Monster Listing, work in progress
Posted: Mon Mar 23, 2009 7:13 pm
I've spent many hours working on the monster catalogs for the Bards Tale games. They have always very reliably followed the 16 monsters per level rule (ie, there are exactly 16 different types of monsters that can be randomly encountered on a level, not including "specials" or monsters summoned by other monsters). This was true for Bards Tale I, and for all 416 randomly-encountered monsters in Destiny Knight. Thief of Fate looked like it was beautifully following along the footsteps of its predecessor.
Then I hit Gelidia. All of the sudden, I was only encountering 10 monsters per level. I spent hours crawling over the icy wastelands of Gelidia looking for those extra 6 monsters, trying stuff like walking zig-zag (It appears that at least the IIe and C64 versions of these games use a random-generator whose seed is derived from whatever your previous moves were. So if you endlessly walk in a straight line, or if you constantly stand in one place, you will cycle through the exact same 3 or 4 encounters over and over again)
Finally, I gave up, and concluded that for whatever reason, Gelidia has only 10 monsters per level. I shrugged, and reasoned that at least 10 is a nice round number, and it did make monster hunting noticeably quicker. Lucencia looked like it was sticking to 10 monster per level as well. Then I visited Cyanis' Tower, where I found 11 monsters per level. And THEN, in Alliria's Tomb I found 12! I feel like one of the very fundamental laws of physics has just been broken.
But I'm still going to have to go back through all these levels yet again to make 100% sure that I didn't somehow miss some random monsters that never came up thanks to a fluke of probability.
Marco.
Then I hit Gelidia. All of the sudden, I was only encountering 10 monsters per level. I spent hours crawling over the icy wastelands of Gelidia looking for those extra 6 monsters, trying stuff like walking zig-zag (It appears that at least the IIe and C64 versions of these games use a random-generator whose seed is derived from whatever your previous moves were. So if you endlessly walk in a straight line, or if you constantly stand in one place, you will cycle through the exact same 3 or 4 encounters over and over again)
Finally, I gave up, and concluded that for whatever reason, Gelidia has only 10 monsters per level. I shrugged, and reasoned that at least 10 is a nice round number, and it did make monster hunting noticeably quicker. Lucencia looked like it was sticking to 10 monster per level as well. Then I visited Cyanis' Tower, where I found 11 monsters per level. And THEN, in Alliria's Tomb I found 12! I feel like one of the very fundamental laws of physics has just been broken.
But I'm still going to have to go back through all these levels yet again to make 100% sure that I didn't somehow miss some random monsters that never came up thanks to a fluke of probability.
Marco.