A while back David asked me to open a post on new potion/scroll ideas. Well, here it is 🙂
To start things off, here are a couple of potion ideas I came up with. (To clarify — these are not planned features at the moment, they are just ideas. Any feedback welcome.)
- Levitation. Your knight rises from the ground and becomes temporarily able to walk over pits.
- Extra Health. You (temporarily) get twice as many hitpoints as normal.
- Confusion. Your knight becomes confused. Whenever you try to move, the knight moves in a random direction instead of the one you selected.
- Blindness. Your knight is blinded — the main dungeon view goes black. You can still move around and your location will still be shown on the map (representing your knight feeling his way around the dungeon).
Now your turn. What new magic effects would you like to see in the game?
Instead of Levitation.
» Transform. Your knight Becomes a vampire bat and becomes temporarily able to fly over pits, Are twice as fast, can drain the other knight of there health, and fly over traps. but can’t open doors and your your health is halfed
Nice ideas, thank you for the forum setup. I finally have a place to share some of the things my brother & I imagined seeing someday.
I like your Confusion idea – easy to implement, just randomize the control settings on a timer of some sort. My version of that is called “Potion of Drunkenness”, same randomized directions plus make the knight walk a bit slower while dragging the sword (not a good condition to be in when another knight shows up).
I also had a variation on the Confusion idea where each door would go to a random point in the dungeon – no logic to it (in one door, out another – nowhere you would expect to be going on the map).
Love your Blindness potion (only affects one Knight) – must have it! We had a similar idea about Potion of Darkness, this one will affect other knights too – and includes a few rooms within close proximity to each other. A nice addition here would be a random torch laying around (too bad you can’t fight while carrying a torch?) Drop the torch, run around and start swinging violently into the darkness – uh… ow.
Spells (or Pentagram Curses):
1. Spiked Floor (Indiana Jones Style) – random pop-up spikes within your room – will knock down health or kill you. Variation could be spikes on walls with conveyor floor leading you into them – would hate that in a narrow hallway.
2. Walls closing in – probably not realistic to code, but reminiscent of a Star Wars trash compactor – you can get out, if you can get to a door in time.
3. Room full of pentagrams – entire floor changes underneath your feet – and stays that way for other knights – this could could be very interesting.
4. Room full of creaking wood – ready to break (progressively as used) and unexpectedly drop your knight into oblivion – also persistant to affect other knights.
After the wood floor is dissolved, or to avoid a plague of pentagrams, your Potion of Levitation sure would come in handy – especially if passage through that room is critical to your quest.
We got very silly one night and decided a Spell or Potion of Aflac was required (maybe just a Pentagram curse). Rediculously, your knight would be turned into a DUCK – forced to nibble at your foes knee caps until the other knight was SOOO kind as to put you out of your misery (or not)! 😀 What makes this especially funny is the famed verbiage that comes out of the duck each time it is hit over the head by your sword. Disclaimer – Not withstanding trademark infringments – this one is perhaps best done as a ‘blameless anonymous user mod’?
I hope everyone enjoys those ideas, time to let someone else have a turn.
Hmm, yes I meant to spell that correctly “Ridiculously”.. Aflaaaaaacccccc
Sorry Justin – due to idiocy on my part I forgot to actually approve your comment until today! That’s why it has only just shown up. My apologies for that…
I like your transformation idea Justin, nice concept, especially if you can fly amongst other vampire bats unharmed and confront your unwitting foe with the pack (for protection of course). I’m sure you thought of the zombification too, would be cool to transform into a zombie as well (forced to drudge around slowly, or without a map hoping to kill the other knight so you can return as your old self, otherwise, continously regenerated as a zombie).
Stephen, if there’s any chance for implementing your ideas, even one, that would be very cool. Start with something simple like your blindness, extra health & confusion, probably easy coding to add those for extra spice in the game.
Looking forward to any of the ideas becoming reality. If not, it’s still entertaining to read, share and dream about the possibilities. Thank you, for the forum.
Adding more scrolls and potions would be nice, but by all means please make it so that you can chose in the options whether the “add-on” stuff will be used so we can still enjoy the old setting if we want to.
As for the potion of darkness, better make it a scroll – potions always affect the body of the drinking knight so far, while only scrolls affect their surroundings.
My ideas:
Scroll of Seeing – Shows you the location of a random gem, staff, or book not being carried.
Scroll of Summoning – Summons a bat to each of the 4 positions next to you.
How about new wands?
Wand of Fire – Damage like sword, fast-striking, but adds a shooting attack similar to a throwing dagger.
Wand of Vampirism – Bats don’t attack the wielding knight, and if striking a bat or knight it drains a bit of life, healing the wielding knight.
What always annoyed me most about the scrolls and potions was their total randomness… I would like to see something to reduce this, the best I can think of is a Nethack style way to visually distinguish the different potions/scrolls from each other (colour for example), which would be randomised at the beginning of every game so you would have to find out by experimenting what colour does what, but once you’ve done that you could avoid the harmful ones by virtue of having memorised them.