Time Lord

Sep 26, 2023, 1:56 am
#1
Joined: Dec 3, 2007
Occupation: Chaos Weaver
Location: Standing between all life and death
Posts: 2,898
Quote
Sep 21
9:43 pm badbeaver Can't believe my seventh year on this forum will begin in December. I need to remember to celebrate, and with how slow things are nowadays, leaving a reminder in the shoutbox might work
Sep 22
4:05 pm chaostrom Have you only been here seven years? Coulda sworn it was longer...
Sep 23
1:03 am capristo wow yeah actually feels pretty short considering the forum's almost 16 years old
Sep 25
7:31 am Eagle V That can't be. I joined 14/15 years ago and was sure you guys already knew each other for forever
5:07 pm red_kangaroo I've apparently joined 9 years ago... What?! It can't be that long!
7:29 pm chaostrom I've got it! There must be a mage dispensing some timey wimey business
Sep 26
1:11 am capristo must be this guy
2:17 am red_kangaroo New enemy idea: Time Lord, who saves that game when he first sees the player, and every time you would kill him, he instead reloads the game.
3:08 am capristo so an enemy who can scum save
3:08 am capristo "oh how the turntables..."

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.
Uchuudonge wrote
creating stable chaos
making patterns where there should be none
sewing order into the chaos
you spit in the face of random numbers, of chaos
Sep 26, 2023, 10:52 am
#2
Joined: Dec 2, 2007
Location: New Attnam
Interests: bananas
Posts: 2,309
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
Sep 27, 2023, 12:36 am
#3
Joined: Dec 3, 2007
Occupation: Chaos Weaver
Location: Standing between all life and death
Posts: 2,898
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.
Uchuudonge wrote
creating stable chaos
making patterns where there should be none
sewing order into the chaos
you spit in the face of random numbers, of chaos
Sep 27, 2023, 1:17 am
#4
Joined: Apr 2, 2014
Occupation: Navastating
Location: Aslona
Posts: 773
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.
Sep 27, 2023, 11:21 pm
#5
Joined: Dec 3, 2007
Occupation: Chaos Weaver
Location: Standing between all life and death
Posts: 2,898
Wait, by reset do you mean he creates a new save point on every floor? Isn't that even easier to abuse?
Uchuudonge wrote
creating stable chaos
making patterns where there should be none
sewing order into the chaos
you spit in the face of random numbers, of chaos
Sep 29, 2023, 1:04 am
#6
Joined: Apr 2, 2014
Occupation: Navastating
Location: Aslona
Posts: 773
Hm, true. There would need to be some very specific rules when he creates his save point.
Sep 29, 2023, 8:39 am
#7
Joined: Dec 17, 2007
Occupation: Taking Names, Formerly Kicking Ass
Location: New Jersey
Posts: 992
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.
affects the danger level correct?
? 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.
Booooooooooo!
Sep 30, 2023, 12:44 am
#8
Joined: Dec 3, 2007
Occupation: Chaos Weaver
Location: Standing between all life and death
Posts: 2,898
Holy smokes Batman that's brutal.
Uchuudonge wrote
creating stable chaos
making patterns where there should be none
sewing order into the chaos
you spit in the face of random numbers, of chaos
Oct 2, 2023, 12:40 am
#9
Joined: Apr 2, 2014
Occupation: Navastating
Location: Aslona
Posts: 773
That's pretty cool! SPOILER ALERT. Click here to see text.
Invisible kamikaze dwarves are suddenly behind every corner!
Oct 3, 2023, 1:15 am
#10
Joined: Dec 3, 2007
Occupation: Chaos Weaver
Location: Standing between all life and death
Posts: 2,898
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.
Uchuudonge wrote
creating stable chaos
making patterns where there should be none
sewing order into the chaos
you spit in the face of random numbers, of chaos
Oct 3, 2023, 12:14 pm
#11
Joined: Dec 17, 2007
Occupation: Taking Names, Formerly Kicking Ass
Location: New Jersey
Posts: 992
Is changing/deleting saves feasible programming wise?
Booooooooooo!
Oct 3, 2023, 10:34 pm
#12
Joined: Dec 2, 2007
Location: New Attnam
Interests: bananas
Posts: 2,309
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!
Oct 4, 2023, 8:33 am
#13
Joined: Dec 17, 2007
Occupation: Taking Names, Formerly Kicking Ass
Location: New Jersey
Posts: 992
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.
Booooooooooo!
Oct 5, 2023, 1:10 am
#14
Joined: Apr 2, 2014
Occupation: Navastating
Location: Aslona
Posts: 773
Batman? wrote
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.
Oct 5, 2023, 1:13 am
#15
Joined: Dec 3, 2007
Occupation: Chaos Weaver
Location: Standing between all life and death
Posts: 2,898
capristo wrote
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!

That's basically what I intended with messing with the saves. Reloading a save is basically going back in time.
Uchuudonge wrote
creating stable chaos
making patterns where there should be none
sewing order into the chaos
you spit in the face of random numbers, of chaos
Oct 6, 2023, 12:43 pm
#16
Joined: Dec 2, 2007
Location: New Attnam
Interests: bananas
Posts: 2,309
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.
Oct 7, 2023, 1:10 am
#17
Joined: Dec 3, 2007
Occupation: Chaos Weaver
Location: Standing between all life and death
Posts: 2,898
Yeah, I don't imagine the strongest implementation will be much liked
Uchuudonge wrote
creating stable chaos
making patterns where there should be none
sewing order into the chaos
you spit in the face of random numbers, of chaos
Oct 9, 2023, 11:11 am
#18
Joined: Dec 2, 2007
Location: New Attnam
Interests: bananas
Posts: 2,309
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.
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