v1.0.3 is up. It's fully playable and you can download it here: Bowiemancy v1.0.3 I've updated the first post with the particulars of the various spells, and some of you may have noticed a few changes to this version from my original design. I've also updated the skill descriptions to be a little more descriptive, though to be honest, I think it's more important to be funny than exact about these sorts of things, and the infographics take care of the more serious stuff. Here's the bonuses and description text: Total bonuses for skill tree: +2 +5 Bowiemancy "As a follower of the far-out space wizard Bowie, you have learned how to freak out to the cosmic jive of your own moonage daydream." Level 0 - Rebel Rebel +2 +1 "Because sometimes you want more and you want it fast, this spell can be cast and recast. Just don't overdo it, or it might all blow up in your trampy little face. (And then what would your poor mother think?)" Level 1 - Under Pressure "You're not 100% sure what this spell does, but you understand it has something to do with the terror of knowing what this world is about." Level 2 - Piece of Cake! "So the dungeon is a piece of cake is it? Well, let's see how you deal with this little slice..." Level 3 - Spiders From Mars +1 "Some may say you took it all too far, but you've become the special man and think spiders are the nazz." Level 4 - Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes +2 "The untempered transmutative energies of Bowie flow through you. Who knows what you'll discover when you turn and face the strange." Level 5 - Heart's Filthy Lesson "I ask for so little... Just fear me, love me, do as I say, and I will be your slave." Level 6 - Ashes to Ashes +1 "Strung out on heaven's high, your enemies will be hitting an all time low. Ashes to ashes, funk to funky."
I've released a v1.0.2 update to scale back a couple of the spells and fix one power where I was using the wrong stat ID. This version is fully playable and you can download it here: Bowiemancy v1.0.2 While I'm still working on a few animation issues, what I could really use at this point is input on how well balanced the set is. To be honest, I tend to play mostly rogue/warrior characters myself, so it's a bit hard to judge how powerful the spells should be vs. their mana cost, especially since none of them have cooldowns. Below, I'm going to break down each of the skills numerically, so feel free to quote the relative bits if you have any suggestions. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Bowiemancy "As a follower of the far-out space wizard Bowie, you have learned how to freak out to the cosmic jive of your own moonage daydream." First, the basics. It's a Wizard skill, with seven levels, and the total stat bonuses for the entire skill tree are: +2 +5 In keeping with the many faces and personas of Bowie himself, the theme of this skill set is change and unpredictability, with most of the damage being transmutative, and the two main buff/debuff spells being completely randomized in their effects. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Level 0 - Rebel Rebel Stat Bonus: +2 +1 "Because sometimes you want more and you want it fast, this spell can be cast and recast. Just don't overdo it, or it might all blow up in your trampy little face. (And then what would your poor mother think?)" Mana Requirements: 8 (min 5) What it does: Gives you a 15 turn buff with: +1caddishness +2haywire +2transmutative damage The spell can be stacked up to 4 times, which gives you a pretty impressive: +4caddishness +8haywire +8transmutative damage Now, +8 damage is incredibly powerful for an early game spell. However, it would cost you 36 to get to that point, and on every casting past the first, there's a 15% chance that you'll cancel the spell completely and give yourself a 10 turn debuff, Rock n' Roll Suicide, which has the incredibly nasty effect: -1 Burliness -2 Armor Absorb -2 Magic Resistance -1 Health Regeneration -1 Mana Regeneration That will definitely ruin your day, on top of the mana you just wasted to get to that point. Still, depending on the situation, it may be worth taking the gamble of a second or third casting. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Level 1 - Under Pressure Stat Bonus: None "You're not 100% sure what this spell does, but you understand it has something to do with the terror of knowing what this world is about." Mana Requirements: 14 (min 8) What it does: Randomly chooses one of 7 possible effects to inflict on your enemy. These effects are: Rock n' Roll Suicide -- This is a slightly different variation of the version you get yourself, since monsters don't actually use mana. For 10 turns, the target will have -1 -1 -2 -3. Just You Shut Your Mouth -- Since I don't think the mute affect has any impact on monsters, this one causes 8 turns of -6 and for the next 5 turns there's a 33% chance to make the monster passive and/or cause 2 damage. I'm Afraid of Dredmorians -- Causes fear for 6 turns and also debuffs -6 -1 for 8 turns. Golden Years -- Since I'm not sure what stats are actually used by monsters, this spell causes -2 -2 -2 and +4 (on account of them being old) for 10 turns, plus 5 turns of blindness, though I don't think either the sight radius or blindness have any effect, since cone of sight and how far away you have to be before a monster will attack you both seem to be hard-coded into the MonDB.xml file itself. The Laughing Gnome -- Summons a tame Laughing Gnome (I was hoping to have it be able to cast spells and disappear after 15 turns but that's not currently doable) and inflicts a 5 turn Gnome-man's Land debuff on the target which does -15 -2. (The sneakiness is mainly a joke, though it may indirectly affect how often the affected monster sets off traps) Real Cool World -- Creates an impassable iceberg around the target for 5 turns which also has a lockdown+paralyze effect (monsters who resist the paralyze are still held in place) and suffer five DoT ticks of 2(+ .1F). Slow Burn -- Creates a 6 turn column of flame which does 4 (+ .25F) damage to anything walking through it, plus four DoT ticks of 2 (+ .1F) thereafter. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Level 2 - Piece of Cake! Stat Bonus: None "So the dungeon is a piece of cake is it? Well, let's see how you deal with this little slice..." Mana Requirements: 16 (min 8) What it does: It fires a silver globe shaped missile which blinks the target somewhere else nearby, paralyzes for 1 turn (so they don't end up stepping out of the globe animation prematurely) followed by up to 4 turns of confusion, plus 3 points of damage (1 on hit, and 2 after teleport).
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Level 3 - Spiders From Mars Stat Bonus: +1 "Some may say you took it all too far, but you've become the special man and think spiders are the nazz." Mana Requirements: 17 (min 9) What it does: Another missile spell, this one flings a ball of spiders at the target which explode in a cross shape doing: 4 (+0.1F) and 2 (+0.2F) to the point of impact with a 30% chance of fear for 4 turns, plus 2 (+0.1F) and 2 to the four cardinal squares next to it with a 15% chance of fear for 2 turns. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Level 4 - Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes Stat Bonus: +2 "The untempered transmutative energies of Bowie flow through you. Who knows what you'll discover when you turn and face the strange." Mana Requirements: 17 (min 9) with 7 upkeep What it does: Randomly triggers one of six possible custom buffs. Each one is a mana upkeep spell with its own special benefit, but you can only maintain one ability at a time. Recasting automatically removed the active buff, and selects again from the list. I tried to make sure that each one gives you an edge in a particular direction, and depending on your individual playstyle, you may find one to be more useful than another. STARMAN -- A buff for mages. Gives you +1 +2 +2. (The +2 should mostly cancel out the mana upkeep drain of the spell itself) JUMP THEY SAY -- Gives you +3 and provides a 20% chance of causing knockback +2damage on hit. SERIOUS MOONLIGHT -- This buff does come with a -1 penalty, but increased +2 +2 +1 RICOCHET -- Provides you with a 20% chance to reflect incoming spell damage plus asmall boost to counter. +20 +2 . ARCHITECT’S EYES -- A buff for those who love (or hate) traps. Gives you +2 +3 +1 HEROES -- A buff for brawlers. Gives you +1 +2 +1 +1. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Level 5 - Heart's Filthy Lesson Stat Bonus: None "I ask for so little... Just fear me, love me, do as I say, and I will be your slave." Mana Requirements: 32 (min 18) What it does: This charm spell not only makes one of your foes fight for you, it also disembowels them and leaves a dangerous trail of blood and existential woe behind them! The victim is charmed for 10 turns, but incurs 3 + bleed status on the first turn, and begins dropping bloody pool spell mines that damage anything that steps on them similar to acid trail. The first puddle laid down (which has the creature's heart on it) causes 4 damage, while each subsequent puddle (blood only) does 2 damage. The probability of dropping bloody pools decreases with each step after the 2nd: Turn 1 - Probability 100% Turn 2 - Probability 100% Turn 3 - Probability 90% Turn 4 - Probability 70% Turn 5 - Probability 50% Turn 6 - Probability 30% ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Level 6 - Ashes to Ashes Stat Bonus: +1 "Strung out on heaven's high, your enemies will be hitting an all time low. Ashes to ashes, funk to funky." Mana Requirements: 40 (min 25) What it does: This is a big area attack spell with a 3 square radius that does a whopping 8 (+.15F) + 4 (+.15F) three times in a row (so basically a minimum of 24+ 12) It also gives the player a 10 turn debuff of -6 -6 -6 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- That's it. Please let me know what you think about the setup balance-wise.
Quick question for you guys. Does anybody know if there's a minimum framerate for animations in the game, or if impact sprite in particular ignores framerates and will attempt to squeeze whatever you've got into it's own predefined parameters? Both Piece of Cake! and Spiders From Mars impact animations should be moving way slower than they actually are, but as far as I can tell setting them below a framerate of 40 or 50 actually makes them go faster. Also, Spiders From Mars seemed to have massively sped up when I increased the number of frames from 12 to 22, so I'm wondering if the game is somehow tweaking the numbers behind my back. As it is now, Piece of Cake! goes a little bit faster than I'd like it to, but Spiders From Mars is an unintelligible blur.
Hmm... To start with, the "framerate" in this game is not a measure of how many frames are in a second of animation, but rather for how many "animation ticks" each frame exists for before being replaced with the next one. The "minimum" in this particular case is 2, because it's possible to run the game at double the speed and this value is stored via integers, meaning that setting it to 1 would cause a crash to desktop whenever the game tried to play this animation when at double speed. The "maximum" (which I think is what you want) is... something, some sprites for whatever reason don't want to get over some arbitrary values while some can be stretched to insane ones, and I won't be able to tell you what exactly affects that because I never really needed to do that for anything. But at least you have some sort of confirmation, and to get more you'd probably have to pester either Sir Nicholas (the coder) or Sir David (the spriter). PS. Nice mod you have there. It's unlikely I'll ever choose it outside of random builds (uh oh, a wizard skill tree), but it seems to be well-made.
Ah ha, so it's the exact opposite of what any normal sane person would have expected! I should have known. Now that I know that bigger numbers = slower, dialing in the animation to where I wanted it to be was a cinch. Thanks, and yeah, I play pretty much exclusively rogue and warrior characters myself, so even testing this one in debug mode has been a bit of a chore. I'm not even sure how often I'll end up using it myself during normal play, though I did try to make it something that Rogue/Warrior builds might find useful because it's primarily a status-effect driven support tree (weakening/scaring/freezing enemies so they're easier to whomp or teleporting them away when they get too close) rather than a heavy duty damage set that can lay waste to an entire room but will leave you without any mana reserves to conquer the next one.
Normal and sane is relative. No rational definition without years of backstory can explain why it is the way it is. But it is. The fact that people actually know this mind numbing stuff is testament to how messed up "Normal" and "Sane" people must be. Live crazy and push the boundaries of what is sane until they are not. Be happy with the world as your sandbox.
I discovered one final glitch with Rebel Rebel where I'd forgotten to put in a requirebuffonnottrigger, so that it wouldn't cast while Rock n Roll Suicide was in effect. I think this is it, and I'll be putting it up on Steam tonight, unless anybody else finds any errors.
Crap. I'm trying to use the publisher and it gets past the validation step, before crashing a few seconds later. Any ideas on what the hell is going on? I've tried restarting Steam and my computer, as well as disabling my firewall.
It's a weird issue some people have. It will work if you grab http://patches.gaslampgames.com/dredmor/dredmor_113_test1.zip Keep in mind that's not the latest version, but it's the only one that has Steam.
Gracias, Daynab. That fixed it. Whew, I was worried there for a bit! Edit: Also, can you teleport this thread over to the completed Mods section (and maybe remove the WIP from the title if that's possible?)
Thanks. It ended up being way bigger than I initially expected, but I'm pretty happy with what it evolved into, even though some of the powers don't work exactly the way I initially envisioned them. And now, just to prove I'm completely insane, I'm going to start work on a custom monster pack, based in part of the idea I had in this thread.
If you ever go back to tweaking this mod, why not add a Blackstar effect to the possible Changes buffs
I have been thinking about doing a stealth update to Bowiemancy with a BlackStar effect even before Bowie left us. 2016 is now over. I had planned to work on it this weekend, and might play around with it tomorrow. It's been so long since I touched Dredmor, that I'll have to shake a few cobwebs loose before I begin. I think with the halo effect, I might be able to make it appear that the character is wearing Bowie's blindfold. Obviously, it would have to be a buff that renders you mostly blind, but massively increased your mana and a few other stats.
