Introduction - networkingguru/incursion-roguelike GitHub Wiki

  Welcome to Incursion: Halls of the Goblin King, a promo game for the upcoming roguelike epic Incursion: Return of the Forsaken. This version of Incursion is still in testing, and has limited character advancement and some unimplemented skills and features, but remains a fully playable roguelike game.
  You can type '?' at any time to bring up Incursion's online help system.
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   The Forsaken -- primordial mage-lords who made pacts with beings beyond the edge of creation -- were sealed into a ceaseless, ageless slumber eons ago during the sorcery wars. Now, their sleep grows restless and troubled, and the thirteen signs and omens that the holy texts claim will presage their awakening have befallen: trees grow warped and crooked, seven nations fall to the hand of one, and a crimson fire rains from the sky for three days and three nights over the town of Akrenstone. The fourth sign is a great goblin horde boiling forth from the bowels of the earth to overwhelm a beneficent king. In efforts to preempt this overturn, many would-be adventurers are making the long and harsh journey to war-torn Mohandi, which holds the one known entrance to the labyrinthine underground citadel known as the Goblin Caves.
   In order to win Incursion, you must create a character and advance him (or her) from 1st to 11th level, accumulating enough class abilities and magical items to be able to delve down to the tenth and final level of the Goblin Caves, wherein can be found the fortress of Murgash, the Goblin King. Slay Murgash, and the hordes of goblinoids will disperse on their own. Fail, and they will spread despair and destruction across the surface of Therya like a plague upon the land. Even should you succeed, you must escape with your life to the surface world.   Do these things and you will receive the fame and glory of a hero of legend... but beware! Rumours claim Murgash is tampering with forces and creatures far fouler than goblinoids.

   Incursion plays differently than existing roguelikes, and it's recommended that players have some experience with at least one other roguelike game before trying Incursion. Beyond this, some basic recommendations include playing a physically tough character to get a handle on the game before adventuring into the more nuanced classes. Orcs, Lizardmen, Dwarves, Druids, Rangers and Paladins all make ideal choices for a new player. Halflings begin with a lot of food, which can be useful to a newbie who keeps running out due to resting frequently.
   It is wise to map out a single level fully before diving lower, and ideally a character's level should equal or exceed the dungeon level he's currently in.

 Ten Points for Experienced Roguelike Players
   Players experienced with other roguelike games would do well to take the following unique qualities of Incursion into account:
   1. Characters in Incursion do not heal by the passage of game turns -- instead, they must use the Rest command ('z') to recover, which means finding a way to be safe from encounters while you sleep. The design intent behind this is to make Hit Point loss a serious detriment to a player, rather than a nuisance. Time still matters in Incursion: every turn burns a little food, so a character who dawdles must eventually eat. A single turn costs little, though, so players can take the time to explore and experiment. Whenever you rest, more monsters are generated in the dungeon (until it reaches equilibrium), so there is a definite pressure to accomplish as much as possible in a day.
   Initially, a character can rest safely by returning to the surface world, and in the mid-levels of the dungeon there are special areas where one can rest safely -- but eventually a character will need to rest in unsafe locales, and should strive to find a means to survive doing so.
   2. List your special abilities. Most characters in Incursion have a lot of them, and they can be complex. Forgetting you have them will get you killed. They're all useful if used right. The design of Incursion is that character abilities matter more than magic items, though the latter still matter. Every ability has advantages and costs; determine how frequently you can use it and which problems it is best suited to.
   3. Fountains are a valuable resource; use them wisely. A fountain can cure poison or disease and remove curses, as well as many other effects. Dipping magical items in a fountain can improve their magical properties. However, fountains can have a wide variety of negative effects as well. The behaviour of fountains is influenced by the Luck attribute; every +1 of your Luck bonus removes one possible negative effect from fountain use, starting with the most severe. Characters with a Luck bonus of +2 or higher can use a fountain without risking truly dire and irresistible consequences, though it can still provoke several dangerous effects. Characters with lower Luck will risk effects that can lead to ruination in the long term, especially in the late game.
   4. Set up shortcuts. You can designate a default melee weapon, ranged weapon and ammo, and switch between them with the '-' key. Once you have done this, you can fire in a cardinal direction with SHIFT+Arrow. This makes ranged combat much less tedious. Likewise, Incursion spellcasters typically operate with a wide variety of defensive spells active at any given time; use the AutoBuff feature to keep defensive spells constantly active. Likewise, assign Quick Keys to spells, Yuse verbs, Tactical Options and other functions you repeat frequently. All these features are discussed extensively in the Interface section.
   5. Incursion opposes scumming by design. This isn't meant as any kind of contempt against people who enjoy patience gaming. When you rest, more monsters are generated, but no new treasure is generated beyond occasional items given to monsters to make them more of a threat. If you clean out dungeon levels 1-3, and have sufficient Experience to move on, it's in your benefit to do so -- you aren't going to keep getting more items by reentering dungeon levels or staying behind.
   6. The early game stage of Incursion can be very difficult -- you will die frequently -- and character generation is quite detailed. The design intent behind the character generation system is that every character, even of the same race and class, will be different in some non-trivial way from others. The counterpoint of this is that it's unfair to get a nice character (or a truly unique one), and then die to random chance right away. Likewise, much can be learned from repetition under controlled circumstances.
   To accommodate this while preserving the intent for character uniqueness, Incursion implements the ability to 'reincarnate' your character after you die, starting again at level 1 with the same stats, perks and random equipment you had at the beginning of the last game. A character can only be reincarnated if they died before reaching character level 5 and before descending to dungeon level 5.
   7. Armour and shields both work differently than they do in any of Incursion's parent systems. Armour gives a character truly significant protection, but has significant costs associated with it. Shields are very strong, but occupy a character's active hand, which prevents two-weapon fighting or wielding a weapon two-handed for increased damage. When you create a Warrior, consider very carefully what kind of Warrior you want to create. Incursion automatically starts very Dexterity- dependent characters with light armour, and very Strength-dependent ones with heavier armour.
   Read the combat chapter in the manual carefully to understand all the implications of the armour system.
   8. Gods are useful. Very useful. Cultivating a relationship with one in the early game will strongly help you in the later game, both in terms of the permanent forms of blessings and bonuses you receive from your deity, and in terms of being able to pray for divine aid if you ever find yourself in a dire situation. Understand the religion system, and remember that a few quality sacrifices count a great deal, whereas quantity accomplishes nothing.
   9. Monsters are not always what they seem. Humanoids can have classes (a Dwarf Rogue, for example) that aren't apparent when you first meet them; likewise, very similar or easily confused monsters cannot be told apart without special knowledge -- for example, the Knowledge (Nature) skill is used to tell different breeds of dangerous fungus apart, and Sense Motive helps you determine a character's profession and skills. A 'Human' might very well be a 'Human Scarlet Disciple', and the game isn't going to tell you that until he does something to make it obvious.
   The overall most dangerous and dynamic monsters in Incursion are probably your fellow humanoid adventurers -- some of them are evil mercenaries serving the Goblin King, while others may provide aid to a respectable hero.
   10. Plan your character build in advance. Choosing the right feats, spells and combination of class levels can be key to success in Incursion. Before you choose to advance in level (which you must actively do -- it doesn't just happen when you get enough Experience), you should already know where any feats and Skill Points you will receive will be placed. If you don't, you're either still learning the game, or you haven't thought ahead enough.

 A Note on Balance and Stability
   Truthfully, Incursion is still very much a game in development and has not yet found its equilibrium in regard to game balance. For all I know at present, it could be nearly unbeatable without cheating, or it could become trivially easy when certain unforeseen combinations are exploited. As the developer, I welcome any feedback on how the balance issues can be addressed to produce a better game. I can be reached at [email protected]. My life is very busy at various times, however, and I cannot promise to respond to all e-mail in a timely fashion.
   As it stands, if this version of Incursion proves difficult or unplayably hard due to game balance limitations, the wizard mode can be used to adjust the difficulty of gameplay by obtaining needed items or otherwise skewing the game in favour of the player. The primary intent of this release is not to be a fully polished game, but to stand as a proof of concept for Incursion's overall design, and to provide a teaser for what's to come in the future. I encourage players to experiment with the game, try out the features and get in touch with me to offer suggestions for any future versions.
   Incursion is still in very early alpha testing. It has several known game stability bugs that cause it to crash -- hopefully gracefully enough to bring up a registry error dialog box, but sometimes badly enough to crash completely. Fortunately, Incursion does not delete save files until it is ready to overwrite them, so if Incursion does crash (at some place other than in the save game routines), you can recover your game from the last place you saved. What this means is that it is also in your benefit to save your game frequently, so that you don't lose a great deal when the game does crash. Incursion provides an AutoSave option for this purpose.

 

   Is Incursion based on, y'know, that popular tabletop RPG? Yes, it is, and we think that this is one of its stronger selling points. The only reason this isn't mentioned more clearly is that the actual names are all trademarks that we can't legally use per the rules of the Open Gaming License.
   Then why didn't you follow its rules more exactly? Because that tabletop RPG was one influence of many on Incursion, not the sole guiding principle. In fact, before the OGL Incursion was imagined as a sort of unofficial sequel to the older Roguelike game Omega. This influence can still be seen in the format of the game screen, the percentile speed system and in other areas. All of the sources listed on the title page were influences on Incursion in one way or another.
   Why is Incursion so buggy? There's a lot of things which are possible for players to try and do, and the cost of doing business is that these interactions sometimes cause unexpected problems.
   Is Incursion open-source? Yes, google the following words 'bitbucket incursion rmtew' and you will find the repository.
   Where can I reach the author? The current maintainer is Richard Tew, and he can be reached at [email protected].
   Where can I post messages about Incursion? Development related posts can be made to reddit.com/r/roguelike-dev/ and gameplay related posts can be made to reddit.com/r/roguelikes/.
   What's the 'resource compiler' option for? It is used to compile the resource files (.IRC) contained in the \lib directory after editing them. If you just want to play Incursion, you don't need to do anything with it. If you want to try editing the resource files, you can then recompile MAIN.IRC and see what happens. Chances are that this won't be very fulfilling, however, as there's currently no documentation on how the IncursionScript language works, and no technical support is provided for scripting at this time.

   All of the source code for Incursion, save what is noted below, is the work of Julian Mensch, and is fully copyright 1999-2006. However, it terms of design and gameplay, Incursion owes a great deal to the other roguelike games that have come before it. The primary inspiration was Omega, and I thus owe gratitude to both Laurence R. Brothers and Erik Max Francis, for creating the only roguelike that inspired me to genuine curiosity about its world, secrets and quests. (The influence of Omega may seem tertiary at the moment; it will show more clearly once Incursion includes cities, wilderness and quests. Of course, the other major roguelikes (Angband, ToME, NetHack and ADOM) all influenced elements of Incursion as well.
   The game system that Wizards of the Coast has released under the Open Game License has been beneficial as well, as it forms the basis for the rules system that Incursion uses. I'd thus like to thank Gary Gygax, Monte Cook, Skip Williams, Sean K Reynolds and all of the others for producing one of the greatest hobbies in the world. Finally, a few more specific attributions:
   * Westley Weimer used to extensively playtest Incursion for me, doing some coding, helping me balance the game and generally being exceedingly useful. Thanks, Westley!
   * Incursion now has many, many playtesters, all of whom I'm very thankful to. However, I've had a truly prodigious amount of feedback from Terje S. Bo, Aaron Lambert, Adam Smith, Jussi Ylikahri, Frumple, Ivan Tomas, 'XenoTheMorph', 'grdice', 'purge383', 'Alik' and 'Davzz' and the game would not have reached the state it has without their support!
   * David H. Hovemeyer placed into the public domain C++ source code for manipulating fractional values without floating-point math that proved to be most useful in the vision system.
   * Bjorn Bergstrom runs the roguelike development archive on the web, which has continually proven to be a useful resource in writing Incursion's monster AI, vision code and dungeon generator.
   * More specifically, the dungeon generator was influenced by articles written by R. Alan Monroe, Josh Tippets, Radomir Dopieralski, and others that I tragically can no longer locate to attribute.
   * Martin Minow wrote the Decus CPP C++ preprocessor and placed it in the public domain; with just a little bit of hacking this became the IncursionScript preprocessor used by the resource compiler.
   * Friedrich Wilhelm Schroeer wrote the ACCENT compiler compiler tool (similar, but far superior to, YACC) that I used writing the IncursionScript compiler, and he too deserves credit, if only for delivering me from the purgatory of shift/reduce conflicts.
   * Jeff Heikkinen and Bradd W. Szonye developed a system for handling armour in a tabletop RPG, Draft Armour System for Cytherea, that heavily influenced how Incursion's armour works. I want to thank them for sharing this.
   * Many friendly people on the rec.games.roguelike.development newsgroup have offered both technical advice and moral support to the roguelike development community; Timo Viitanen stands out in particular for advice for dungeon-themed roguelikes.
   * Many interesting Netbooks contain a wealth of Open Gaming Content. Incursion may contain material from: The Book of Beasts, edited by Robert J. Hall; The Netbook of Creatures, edited by Spencer Cooley; The Netbook of Feats, edited by Sigfried Trent; The Netbook of Spells & Magic, edited by Dennis Przybyla; The Netbook of Traps, edited by Adam Nave. Credit goes to the original authors and contributors.
   * The Mersenne Twister random number generator code was written by Makoto Matsumoto and Takuji Nishimura, for which I am grateful; their original copyright notice is preserved after the OGL.
   * Finally, the greatest thanks go to my father Fred Mensch, for continued support over the time that I developed this game.