Smoothing RNG | Patreon Weekly #175

Hey Patrons, in this weekly I’m going to talk about an upcoming presentation I’m going to give at Roguelike Celebration 2022!

Also, there’s a new Patreon Poll this week! Poll #34 offers a second chance to some smaller pieces of content that didn’t quite make it in previous polls.

Roguelike Celebration?

In their own words, Roguelike Celebration is a community-generated weekend of talks, games, and conversations about roguelikes and related topics, including procedural generation and game design. I gave a talk at last year’s Celebration, all about Shattered Pixel Dungeon’s position as a game so heavily driven by its community:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMWQIdfCgQg 

It was not only great to be able to give the talk itself but participating in Roguelike Celebration was also a major boost for Shattered’s Steam release. The Roguelike Celebration Steam sale got Shattered a huge number of initial wishlights, even though Shattered wouldn’t be available to buy until several months later.

My Presentation This Year

I’m going to be presentation once again this year, and also participating in this year’s Steam sale. I’m a but busier this year, and so Will be giving a ~15 minute lightning talk, instead of a full ~30 minute talk.

The topic this year is ‘Smoothing the Sharp Edges of RNG’. It’s all about the design adjustments I’ve made to Shattered over the years that reduce RNG frustration without making the game perceptibly less varied. Here’s the description I submitted for the talk:

“Roguelike games involve a huge number of random calculations, from item and level generation to damage values in combat. We love this randomness because of the excitement and variety it brings to the Roguelike genre, but it can also bring unfairness and frustration.

In this talk I'll go over some techniques I've used to 'smooth off' some of the more extreme and frustrating results randomness can provide. These adjustments can make the game experience feel much more consistent and fair without perceptibly affecting the things we like about RNG.”

One of the examples I’m going to cover in the talk is how I’ve implemented a ‘deck system’ into lots of the game’s item and enemy generation logic. This system ensures that the average result (e.g. 1 crab for every 7 enemies on floor 3) occurs very consistently, eliminating the chance for unlikely but frustrating outcomes (e.g. opening a door into 3 crabs on floor 3).

The talk will be at 4:15PM EDT on Sunday October 23rd, but will also be uploaded to youtube after the conference is over.