Adding 3 dimensions to a 2D roguelike

[Mikko Lehtinen]

Originally Posted by Derakon

* Units will need different capabilities when it comes to traversing the terrain. Snakes should probably not be able to just jump up over a short cliff, but they might be able to climb its side.
* Testing for line-of-sight becomes more complicated.
* Area-of-effect spells should probably also be tweaked, since presumably they aren't all going to be lightning bolts out of the heavens.

With my small set of terrain features I managed with a very reasonable amount of changes.

Monsters have only three new flags: FLYING, BAD_JUMPER, and PASS_VEGETATION. (Most monsters have jumping at 40%.)

Making bolts and ball effects behave near platforms was tricky, with lots of special cases. And it's not always intuitive to the player what's gonna happen when you blast that fireball near a platform.

I specifically designed the terrain features so that I would not need to touch the monster AI. I'm quite happy with my monsters being stupid sometimes. It actually makes terrain features more tactically interesting for the player.

With richer terrain elements, AI would surely have to be tweaked. Many monsters would need their own set of monster flow rules. Andrew Doull has been doing this for a long time in UnAngband, and he claims it is actually not that hard.

[xibalba]

Azure Dreams deals with height variance by some kind of algorithm which limits extreme changes in height so that every square can be climbed. And everyone - player character, NPC, and enemies - can jump 2 or 3 tiles vertically and 1 tile horizontally at the same height.

http://www.gamefaqs.com/ps/197339-fi...tics/faqs/3876

Read Aerostar's battle mechanics guide for more details on jumping mechanics in FFT. Though FFT isn't a roguelike, it's within batting distance of Azure Dreams.

[getter77]

Originally Posted by Derakon

I've thought about trying to make a roguelike with height variance in the tiles.

And so on...

Castlevania RL manages height variance relatively well with platforming, stair mechanics, etc. More is needed in terms of letting the player better determine effectiveness of doing various things with respect to height tolerance and such, but hey.

http://slashware.net/blog/labs/