Wondering about Wandering ...

Wandering monsters … you know, the ones that just sort of appear from time to time as you explore an area rather than sit around waiting for you to find them.  The original text game included dwarves and a pirate as random encounters (wandering monsters by another name); however, given the 3-D graphics and the plethora of things for the Player to “see” while exploring an area; I felt a better selection of random encounters would add to the gaming experience.

As it was my intention to retain the original game’s integrity as much as possible, the additional wandering monsters that I introduced are “neutral” to the Player – they will not attack (unless provoked); but rather give the areas a breath of life.

In the forest, I added crows, and deer; which the Player can encounter fairly often as they move through these areas.  I also included a badger and even a small chance to encounter a black bear.  The badger and bear will ignore the Player, as long as they keep their distance …

I broke the caverns up into two areas: the Upper Caverns include the areas from the entrance to the pit just beyond the bird chamber.  In these areas, the Player may encounter bats and rats.  Once the Player descends the pit into the Lower Caverns (Hall of Mists and beyond); the goblins (my substitution for the dwarves of the original game) and pirate are added to the mix as “special” encounters.

The very first “special encounter” will be the goblin that throws a knife and runs away.  This gives the Player the opportunity to have a weapon before encountering any more goblins, which will attack the Player on sight.

On each special encounter after the first, there is a 1 in 6 chance that it will be the pirate.  The pirate will only appear one time; after that, only goblins will be encountered (this has some impact on the final score, just as it did in the original text version of the game).  When the pirate appears, he will take any treasures the Player may be carrying (if any) and run away.  Any treasures stolen by the pirate may be found in his chest, deeper in the caverns.  There is a chance the pirate may never appear (random rolls you know) and there is also the chance that he will appear when the Player has no treasures to steal – in either case, the Player will miss out on a few points from recovering their treasure from the pirate.

After the first goblin, any special encounter that is not the pirate (meaning all special encounters after the pirate has appeared) will be goblins.  These goblins are equipped with bows (with reduced damage applied … low quality?).  These goblins will be hostile and will fight to the death … be it the Player’s or their own.

Finally, I included a “clean-up” script in the area’s OnExit event to remove any “non-special” creatures after the Player has left the area.  This was done for two reasons:

1)      I did not want to fill the areas up with wandering monsters that slowly accumulate as the Player revisits areas in the normal course of the game; and

2)      Each creature created in the game fires a heartbeat script every 6 seconds.  Over the course of the game, enough random creatures could be created to impact performance.

Basically, there was no real reason to keep these things around once the player had exited the area.