QCF Design Community

I thought it might be a good idea to add a little description in the desecration panel which tells you what will happen.

Ie, when you click the desecrate button it says

Desecrating Binlor will remove all your resistances, grant X piety and make your god more forgiving of mistakes. Are you sure you want to destroy this altar? Yes/No

That would make it very clear and make sure no new players are confused as to what desecration does.

This way also doesn't require referral to a codex or the wiki

edit: For instance i just forgot that desecrating mystera increases BOTH resistances, not just magic. Almost cost me the run

But discovering what they do is fun. And the flavor text is descriptive enough with most of them to tell you what happens (Dracul is kind of vague, I guess).

I'm still afraid of finding out what happens when you get the wrong side of the coin flip on JJ. I've been really lucky so far and always missed it

I don't think I ever won "JJ gamble'", as my fav. deity, it isn't bad, anyone else, avoid like the plague.

I actually think it'd be better to have the piety log tell you what happened rather than warning you in advance. I think a bit of trial and error is a good thing.

For what it's worth, I got thinking about this from this article: http://www.kotaku.com.au/2012/08/its-mu ... uttons-do/

Basically, we underestime the importance of transparency, tooltips and things which explain what you are doing when you are doing it in games.

The article discusses rogue-likes and old school games which require memorising rules and lore of a game before even playing it. It compares them to something like Civ 5, which what is probably the greatest UI ever created. It is so intuitive and explanatory that you can literally pick it up and play without a single manual and tutorial.

Modern gamers have come to expect that kind of thing, and find anything else frustrating.

I'm not saying that DD has to do this, it has strong roots in rogue-likes with many complex unknown rules, but modern audiences expect a certain kind of transparency. As far as I can tell, there is absolutely NO reference to the effects of desecration either before or after you trigger it.

It could be as simple as having your game 'learn' the effects; once you trigger it, it gets recorded for future reference.

We've spoken often before about the "Codex" that we want to bring in towards the end of the dev process, before mainstream release. It will ideally embody the "learn as you play" approach that requires players to take risks on first-time activities.

Right now, most deliberate game "vagueness" surrounds the gods, and they aren't an element that's introduced very early.

Given the nature of most of the god puzzles, players should have a well-padded Codex just from a basic playthrough of them.

If you need help with the writing for the codex, I'm up for the job. I seem to get most of the references in Dredmor, am a semi-professional writer (in my own language, but still), and even though I like the writing and humor so far, filling the damned thing out might be really daunting. Yes, I seem to misspell stuff a lot on the forums, but the only reason I'm not contributing to TV tropes was that I started using more and more of my free time to play this game

Only question from my side would be if you want "flavour" text in there at all, or just basic stats and stuff?

Well, as far as a fan-maintained codex goes, the Wiki is already there. If the devs wanted to take from somewhere, they'd probably do so from the Wiki.

True that, for some reason I thought everything would have an amusing quite Dredmor style. And they set the bar a bit high.

EDIT: Figured the reason out - if it's gona be vague at first and have the actual data on stuff need unlocking, then just about everything needs an obtuse/vague/silly quote. Dredmor takes this up to 11 with not actually providing in game info for several games woth of effects. Except the silly quotes.