It looks like Ighalli has done well to limit the number of god actions to four or five, which is good because it makes things easier to balance.
One of the features of the present system is that the Lawful gods tend to get you out of dicey situations, the neutral gods get you cool stuff and the chaotic gods pimp you with wicked powers to make you badass (but don't rely on them to save you). I like that a theme runs through the pantheon.

Holy books are all you need to change alignment, and there is no penalty for changing alignment other than forgoing benefits of other gods. Imagine if the way to increase relations would be via prayer only. Holy books would allow you only to learn about the god. The range of gods to be able to pray to would be say five, with highest chance of top relations with the centre god, and say 67% max relations with adjacent gods, 33% max with next adjacent gods. If you wanted to switch to a god with which you have negative relations, you would have to undergo a penance with that other god, so praying to them would mean you get punished until your relation with that god enters positive territory, and you start gaining better prayer effects. During this process you lose champion status and gradually that relation goes negative.
Once you reach champion, the adjacent gods lock in to 67%, 33%, 0% pattern, meaning adjacent gods give you the benefits of their lesser prayer outcomes in a tiered way.

Admittedly it sounds a bit like a frequent-flyer scheme.

It seems like there are different types of petitions (with relation requirement in brackets):
(0) common petition (pray for a new limb etc)
(1) god-specific effect 1 (0 - 33%)
(2) god-specific effect 2 (34 - 67%)
(3) god-specific effect 3 (68% - 99%)
(4) god-specific effect 4 (champion effect 100% relation)

You would be able to tell whether you can pray for an effect if it appears on the list of available petitions on the "prayer screen", giving you an idea of your current relation with that god.
You could forgo the champion effect and pray to two gods in exchange for their two tier-three effects, and on and on.

Positive relations could die away to zero (negative remain negative), so there is a reason to pray relatively frequently in order to keep relations up, until you reach champion.

One thing you could do is create two different types of behaviour, instant and delayed outcomes:
1) Instant outcome. You lose a limb or you are losing a battle. You pray, the god answers and saves your ass (or not, by some random factor).
2) Delayed outcome. There is no immediate danger, you pray to the god. He or she is busy, and they'll get back later.
2a) You get into shit, BAM! the god answers your prayer from before and saves your ass.
2b) After some random time (say within a bandwidth of 1000*(god-specific effect tier) - RAND_N(relation) or somethign) your prayer finally gets answered and you get what you prayed for (or maybe not, depending on some random factor). Prayer timer goes back to zero and then you know you can pray again for another effect.

If you pray multiple times (it resets the timer?) and you can change your petitition to the god, so the outcome of the prayer follows the last thing you prayed for. So high frequency prayer is pointless, but incurs no penalty. Means you can be a devout follower (being punished for frequent prayer seemed counterintuitive).

The trick is, IVAN would need a good way of monitoring and prioritising what sort of help the player should receive, and whether it should be instant.

If you want to make the gods more capricious: So you want to be champion to a new god? Simply offer a limb at an altar, or renounce your old god for which you are currently champion (and face punshment by being scourged - scarred and covered in blood), or do battle with an armed warrior sent to kill you in `%gd`'s name. Or maybe you get sent a kamikaze dwarf to blow you up?

In fact, I think the type of kamikaze dwarfs should be restricted to the gods that you have negative relations with.

We could decouple the player's Lawful - Neutral - Chaotic meter to be restricted only to the types of deeds that the player does, as opposed to being a status meter showing the player's overall alignment to a Lawful/Chaotic god + deeds. If the central, or champion god is say neutral, and the player's deeds tend toward Chaotic for example by eating human flesh, then when the player next prays, he may be hit with a punshment instead. So the player's behaviours need to align with their chosen god's morals. So if you're in with the chaos gods, you better be looking for evil deeds to do, just to stay in the gang. In this way, the player may be punished by prayer, but it is still within the player's control somehow, and gets to play a mini game to stay in control of their alignment.
It could also be that between when the player prays and when the prayer is answered, the difference in the values of the "Deed-alignment Meter" need to stay within some band in order for the prayer outcome to be positive. If the player has prayed to a lawful god when he was Lawful, but does evil and becomes neutral, then there is a negative gradient and the god may choose to punish the player.

Building a new god system is terribly difficult. The above is only one idea out of myriad different types of models you could implement. I hope it contributes to stimulating you own ideas. The game has extensive ancilliary machinery, like the danger system working in the background, which I haven't got a good handle on, but which can be utilised to assist the automation of some things. I think the main thing is that there is some structure nailed down in order to balance out the effects. Using a table or a matrix is usually a good way.

If anything, Kahvi's metaphysics game reminds me of the plans to implement magic in an esoteric way. I need to think about it in a simple way. All roads lead to astral projection.

I agree, and I like it that the game decides I need a banana flesh leg.
I think some of the motivation behind Ighalli's original system was aimed at allowing the player to determine what kind of assistance to receive from the god. For instance, Seges has a lot of abilities but sometimes I just want the flames put out instead of being fed a delicious meal.
The list Ighalli put up is roughly a rebalance of what is the present system, which is needed. I've run out of hours in the day to go through point by point, but it's more or less complete.

I want to know if there will be changes to the mechanics. I read there will be no cooldowns; will there still be negative effects? Punishment?
I'm not really into the idea of banking a a favor from a god for later use, that's possibly what made Mellis overpowered.

Will there be a relation system as there is today?
What renewed role can altars play?

Fisrt of all, this is a really interesting game, well thought-out and richly illustrative of metaphysical concepts. I tested out some mechanics by adding two human-only players and deleting the rest. Now I am playing against two AI players and I am finding they are quite belligerent!

This took me a while to get the hang of, but now I understand how it works. It is easiest if you have at least one co-operative down-stream agent to help push you into the right square.

I don't know how the agents could be represented in IVAN. At least one of them could be the player itself. I wonder if the robot agents could act as a kind of zodiac, determining the greater part of the player's current position? As the player progresses into new positions along the major cartesian axes, this unlocks a new set of manoeuvers/abilities.

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I wonder what we might mean by a magic system in IVAN. If we look broadly, any actions that are not able to be performed by the player without the requisite items (scrolls, wands etc) can be said to be magical type actions. In short, magic.
We want to avoid a spell-casting system that works by mana points. Such a system is not in use at the moment, and I don't think one based on that ubiquitous mechanic is about to be invented for IVAN.

We want control over how magic is used. But there are lots of ways in which magic is used in IVAN. Sources of magic include: wands, scrolls, rings (states) and some item enchantments and definitely the gods, at the moment, and of course potions and in particular the ommel materials.
It occurs to me that there is no particular restriction on the use of magic; the player can use all types of magic, commune with the broadest range of most useful gods and make use of just about any magical item at any point in the game (unless you're maimed).

Kahvi's game depicts some metaphysical structure that IVAN could possibly make use of, and it prompts me to describe a way of structuring some exclusivity in the range of magical abilities at the player's disposal:

The four axes might represent the following ideas:
faith/cleric vs superstition/druid/sage (this is the Holy vs Extreme axis)
fighting vs rationalism (Champion vs Ruler axis)

(Holy) The player is faithful. Then player follows the gods and obtains favours and abilities this way. The player can learn about all the gods. Using rings and scrolls decreases favor with the gods? Player cannot use wands. [EDIT: balanced out by Ighalli's pray ideas which offer the player a panoply of "magic" abilities - or at least access to supernatural interventions].

(Extremist) Superstition, player does not follow all the gods, instead only a select subset (three or four?). Gods outside the subset are extremely punitive. Using unaligned materials decreases favor with subset gods. Slaying aligned monsters decreases favour with the subset of followed gods.
Player can use rings and wands, but not scrolls.

(Champion) Player is a fighter type and must use rings, scrolls and wands for magical benefits. Player can be monotheist? Atheist?

(Ruler) Rational player type that cannot use rings, only wands and scrolls, but can gain their altered states through learning/eating mushrooms/Astral projection (?) No religion.


I don't know yet what determines whether a player is extremist or champion or a hybrid of the two. Perhaps actions that the player takes in the game help to determine what direction things will be going. At the moment the above is only a model, as an attempt to connect choices about metaphysics to consequences for a player character trying to survive in a post-0.50 IVAN.

In fact, I don't yet know what role Kahvi's game mechanic might play at all. I looked upon his game and felt like the positions of the five agents in the game could represent the five cards the player holds in their hand for one hour in the game, and has this time to use them before the cards are re-shuffled/dealt again? (positions are moved). Each square would represent a special ability or a state (1 free teleport, polycontrol etc), and the player unlocks increasingly powerful abilities somehow in the game.

EDIT: I feel like willpower could be used to determine the number of human controlled or hybrid agents in the game. Higher willpower increases the odds that the player can move a hybrid agent on any particular turn in a Kahvi game.

Awesome! I found the bit in the code where the game determines which head bitmap to use, here.

I think that's the eventual goal. My usual first step before embarking on a change is to wreck the code to try to see if an idea will work.

Alt-tab crashes the game? That's sad. Something is seriously wrong. Please save your thanks for when this bug is fixed.

With a few odd changes, you can play as a ghost!

That's right chao, berzerk sex.


Azba, just add them into some blank space in humanoid.pcx. I like the stuff in the top row, it's the same as the one in full armor right?

Thanks Erno for the link to the file. The faces look amazing! Are they meant to replace the head in the mannequin type thing in the right-hand pane?