Re: I'm finishing a roguelike for the visually impaired
Hi.
sounds like a fascinating project, and welcome to the forum, this could be a great thing to add.
Technically speaking, the gameplay of entombed only resembles a roguelike in that it has a randomly generating tyle based map and items along with unidentified potions. The main battle system of entombed does not resemble a roguelike so much as it resembles a more standard turn based party rpg similar to final fantasy or indeed dungeons and dragons, since entombed A, has multiple characters, and B, does not function on a grid system for it's enemy position.
To explain, in most roguelikes, the view is top down similar to that in entombed, so you can move in 8 directions (yes diagonals too), however rather than going into a battle system with menues outside the game arena, battles happen by either A, moving your character into the same tyle occupied by a monster (like taking a peace in chess), or by being within a set distance in tyles of a monster and using a missile weapon or using a spell.
thus grid position is quite important, especially when dealing with spells such as cone of cold or light beam which may affect groups of monsters.
While I do't have enough sight to see text in order to play most roguelikes, and playing with a screen reader is too time consuming to be fun, I do have experience with Angband and several of it's varients. Since the text in the game is readable with my screen reader and I have enough vision (plus a large tv monitor), to see the biggest size of graffic tyles for the game. On this basis I do have some questions.
Firstly, another thing that makes angband very very nearly! accessible without the graphics is a similar monster list and targeting system to that you mention in the first post, however, while it is possible to discover and list objects such as monsters, items on the floor, chests, stairs and doors, the problem is you still don't have any way of finding out where the corridors and walls are relative to your character, or when there is a large crowd of monsters, still less when you can use the environmental features to your advantage.
For example, one situation I remember being in in a game of angband was my paladin was in a narrow 1 space wide corridor which lead to a large open room full of goblins. I walked up the corridor until the goblins noticed me, then backed down it again, with a large column of goblins folliwng me. Wehn they were all in the corridor I let fly with my beam of light spell. Since goblins obviously were weak to light, and since (being a beam spell), I knew it'd go through multiple targets in a row, this had great effect, and it was quite hilarious seeing the long line of goblins all go poof!
While I understand you are going for a simmpler layout with just rooms and corridors and without the debris, pillars and erregular vaults (not to mention some of the other crazier features such as lava), that mak e up Angband, how exactly are you going to represent the grid based nature of combat? If you for example want to use your ranged weapon, how will you let the player know when is best to? or what rangers of player attacks or enemy attacks are?
If you are planning to reduce combat to a basic turn based affair, eg, "you enter a room with an orc, do you want to fight? take turns until orc drops" without say the possibility to shoot the orc with a bow before it attacks you, or back away from the orc when his friends arrive up the corridor, is your game still a roguelike?
this isn't intended as a cryticism, I'm just interested to know.
Another question I have relates to tactics.
In Angband the main challenge of the game is that of risk taking. If you head into that room containing that large group of monsters, will you come out? Do you explore the floor your on fully, looking for magical protections against elemental attacks or head further d own into the dungeon? This is btw why I myself have never got further than floor 25 out of the 100 floors of Angband, ---- I tend to enjoy exploring and encountering the many many different monster types too much and thus don't tend to know when to run away :d.
If the player doesn't get as much overview of the floor or where monsters are, how will they know when to approach a dangerous situation, or when to leave well enough alone?
I'm also interested to know what you plan to add in terms of elemental attacks and equipment into the game, since again, that's a big part of the challenge of roguelikes, making sure you have the right equipment from early in the dungeon without risking your kneck before going deeper down.
My final qustion has to do with mosnter descriptions. Obviously when dealing with spoken text, your main atmospheric tool is how well you can describe things. I know myself if a game just says "you see an orc, the orc hits you for x damage" it can feel pretty flat.
Any plans to add descriptions for when you examine monsters, since those can really! make a huge difference to the game, especially when attached to in game information such as elemental weaknesses such as the goblin's fear of light.
Lastly I will say I absolutely agree with giovani. One of the sad things about audio games generally is that while people would love! to play more rpgs, coding them is something only few people can do, ---- one reason why there are so few audio rpgs available.
Thus an editor, or even some easy scripting to add monsters, items, location descriptions etc to the game would be hugely welcome.
After all, Angband has a huge amount of varients available, which use the same codebase and yet have created some vastly diverse games, and it'd be great if a similar thing could be begun in audio.
I very much look forward to trying the game out.
URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=149584#p149584
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