Rogueish
I like NetHack. I'm not very good at it, honestly, but I've played it a lot and generally enjoy myself.
Naturally, I thus consider myself qualified to bitch about it.
I started a stub of my own roguelike, entitled "raidne", with the hopes of building what I wish NetHack were. Perhaps a worthy goal, or perhaps that ship has long since sailed-guess I'll find out. Anyway, it's a good idea to collect my thoughts before I get very far, so here goes.
(Disclaimer: I've only played a few other roguelikes, so for all I know I'm retreading ground here.)
Stats
I actually really like Fallout's SPECIAL system: Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Agility, Luck. It avoids some problems that gnaw at me with most other stat systems:
- More a UI thing, but absolutely everything else in Fallout starts out derived from these stats. Health, resistance to stuff, a lot of skills, etc. And the game tells you the formulae for each of these, so you don't have to guess.
- A whole lot of games have both wisdom and intelligence. I always thought this was really silly, and the division is arbitrary at best.
- 18/** str is ridiculous. That has got to go.
- I like Luck being a real stat. I also like Luck actually having a real effect on everything you do, so that max Luck is just as obviously helpful as max Strength.
I've also been told I should use the GURPS system, but it strikes me as a little... simple.
I don't know what could be done with Charisma. It works in Fallout, where there are huge conversation trees for half the people in the world, but roguelikes don't exactly have a lot of NPCs to charm. What else could it be used for?
I'm also torn on whether stats should be trainable like they are in NetHack, or a nearly-fixed constant like they are in Fallout. With the former, your starting stats barely matter and you'll end the game with everything maxed (for your race) anyway. With the latter, choice of gear may become far more interesting, but you might also want a fleshed-out secondary layer of skills (or whatever) that can be improved. That's probably a bit much for a roguelike.
Interface
Menus are great.
Your inventory should be sortable and probably show the symbol for everything you pick up, but more importantly, pressing a letter should give you a submenu of commands you can do with that item. Eat, quaff, drop, zap, throw, loot, bop, twist, alchemize, whatever. These can exist as separate commands too, if necessary, but this stuff should be ~discoverable~. (Even the NetHack GUIs are kinda bad at this.)
Also there oughta be an equipment "menu". No differentiation between accessories and armor, christ.
The mouse should be useful, because goddamn, it's 2010. Clicking could give a short menu of fast-travel/look/help/etc, or shift-clicking could be always-fast-travel, or whatever.
I want the arrow keys to work, but this presents the problem of how to do diagonal movement. I could use home/end/pgup/pgdn, as they're in the right places on the numpad, but I wanted to use pgup/pgdn for scrolling back through messages. :V
Plan B: Use shift-pgup/pgdn for scrolling through messages, and then I can use pgup/pgdn in menus without hiding the message pane. Hm. Might work.
Generally I don't want the interface to be part of the difficulty of the game. That's lame. Applying wands breaks them and probably kills you? Really?
Gameplay
I don't have a big plan for a style of game I want to build, specifically. But games like Crawl and ADOM seem to have gone much further down the RPG route, which I don't like so much; a lot of what I enjoy in NetHack is that it's clever and resourceful and makes you be the same. There are a lot of in-jokes, items with strange uses, obscure solutions to problems, and so forth. Building your stats is something that just sort of happens along the way.
I just have a thing for inventory-focused games in general. Ever play the bad 90s Amazon point-and-click game? The whole game basically came down to combining junk you picked up in creative ways to get past problems. I like that; it's obviously built into the game, but it still feels like an original solution to an open-ended problem.
So it seems I want a game focused around items. Items items items. Items are great. If nothing else, a wider variety of items would avoid the NetHack One True Ascension Kit problem, which turns the game into a boring grind. It'd also make the early game more interesting, which is good for those people (*ahem*) who tend to die around the middle and are sick of seeing nothing but iron shoes and dwarven helms. There are a lot of items in NetHack that are cool but so rare that I almost never see them, and when I do they tend to be of such specific use that they don't help me out of the dire situation around the next corner.
Discovery
The core of NetHack is identifying items, yes yes, I know.
I always felt that the game is remarkably inconsistent about what it actually lets you know. You can see your exact attributes, but not your own Luck (or even whether it's good/bad). You can gauge how much you get hit for, but not how much damage you do. You know exactly what turn it is, but not whether your prayer timeout is up.
Worst of all, the most interesting things the game tells you are mentioned once and forever forgotten. Enlightenment will tell you all of your resistances, but you have to resort to writing them down if you want to remember them-but if you're doing that, you hardly need enlightenment. Probing will tell you the maximum health a creature type has, but again, you have to jot that down if you ever want to use that information again. Not that it'll do much good unless you also do the math to figure out how much damage you're doing!
I don't want memorizing wikihack to be a prerequisite. I want a game that avoids this problem by building up its own internal reference guide, as you play, preserved and improved across games. Once I find out that kobolds are poisonous, I should have that information available forever. Consider it a guidebook passed down through the generations.
In closing
Gehennom is stupid and really boring.
Also please tell me of interesting things other roguelikes do so I can rip them off if this ever gets off the ground.
Naturally, I thus consider myself qualified to bitch about it.
I started a stub of my own roguelike, entitled "raidne", with the hopes of building what I wish NetHack were. Perhaps a worthy goal, or perhaps that ship has long since sailed-guess I'll find out. Anyway, it's a good idea to collect my thoughts before I get very far, so here goes.
(Disclaimer: I've only played a few other roguelikes, so for all I know I'm retreading ground here.)
Stats
I actually really like Fallout's SPECIAL system: Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Agility, Luck. It avoids some problems that gnaw at me with most other stat systems:
- More a UI thing, but absolutely everything else in Fallout starts out derived from these stats. Health, resistance to stuff, a lot of skills, etc. And the game tells you the formulae for each of these, so you don't have to guess.
- A whole lot of games have both wisdom and intelligence. I always thought this was really silly, and the division is arbitrary at best.
- 18/** str is ridiculous. That has got to go.
- I like Luck being a real stat. I also like Luck actually having a real effect on everything you do, so that max Luck is just as obviously helpful as max Strength.
I've also been told I should use the GURPS system, but it strikes me as a little... simple.
I don't know what could be done with Charisma. It works in Fallout, where there are huge conversation trees for half the people in the world, but roguelikes don't exactly have a lot of NPCs to charm. What else could it be used for?
I'm also torn on whether stats should be trainable like they are in NetHack, or a nearly-fixed constant like they are in Fallout. With the former, your starting stats barely matter and you'll end the game with everything maxed (for your race) anyway. With the latter, choice of gear may become far more interesting, but you might also want a fleshed-out secondary layer of skills (or whatever) that can be improved. That's probably a bit much for a roguelike.
Interface
Menus are great.
Your inventory should be sortable and probably show the symbol for everything you pick up, but more importantly, pressing a letter should give you a submenu of commands you can do with that item. Eat, quaff, drop, zap, throw, loot, bop, twist, alchemize, whatever. These can exist as separate commands too, if necessary, but this stuff should be ~discoverable~. (Even the NetHack GUIs are kinda bad at this.)
Also there oughta be an equipment "menu". No differentiation between accessories and armor, christ.
The mouse should be useful, because goddamn, it's 2010. Clicking could give a short menu of fast-travel/look/help/etc, or shift-clicking could be always-fast-travel, or whatever.
I want the arrow keys to work, but this presents the problem of how to do diagonal movement. I could use home/end/pgup/pgdn, as they're in the right places on the numpad, but I wanted to use pgup/pgdn for scrolling back through messages. :V
Plan B: Use shift-pgup/pgdn for scrolling through messages, and then I can use pgup/pgdn in menus without hiding the message pane. Hm. Might work.
Generally I don't want the interface to be part of the difficulty of the game. That's lame. Applying wands breaks them and probably kills you? Really?
Gameplay
I don't have a big plan for a style of game I want to build, specifically. But games like Crawl and ADOM seem to have gone much further down the RPG route, which I don't like so much; a lot of what I enjoy in NetHack is that it's clever and resourceful and makes you be the same. There are a lot of in-jokes, items with strange uses, obscure solutions to problems, and so forth. Building your stats is something that just sort of happens along the way.
I just have a thing for inventory-focused games in general. Ever play the bad 90s Amazon point-and-click game? The whole game basically came down to combining junk you picked up in creative ways to get past problems. I like that; it's obviously built into the game, but it still feels like an original solution to an open-ended problem.
So it seems I want a game focused around items. Items items items. Items are great. If nothing else, a wider variety of items would avoid the NetHack One True Ascension Kit problem, which turns the game into a boring grind. It'd also make the early game more interesting, which is good for those people (*ahem*) who tend to die around the middle and are sick of seeing nothing but iron shoes and dwarven helms. There are a lot of items in NetHack that are cool but so rare that I almost never see them, and when I do they tend to be of such specific use that they don't help me out of the dire situation around the next corner.
Discovery
The core of NetHack is identifying items, yes yes, I know.
I always felt that the game is remarkably inconsistent about what it actually lets you know. You can see your exact attributes, but not your own Luck (or even whether it's good/bad). You can gauge how much you get hit for, but not how much damage you do. You know exactly what turn it is, but not whether your prayer timeout is up.
Worst of all, the most interesting things the game tells you are mentioned once and forever forgotten. Enlightenment will tell you all of your resistances, but you have to resort to writing them down if you want to remember them-but if you're doing that, you hardly need enlightenment. Probing will tell you the maximum health a creature type has, but again, you have to jot that down if you ever want to use that information again. Not that it'll do much good unless you also do the math to figure out how much damage you're doing!
I don't want memorizing wikihack to be a prerequisite. I want a game that avoids this problem by building up its own internal reference guide, as you play, preserved and improved across games. Once I find out that kobolds are poisonous, I should have that information available forever. Consider it a guidebook passed down through the generations.
In closing
Gehennom is stupid and really boring.
Also please tell me of interesting things other roguelikes do so I can rip them off if this ever gets off the ground.