I sort of like Luck being invisible but it's perfectly reasonable to make it visible if it's going to be as manipulable as it is in NetHack. I've never seen Luck exploited as much as I'd like, so yeah, I hope for it to be a "real" stat. And it should bias the selection of items on new levels, drops from monsters, items with random effects... anything not purely deterministic. Obviously it'll take some care to prevent just maxing out Luck and breezing through the game with twelve +10 Amulets of Winning, but a significant difference in Luck should at least be noticable.
I think this partially depends on whether you are writing a roguelike for... I know, I know. There's no reason I can't do both, of course. But even as someone who's plenty used to the e/q/z/whatever dance, it's plenty annoying to look in my inventory, see a thing I want to eat, and be unable to eat it. Instead, I have to memorize a letter, back out of my inventory, eat it, and then go back to my inventory and whatever I was doing. That's absurd.
As one of those people, there's a reason for this; when I hit "e" I know I can only eat a comestible, and I'm not going to accidentally drink a potion or zap a wand or use the last charge on my mumbledyfrotz. This did occur to me, though I think it might be a different problem. You won't zap a wand, but you might still accidentally eat the lizard corpse you were saving, or a big chunk of meat instead of a fortune cookie, or a zombie corpse, or whatever. So prompting for just a contextless letter isn't very player-friendly, either.
What if you had a general 'use' key that showed the parts of your inventory that were usable, broken into sections by how you'd use them? You'd still be able to just mash two keys to stuff something in your face, but if you weren't 100% sure about what you were mashing, you could double-check. Or, I don't know, have an excessively "paranoid" setting that confirms exactly what you're doing before you do it. There's got to be room for significant improvement here.
Mandating the mouse loses you some of the hardcore rogueliker audience and makes it so you can't play your game through dgamelaunch and similar services. Oh, no, I wouldn't require use of the mouse any more than I'd require use of the arrow keys. (Though I'm pretty sure it'd work through dgamelaunch, as long as it were running over SSH instead of telnet.)
I've never seen Luck exploited as much as I'd like, so yeah, I hope for it to be a "real" stat. And it should bias the selection of items on new levels, drops from monsters, items with random effects... anything not purely deterministic. Obviously it'll take some care to prevent just maxing out Luck and breezing through the game with twelve +10 Amulets of Winning, but a significant difference in Luck should at least be noticable.
Maybe just have it be one of the inputs to the RNG function?
Oh, no, I wouldn't require use of the mouse any more than I'd require use of the arrow keys. (Though I'm pretty sure it'd work through dgamelaunch, as long as it were running over SSH instead of telnet.)
Huh, I should test that at some point. I'd assumed it wouldn't work or would only work on a limited number of systems.
I've never seen Luck exploited as much as I'd like, so yeah, I hope for it to be a "real" stat. And it should bias the selection of items on new levels, drops from monsters, items with random effects... anything not purely deterministic. Obviously it'll take some care to prevent just maxing out Luck and breezing through the game with twelve +10 Amulets of Winning, but a significant difference in Luck should at least be noticable.
I think this partially depends on whether you are writing a roguelike for...
I know, I know. There's no reason I can't do both, of course. But even as someone who's plenty used to the e/q/z/whatever dance, it's plenty annoying to look in my inventory, see a thing I want to eat, and be unable to eat it. Instead, I have to memorize a letter, back out of my inventory, eat it, and then go back to my inventory and whatever I was doing. That's absurd.
As one of those people, there's a reason for this; when I hit "e" I know I can only eat a comestible, and I'm not going to accidentally drink a potion or zap a wand or use the last charge on my mumbledyfrotz.
This did occur to me, though I think it might be a different problem. You won't zap a wand, but you might still accidentally eat the lizard corpse you were saving, or a big chunk of meat instead of a fortune cookie, or a zombie corpse, or whatever. So prompting for just a contextless letter isn't very player-friendly, either.
What if you had a general 'use' key that showed the parts of your inventory that were usable, broken into sections by how you'd use them? You'd still be able to just mash two keys to stuff something in your face, but if you weren't 100% sure about what you were mashing, you could double-check. Or, I don't know, have an excessively "paranoid" setting that confirms exactly what you're doing before you do it. There's got to be room for significant improvement here.
Mandating the mouse loses you some of the hardcore rogueliker audience and makes it so you can't play your game through dgamelaunch and similar services.
Oh, no, I wouldn't require use of the mouse any more than I'd require use of the arrow keys. (Though I'm pretty sure it'd work through dgamelaunch, as long as it were running over SSH instead of telnet.)
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Maybe just have it be one of the inputs to the RNG function?
Oh, no, I wouldn't require use of the mouse any more than I'd require use of the arrow keys. (Though I'm pretty sure it'd work through dgamelaunch, as long as it were running over SSH instead of telnet.)
Huh, I should test that at some point. I'd assumed it wouldn't work or would only work on a limited number of systems.
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