Philosophy

I've been reviewing my changelog recently (not this devlog; the more mundane day-by-day "what I've been doing"), and I realize I've been spending a LOT of time tweaking the UI lately. Part of that makes me yell at myself a bit (stuff like "you should be doing cooler/more important things instead!"), but for the most part I'm completely fine with that. Thing is, the first, biggest, most major push I had saying "program a roguelike" was one simple thing: I wanted to resize the friggin' window.

From there, a minor obsession with a good UI came up. From a design standpoint, UI is more or less everything. It ultimately comes down to two tenets:

1. If the player can not or is not likely to perceive something, it is better that it not exist.
2. The player's interaction with the game is the entirety of the game experience.

As examples of the first: It doesn't matter all the cool systems I have if they don't directly affect much. I doesn't matter that I can grow enemies organically if they're only at level one. It doesn't matter if enemies have inventories just like the player's character if I haven't given them items to carry and equip yet. This is pretty much Occam's Razor. Go with the simplest system that functions identically.

The second is a bit more broad than I really want to go into anytime soon. But, simplified, the controls for the game should be very, very good. For roguelikes, "controls" is almost the wrong term, because having to memorize a list of keystrokes to do stuff is never intuitive at first. With roguelikes what is important is the interface. What is important is how comfortable the keybindings are after you learn all the important ones. What is important is how quickly you can do what you want to do when you know exactly what you want to do.

I think all the roguelikes I've played have at least one design decision that I'd like to call a Stupid Fucking Idea (SFI). With NetHack, I'd like to point at "w" vs "W", wield vs Wear. Completely non-obvious at first, and hilariously disastrous when you accidentally try to kill a frenzied bugbear with body armor. ADOM's biggest SFI is simply having far, far too many keybindings. "F", for example. This is the command to wipe your face. What? When will that ever come up? Then you forget all about it, and when the mudmonster gobs all over your face, you - still forgetting how to wipe your face - think there was something funny about that attack because you're now inexplicably incurably BLIND. And have fun sorting through the ten-plus pages of keybindings when you're still getting used to the game; there's no "here's about a dozen extremely important commands that crop up every minute or so" page to let newbies learn the essentials before being thrust into the manual-sized behemoth of a keybindings? page it has. ADOM's w+direction to move is extremely handy, but Crawl's Shift+direction is more intuitive and slightly faster. Crawl's and Elona's UIs don't have any SFIs sticking out in my memory at the moment.

Why yes, I do need to play more roguelikes. Of course, again, roguelikes are probably the most noob-unfriendly games out there (the second being Counter-Strike. Not FPSes, Counter-Strike specifically), so I don't tend to experiment with them.

In short, while I make no promises to revolutionize the interface of the modern roguelike, I will try to keep myself from coming up with any SFIs.

Another major fundamental underlying design philosophy slash motivation is my take on leveling up, which I'll write tomorrow. Blarg.