In this mode, players should feel like they can really dig in (maybe a few floors deep) before meeting their first potential demise. I think AFTER you've made your roguelike, you should go back and attempt to create an easy mode. This one may be more personal preference, I'm not entirely confident in it. They also allow players to draw enemies back to an item so the player can step on it to power up for the fight (much like the big pellets in Pac Man). They add a tactical element of timing when you want to step on the item. Items that are used upon stepping on them (like many of the items in DoomRL) are also great. This cuts another command out of your list and plays into the "bumping into things to interact with them" premise. If you can eliminate the need for inventory management in your game, then you can allow players to automatically pick up items when standing on them. Pickup or use items upon stepping on them. You can reduce ALL your item verb commands down to one single use button.ģ. Item to item interaction and item to monster interaction can still hold secret properties. There is still a lot of complexity you can derive from single use items. It is more similar to what a player expects from an object in most RPGs. It also removes one level of interface between the player and the action they want to perform. While driving your item interactions as object-verb rather than verb-object helps, reducing all objects down to a single verb helps even more. The user knows that the verb for placing things in the pot exists, but they don't know what the effect of placing a specific item in the pot is. In Shiren the Wanderer, a magic pot may cause an effect when an item is placed in it. However, they can still have hidden properties. This interface means objects can't have hidden verbs. When you select the object, you are presented with a list of appropriate verbs. In Shiren the Wanderer, an object may have many verbs associated with it. Most games act in the opposite order: object-verb.
Roguelikes are the only genre of games I'm aware of that uses this. These are more extreme, and I certainly don't mean to imply all roguelikes should do this, but I think doing them helps clarify things for non-roguelikers: If you can design the game without inventory management, I think you end up with a much more approachable game. It's not a fun mechanic and forces lots of complicated interactions that take the player out of what feels important to the game. Lots of roguelikes use inventory management as a key game mechanic forcing you to decide what is most important to you. I think your comment about inventory is under-emphasized. For all of the supposed benefits of ASCII it's rather strange how every other genre of games in the entire universe switched to using actual pictures of things the second the technology became available. I think there's a slightly separate question as to how you get non-roguelikers to even look at your game in the first place and I'll be buggered if I know the answer to that one, but I rather suspect that ASCII doesn't really help there. If you can get a player there they will probably be able to overcome whatever UI atrocity you're trying to inflict on them, but I think most of us devs (being totally used to it) underestimate how difficult that can be for new players. So, I think for roguelikes you need to get into a headspace that is wedged somewhere in-between-and slightly-off-to-one-side-of those required for 'normal' realtime and turn-based games. Certainly there are other genres which use turns, but usually in a very different way - the discrete time steps are much larger, for example - and so use game mechanics and a control paradigm which are actually pretty different. That being: the fact that roguelikes are turn-based, which is pretty much unique to the genre for single-player, single-character dungeon-crawler games. However I think that both (and indeed, grid movement in general) are really just symptoms of the major thing which I suspect throws off new roguelike players. Regarding 4-way vs 8-way: personally I much prefer the 'feel' of 4-way movement but I think that 8-way movement is one way (though not the only way) of adding greater tactical depth. First of all I'd like to thank Darren for unintentionally providing me with the mental image of Buckminster Fuller as the star of 80's sci-fi show Buck Fuller in the 25th Century, which made me spit coffee accross my desk.
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