh duh... the game autosaves every ~100 steps or something right? And every time they go up/down a level. Totally forgot.

I think if it went back to the previous autosave that would be fine. I was imagining it taking them back from like GC6 to GC1 if they happened to be sitting and playing for a while.

Yeah, I don't imagine the strongest implementation will be much liked

yeah my bad lol, the autosaves change everything.

I still think the staff would be a cool idea though, if we can somehow restore the save but reduce the # of charges on it each time to keep him from being too annoying and also to be an awesome artifact if they manage to retrieve it while it still has charges.