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[tametick]

(Isn't ### a hallway and not a wall, anyways?)

It's a hallway in nethack and rogue and a wall in angband and crawl.

[Radix]

Dark hallway to be specific.

[mcc]

I have zero problem with ASCII and usually like it better than I tend to like the (low quality, incomplete) tilesets. I think what I wound up liking most was the sort of split option with simple graphical tiles for walls/doors/floors but using ASCII for objects and living things.

The 40-key hotkey interfaces, though, are unforgivable. I like vi but I don't want to play a video game based on it. After multiple attempts over a period of something like 10 years I was only able to play rogue/nethack when the iPhone versions (which, conveniently, give you the option of picking your next move from a MENU) started appearing. (This also means I haven't played ADOM/Crawl because of a lack of Gandreas versions.) I can see advantages or even a little bit of mystique to the ASCII art* but I see no function for the standard roguelike interface except to make the genre inaccessible and insular.

* (EDIT: Oh: and I tend to find tileset versions unplayable because they keep you from seeing the whole screen at once, something the design of most roguelikes I've seen subtly depends on)

[William Broom]

That's funny, I personally find the hotkey setup in Nethack to be so much easier and faster to use than a mouse interface. Granted, it took a little while to get used to it (like an hour of playtime) but once I had the hotkeys in my memory it felt so clunky whenever I had to reach for the mouse.

40 hotkeys is an exaggeration, in Nethack there are probably only 10 keys that you have to use on a regular basis.

(I say 'in Nethack' because that's the only one that I've played extensively, but I know it's also one of the most complex.)

[mcc]

Well mouse interface would probably be unnecessary.

It's not that a keyboard interface is inherently problematic, it's that these particular keyboard interfaces are so weird. I once again return to my complaint from my page 1 post, that "use staff", "use potion", "use food" and "use scroll" are three totally different keys. Why? Removing/wearing rings, armor, and weapons are three different keys that aren't even near each other on the keyboard. Does this add anything to the experience? Meanwhile while you're hitting all these buttons you're getting very little feedback, maybe a menu of further options every so often. Everything about the interface seems to spring from "what curses makes easy" + "laziness" + "extremely tolerant user base".

The Gandreas versions I like so much have a neat thing where there are nice accessible menus that give you a list of all the options, and next to each option is the gesture (the equivalent of a key press, except because they're mostly movements rather than letter mnemonics he's able to design gestures with similar effects to have similar symbols) that you use to shortcut that particular action (like draw a little harry potter scar to use a scroll), so that if you don't know how to do something you can just go do it but in the process you inadvertently learn the shortcut. Do the standard roguelikes have any equivalent of this? Dunno, but the fact I never found one is a problem by itself*.

Cuz yeah you'll only be using 10 keys most of the time, and you'll memorize those quickly, but there's all those other commands you use infrequently and shouldn't need to memorize. At some point you will need to "dip" something or "rub" something and then what, you're scrambling for a help file. Looking at gandreas nethack it lists 83 unique commands in its menu (some of these would have been : commands or combinations of numbers with letters in the original, but then again the menus aren't complete either, there is no option to dig or zap down for example). It seems to me there must be some way to present a general interface which is less baffling and more intuitive than rogue/nethack present without sacrificing quick keyboard control or ASCII graphics.

* Stupid story: Getting back to vi, I use vi rather than emacs. The reason why is that the first time I used linux, I was told both these things existed, so I just tried both. I was able to locate both the help file and the "quit" command in vi simply by button mashing. I never found those same things in emacs. So I just stuck with the first one.

[Hayden Scott-Baron]

MCC, the argument is that you can try to eat a staff, or use a bread roll as a wand, etc. All of this could be better handled with a default behaviour and then menus for specific behaviours, but that's unnecessary when all roguelike players are required to have passed a standard interface test of keyboard and symbol memorisation.

William, I congratulate you on your fortitude for memorising hotkeys in 60 minutes, but you have to appreciate that for some people video-games are more recreational and not an exercise in interface penetration. I'd rather reserve my hotkey memory for the 12 hours a day I spend working. That, and they're not well thought out either.

Also, every mouse interface I've seen for a roguelike thus far has been atrocious.

I tried Tilerogue very briefly, to see ugly tiles and an entirely keyboard and log driven interface. I'd rather play Stone Soup in which case.

With regards to tilesets, I do think these are difficult to get right. There's a certain degree of abstraction inherent in this genre, and most tiles seem to totally miss that. I don't think map style necessarily manages it either, but it might be fun to give it a go sometime. 

[William Broom]

I do agree that having [w]ield, [W]ear and [P]uton as separate hotkeys is silly. Probably the same with quaff, zap, eat, apply, etc. Personally I have never tried to eat a wand or zap a bread roll, nor do I really feel any need to. There are a few cases where the versatility is actually meaningful (i.e. you can eat a cream pie, or throw it to blind enemies, or apply it to blind yourself) but mostly it's pointless. Another thing I dislike about Nethack is the pointless questions: Identify object with cursor? Yes, that's why I pressed 'identify object'. Right finger or left? I don't give a shit!

But basically I think all these problems are pretty minor, and it's definitely worth trying to surmount them to get to the sweet, delicious game that's inside. However I can see why it could be frustrating if you found it more difficult to memorise hotkeys or if it made the game feel like you're at work. (I'm a student, I wouldn't know haha.)

I'm actually thinking about making a roguelike myself, and if I do I'll definitely keep this thread in mind. In particular I like the idea that we can have simple and symbolic interfaces that look much nicer than ASCII.

[SirNiko]

I think there's at least two different groups who play Roguelikes - one group is enamored by the mystery of the game, and enjoys experimenting with combinations of items searching for new behavior, and the other is more interested in what amounts to a much more complex version of minesweeper.

For the first group, more hotkeys and therefore potential actions is attractive, because underneath those options there is the possibility to discover nuances (like perhaps wearing a pair of boots offers slightly different bonuses than if you applied them, or quaffing a bowl of cereal instead of eating it makes it last longer). For the second group, this all just gets in the way of turning the next corner and seeing what's on that scroll you're carrying.

Pokemon Mystery Dungeon fits in that second category, it dispenses with much of the complexity and focuses on more obvious strategy - find food, kill monsters, efficiently find the exit. It's a good game, but it's designed for a different style of play despite being a roguelike.

[tametick]

Also, every mouse interface I've seen for a roguelike thus far has been atrocious.

Did you try POWDER? It is one in a long tradition of gameboy roguelikes (SirNiko mentioned another one) that tend to be a lot more user friendly than their PC counterparts (it is also AFAIK the only one that has a PC port and that is not Japanese).

BTW, did you know that the humble Roguelike (pretty much exclusively on the GB/GBA/DS) is a curiously popular genre in Japan (and to my knowledge nowhere else)?

I wonder why that is.

Also, if you would excuse the shameless self promotion, I think my upcoming game

(soon to be with all-mouse as well as all-keyboard control schemes) will be exactly what you're asking for.

[Hayden Scott-Baron]

SirNiko - I don't think any of the extra functionality needs to be stripped out in order to facilitate the basic minesweepering. It's just a messy legacy interface as is. Shift + keys are incredibly non-standard for all but the most peculiar of application interfaces, let alone games.

Tametick.. Yep, I played a good amount of Powder on the DS. Really enjoyed it, although I hated the lack of sound.  Felt weird on PC, and I didn't like the iPhone implementation of Powder either.

I don't necessarily need a mouse interface, for the record. It's not like I'm afraid to play games using keys, in case anyone is taking me for this sort of person.

I'll also try Cardinal Quest when it's available. 

[tametick]

Yep, I played a good amount of Powder on the DS. Really enjoyed it, although I hated the lack of sound.  Felt weird on PC, and I didn't like the iPhone implementation of Powder either.

Can you be more specific about what put you off in the PC & iPhone versions?

[Seth]

One thing about the separate hotkeys--in Crawl it's nice that when you press 'q'uaff only your potions come up and you don't have to dig through your inventory--you can amass quite a few items later on in the game.  Of course, I don't see a reason there couldn't be a general a'pply in addition to the specific hotkeys.

[Dragonmaw]

I don't know if it has been mentioned, but another good introductory rogue-like with a simplified interface and such is Sword of Fargoal, especially the iPhone version. Great game.

[Slash - Santiago Zapata]

I've tried to implement a graphics layer for all of my roguelikes, but I will always support console mode because it allows much quicker development and it allows people to imagine the world in their heads using their own neuronal renderers.

I think dozen-command roguelike UIs are a problem to solve, not a tradition to keep.

[tametick]

I think dozen-command roguelike UIs are a problem to solve, not a tradition to keep.

But honestly, which roguelike that is <10 years old* even have those?

If you look at newer roguelikes (doomrl, nlarn, powder, tome4, brogue, sword of fargoal, etc) most of them have pretty decent UI if you can stomach the ascii graphics.

• The 4 "major" roguelikes are all 15+ years old

[Hayden Scott-Baron]

Can you be more specific about what put you off in the PC & iPhone versions? [of Powder]

It's just a GBA game in a wrapper. It makes no allowances for the platform it's on. It's acceptable on GBA/DS (and I like it in that respect), but on iPhone you're playing a tiny window with virtual buttons and dpad.

Fargoal (of course) is a better example of how to do the game on a touch screen. Fargoal, however, is a case where I find the graphics a little weird... the animation and 3D walls emphasise the fact that they're not animated and that they're flat.

Very tempted to take a stab at making a roguelike soon, or at least a very basic equivalent.