Rulesets: Allow home room NPCs to change the dungeon's rules

[ChrisNZL]

NPCs should allow the player to set the dungeon how they like before they leave the home room.

These essentially replace the old pre-game setup screen. It should be more fun to just jump into the home room upon creating a new game and sorting out what type of dungeon you want to play while in the dungeon, rather than navigating some boring menu beforehand.

Either a lot of options can be shoved onto an NPC with the existing CanvasMenu system, or certain NPCs could manage just one option type each with the multi-icon UI (like how the Level Up UI works).

Ideas:

• Death-handling NPC: Do you want Infinite Respawning (Cuddly), Stock Life (Voracious), or Permadeath (Feral)? Could be 3 icons to choose from.

• Conquest NPC: Pre-defined rulesets you can optionally choose from, perhaps suited for weekly challenges with special leaderboards, and/or tied to achievements.

• Difficulty NPC: Perhaps have ~5 difficulty modes, setting enemy quantity, attack speed, increased enemy health, increased trap rates, more room modifiers, etc. Conquests/leaderboards/achievements can then be matched with different difficulty tiers.

• Configurator NPC: If a "Free-roam" Conquest has been selected from the Conquest NPC, this NPC lets you tweak the dungeon's settings: enemy types, drop rates, spawn rates, etc, just so you can muck around how you please.

[ChrisNZL]

Bumping this. Want to have The Punisher add some options to the game, and bring back Esmerelda from T1 for ease-of-play options.

Many requests for player respawning, and difficulty options in general.

However, need to assess how things fit in with achievements and leaderboards.

[ChrisNZL]

Further integration thoughts:

• Online Co-op: Allow info to be shown on games on the Join tab.
• Needs to be easy-to-see for other players in the game in-game - primarily in the home room, but also mid-romp.

Also to consider:

• Friendly AoE from explosions, lightning
• Friendly damage reduction, including 100% reduction

... having Friendly Fire in this game is like having friendly fire in Terraria

Imagine if every shot from the minishark with chlorophite bullets could hurt your teammates and yourself. Thats how it feels when we try to use Grenades. All this means is that any smart players will just not use them at all. Thats not balance, that just severely reduces the choice of weapons. Bows are so good that there already arent that many reasons to use anything else.

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I'd say at the moment, the game treats explosions/AoE as damage from any source (friendly or not) because it's generally from sources that are not instant.

... which at the moment are just from Grenades and Lightning Orbs (upon shield collision). ... which could also change if explosive AoE modifiers are added to other projectiles at some point.

If full friendly-fire is to be enabled, you'd get melee weapons and small projectiles damaging everyone – teammates able to slash and shoot you in the back. Which is not fun when 4x melee-players are trying take down an Elite or something, all standing in the same place overlapping each other, or slashing at each other with Katanas and teleporting around.

... explosions being this weird extra mechanic the whole party has to watch out for.

Not all weapons are good for all situations as well. Even for self-damaging weapons – also to be looked at for v0.3 with damage multipliers – play-it-safe weapons versus deadly-but-powerful... different playstyles, turtling vs going rambo

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For an Easy difficulty option:

• Don't allow kittens to be killed.

[ChrisNZL]

Difficulty options will likely be part of the upcoming feature: Rulesets.

[ChrisNZL]

Further bumping with plans:

• Allow players to specify game mode options, such as:
  • For Online Co-op and Steam – enforce VAC-enabled games or not
  • For Online Co-op, allow cross-platform games or not
  • Allow cheats to be enabled or not (which is fine if players just want to muck around, like a free-form mode for fun without actually trying to gain achievement progress nor care about high scores)

[ChrisNZL]

0.4:

• Added a Game Mode portal in the home room, allowing access to special game modes such as Kitten Collect-a-thon, and various Enemy Challenge and Weapon Challenge modes.
• Added a Difficulty Panel in the home room.

To do in some other patch:

• Allow the Punisher (or something) to configure things further, like Rulesets.