I may be too late to the party depending on how the code works behind the scenes, but here goes:



Observation: due to randomization and some extremes, some play throughs feel a lot harder than others. One play through I got my first recruit on floor 3 but not another. Made it to floor 6 with the 3 and felt really good about it, but never finding another hero to recruit doomed the run.



Proposed solution: using a shuffle bag instead of straight randomization of dungeon contents. A very large shuffle bag.



Explanation: What it appears is right now a dungeon is created purely through randomized tables. what does this room contain? generate random number 1-100 and check. Or something similar. This can lead to statistical oddities due to the way randomization works. Extreme results like not finding a hero, or an entire floor being so dust deprived it makes it near impossible to complete.



What a shuffle bag is, is basically an array of results, of what can possibly be in a room. a hero to recruit. a cryo vat, a pod, a resource stockpile, a chest etc. You have multiple of some of these to set your ratio for things appearing. Then you generate a random number between 1-number of items in your shuffle bag and pull out that item in the list to use. Then you remove that item from the shuffle bag. This makes it less likely for that item to reappear again. Once the last item in the shuffle bag is removed, you reset it.



You wouldn't likely do this for every aspect of the game, but you could have different shufflebags for different attributes in a room. You could do this, for example, for the dust gain by exploring a room. This way you could have a reasonable range of dust someone will find in a floor, but keep the randomization. You could do this to ensure that over the course of say 50 doors you will find a recruit. You need to make the shuffle bag big enough that the floors are still unpredictable but small enough to guarantee you can't get completely screwed over the course of a couple floors.



Drawback: Doing this will make some things more predictable and could results in some people "counting cards" but only if they figured out the contents and size of the shufflebag. This could be mitigated quite a bit by the shufflebag not indicating specifically what is generated but on a more general basis. You could have a 70 item shufflebag that is as simple as '20 empty rooms, 27 rooms with monsters, 20 rooms off the "found something good table", and 3 rooms with recruits'.



#2 Drawback, depending on how it is coded this may not be the easiest thing in the world to implement at this stage and not see enough benefit to be worth the investment of time coding.



Personal note I was a game programmer back in the day. Before 'professionally' doing it, I was freelance making "Indie" games before they were embraced (and before the net was popular. Think '93. Then think Amiga. Poor me). IMHO shufflebags can introduce some creative design and make balance a little easier to deal with. They aren't for every game or every situation, but I think DoTE could benefit from this concept quite a bit. If you already use shufflebags then maybe make them smaller to reduce the number of situations the RNG totally changes the difficulty of the game (both for easier and harder)

Neat idea, but as far as I know, the game is about altering your actions/upgrades depending on the random events. If you were guaranteed heroes or whatever, it would be too easy to finish. It's really the whole point of "what's behind the door" otherwise it would be called "what's behind door 4, oh we know that, cuz door 1, 2, & 3 didn't have a hero yet" Cheers mates! lol



Sorry if I sound a little pissy, I just found out I don't get to play gauntlet until noon tomorrow, so I'm off raging on forums. All ideas are welcome here at Amplitude

Hi Skarnor,



In fact, we partially use shuffle bags in Dungeon



Here is a quote of a dev blog post:

Mysterarts wrote:
Dynamic and Static Events

In the previous version, there were only dynamic events: what you found behind a door was generated when the door was opened and allowed us to control the floor difficulty.



In the next update, we are keeping the dynamic events and the difficulty variable but we are also adding static events, which are placed at the generation of the level to control the number and the depth position. That means for example that we can be sure that there are exactly 2 or 3 artifacts in level 7, placed mostly not too far from the first room. These static events are currently used for the exits, merchants, heroes and artifacts.

Some more detailed examples:

- Heroes are dynamic and static events in the same time: a part of them is placed are placed at the generation (but you might need to open all the door to find them), the others are randomly added when you open a door (based, among other things, on the current positive / negative ratio of events, the number of opened doors, the spaceship...)

- There is a minimum and a maximum amount of Dust placed in the dungeon at the generation, based on the number of rooms.



So yes, we try to assure a minimum for some events, but there is still a big random component. We don't want to have a game too predicable but we agree, the amplitude of some numbers still needs to be tweaked to avoid frustrating games!

Thanks for your feedback

That's awesome! From this end of the screen it is hard to tell exactly how things are done. Sounds great, can't wait to help tweaking.



If I run in to any other anomalies I will try to document them better and report them. The game is fun as hell, and I can't wait to see what multiplayer will be like (my other half has the game but isn't nearly as addicted as I am, only like 20 hours put in)



The game when I thought of it was the one where I only hit 1 hero to recruit, but still was managing to do well until, I believe, floor 5 when I got overwhelmed. So floors 2,3,4 only had 1 recruit. But that is going off of memory which is about as reliable as...well... I can't remember what it is about as good as, but not very much.



*btw - you guys rock. I am enjoying all of your games. Keep it up.

Zigeye wrote:
Neat idea, but as far as I know, the game is about altering your actions/upgrades depending on the random events. If you were guaranteed heroes or whatever, it would be too easy to finish. It's really the whole point of "what's behind the door" otherwise it would be called "what's behind door 4, oh we know that, cuz door 1, 2, & 3 didn't have a hero yet" Cheers mates! lol



Sorry if I sound a little pissy, I just found out I don't get to play gauntlet until noon tomorrow, so I'm off raging on forums. All ideas are welcome here at Amplitude

Sorry about your luck with Gauntlet. Oh, and just so you know shufflebags many times make things seem more random when done right. If you ever played a computer rpg heavily dependant on random number generation (like d&d rolling a d20 to hit) I am sure you have noticed how extreme odds occur not so rarely. "What? I fumbled 3 attacks in a row and he hit me all 3 times when he has a 10% chance to hit?? Computer CHEATS!!". This is because of how computers generate random numbers off a stack. Many games use a large shufflebag to help mitigate this. You still get random results and can get some extreme results but it follows the odds ratio far more closely while still being unpredictable.



p.s. Gauntlet looks like it could be a lot of fun.