Very cool! Always excited to see more old-school roguelikes. I’m playing it now and I have a few notes if you’re interested. For context I haven’t played much nethack specifically but I’ve played a bunch of other traditional roguelikes like dcss and brogue and I’ve done the 7drl like 9 times.
- I loved the “go blind/unblind” key. I haven’t used it yet but reading its description on the help screen makes me interested to explore and find when it’s useful.
- it would helpful if it printed a message when you pick up an item
- when a lot is happening at once I’d find it useful to have a way of seeing a log of events rather than just the most recent events (either on a separate log screen or just if the message area to the right of the screen displayed the most recent few events)
- some kind of “examine” command would be really helpful when you’re encountering a new ascii character for the first time and aren’t sure how scared you need to be (though I appreciate this could be left out on purpose to make the player more comfortable with the “learn things by dying” mentality
) - I was confused about the difference between gold and zorkmids. When you stand on a “$” on the floor it says there are gold pieces there, but I found a shop where I could buy items for zorkmids and it caused the number next to “$” in the hud to go down, but then I died and the game said I had “30 gold and 450 zorkmids worth of items”. I assume that a zorkmid is the name of a coin and the coin is made of gold so colloquially it’s referred to as a gold piece.
- Is there a way to wait for a turn? During combat it’s sometimes useful to skip a turn so enemies walk into your melee range and you can hit them before they hit you. It’s possible to skip a turn by walking into a wall tile but it might be worth adding a dedicated “do nothing” command. Again this could be left out on purpose as it forces you to think more tactically to compensate.
- The player heals automatically over time and it seems like no resource is consumed by healing like this so I find myself walking back and forth a bunch after each battle to get all my health back. In the roguelike dev “literature” there’s a term “food clock” for dis-insensitivising waiting around like this.
- Is it possible to eat apples or are they just for pets? I couldn’t find a way to eat the apple I found though this might be by design as I’m not sure the player character is the sort of thing that eats (they can only “absorb” corpses )
- Nice addition of nethack’s sokoban boulder-pushing puzzles!
- I couldn’t work out how to compare weapons. Might be useful to display their damage/accuracy (or whatever stats are relevant) on the “wield” menu.
- It looks like enemies keep spawning forever. I found that if I spent a few minutes walking back and forth along a long corridor I could farm kills and get a bunch of levels and gear. This is another problem that could be solved by a “food clock” (again doesn’t have to be literally food!). Despite grinding a bit early on I still struggled with enemies around floor 5 though so this “loophole” doesn’t necessarily break the game.
- I like the mold enemy because it’s hard to kill and can block your path. After I spent ages farming I found a bunch of molds had spawned which made it hard to get to the exit (next time I’ll farm near the exit haha). I needed to use a wand of digging to dig around the molds blocking my path which was fun!
- The garden on level 6 was a nice touch.
Overall I had fun playing your game. There’s already an impressive amount of content. Looking forward to seeing how it evolves!