Feature Requests for Rogue Touch - Part TWO!

[GriffinBait]

It may have been sugested before, but we really need a "Dip" command for potions. Most of the time, nonthing would happen, but dip your sword in a potion of blessing and it comes out blessed. Dip your darts in a potion of poison to coat them and get extra damage. Add healing to gain strength and you end up with extra healing. Maybe you could dip somthing identified in amnesia and you will forget what it was. It gives the player strategies to identify potions and enhance equipment.

[Jim2wheels]

It may have been sugested before, but we really need a "Dip" command for potions. Most of the time, nonthing would happen, but dip your sword in a potion of blessing and it comes out blessed. Dip your darts in a potion of poison to coat them and get extra damage. Add healing to gain strength and you end up with extra healing. Maybe you could dip somthing identified in amnesia and you will forget what it was. It gives the player strategies to identify potions and enhance equipment.

Loving that idea!! That would open up a whole new strategy to the game.

[bindlewirdle]

IIRC the original game had a command where it would list all the items you'd discovered. I miss that, especially when playing as Neo and having quaffed a bunch of potions and not found either a potion of self haste or amnesia, I've forgotten just what I have discovered and of course, I'm right out of identify scrolls with a bunch of unidentified rings.

[Glarvole]

It would be very nice if we could list the items we've identified. Maybe as a list off of the main inventory screen?

[JonathanCR]

I've really been enjoying this game. It's beautifully designed and a pleasure to play!

I had never played Rogue before encountering it on the iPod Touch. However, I did play Moria very intensively many years ago - as you probably know it's like Rogue, but with much more to it - I still think Moria is the greatest computer game ever made. I tried Angband and its variants later on, and while the extra bells and whistles they added were fun, I didn't feel they really added to the gameplay.

So basically, my ideal request would be to make a version of Moria (or a roguelike game along those lines, with that amount of stuff in it) for the iThing. That game, recreated in the stylish way you've done Rogue, would be absolutely incredible and blow everything else in the app store away. I noticed a post or two suggesting that a more advanced roguelike game might be on its way, and that would be fantastic.

Failing that, there are a few ideas I'd like to see in Rogue if possible. I'm aware that many of the things that make Moria great - such as more character stats, character classes, different shops, and the rest - would probably spoil Rogue. I rather like the "jump in and play" feel of Rogue, no need to mess about creating a character and all that. So I'll restrict myself to some of the simpler things that I think would enhance Rogue as it is, without losing its distinctive feel, and keep back all the other stuff for my request for a version of Morialike game!

(1) Search mode. Turn it on and you automatically do a search every step. This would save a lot of hassle.

(2) Please, show the walls of corridors as well as rooms! It looks odd to have walls around rooms but not corridors. Also, for those warrens of corridors, it is useful to see what's a real dead end and what's just a tunnel you haven't walked all the way down yet.

(3) Monsters should be able to use secret doors without you having to find them first (or at least, intelligent ones should). Of course, if you see a monster emerging from one, you will know it's there.

(4) There should be some monsters (ghosts etc) that can move through rock. Admittedly I haven't got all the way to the bottom of the dungeon yet so perhaps there are some waiting for me!

(5) There could be many more varieties of monster. For example, there's just a "Slime" monster. Why not use the same graphic, but perhaps with different colours, to represent many different kinds of slime, with varying abilities and strengths? And so on for the others.

(6) It's incredibly confusing that AC is measured on a descending scale but armour is rated on an ascending scale.

(7) How about the ability to mine? There could be different kinds of rock, representing different degrees of hardness, and containing gold seams that you could dig out. (I just nicked this from Moria but it might be fun.)

(8) Character abilities - e.g. fighting, ranged weapons, magic item use, etc. Each time you go up a level, your abilities might improve, representing your skill at those particular activities. Rather than mess about with assigning skill points and stuff, why not have the abilities improve to reflect gameplay so far. For example, use your bow a lot, and next time you go up a level your ranged weapon skill will increase.

(9) Timed rests. Enter a number and your character will rest for that number of turns (stopping if a monster appears, of course). Or have the option to rest until fully healed.

(10) Examine icon. Tap it, and then tap something on the screen (tile, monster, object) and it will tell you what it is. That way I don't have to go and pick up that potion only to find it's a useless one. And I have some idea what that unfamiliar creature is.

(11) Some sort of indication in-game of the relative power of weapons. Is a two-handed sword better than a katana? It would be nice to know when I'm wondering which one to wave at things.

(12) Variable light radius. Why not get some item that casts light for two squares, or even more? (Actually I think these may already exist deeper down - but I think there should be more options for casting light, given that without it ranged weapons aren't much use.)

(13) I think that when you cast a light spell in a room, any sleeping monsters there ought to wake up.

[EDIT] A couple more...

(14) You can wield a new weapon without having to remove the old one manually first - the game swaps them for you. So why can't you do this with armour?

(15) The "tap the weapon icon to shoot" feature doesn't seem to work if you're using D-pad controls.

(16) I really like the little touch of finding graffiti by your previous characters! But it always seems to be only your *last* character. And I've found his scrawlings on much deeper levels than he ever got to. It would be cool if the graffiti were by all of your previous characters, and they appeared only on depths that those characters actually got to - so if you get to a deeper level than ever before, you won't find any. (It would also be cool if the graffiti said various different things...)

(17) I also really like the little touch of finding your previous character's corpse and being able to fight it. It would be nice if, after defeating it, the game specified which previous character it was ("The nametag on his clothes says '...'" or something like that!).

Thanks again for a really smartly designed version of this game. I'll be watching out for anything else you produce.

[Mister Fluff]

How about some protection against confusion?

What about a set of rings that worked together? (One ring has some small benefit, the other has some small perk, but when you are wearing both, it would be a REALLY nasty bonus)

Finally, what about the chance to buy back items stolen by Nymphs?

There's my thoughts. Apologies for any repeats.

One more idea: What about weapons having bonuses/negatives to hitting? (Something like a Two-handed sword being big on damage, but having a negative to hit, whilst a long sword would not be a big damage, but it would have a plus to hit something)...

[Mister Fluff]

A couple more ideas:

Let the player double-tap a creature and the program will attack the monster until it (or the player) is dead.

When you tap on the avatar, it takes you to your inventory, where your stailed stats are shown as well (steps taken, enemies killed, etc.)

That's it for now. I still hate this game for the hours I waste on it. Cheers!

[ssarwate]

How about a "save" feature that would let you save multiple games in progress. Maybe limit it to five or so, but sometimes I want to try a game with a different character and not lose the prior game, or go back to before something killed me.

[swhatley]

Mister Fluff, I like your idea about double tapping on the monster to fight to the death and double tapping on the avatar to bring up the inventory.

Ssarwate, I like your idea about saving up 4 or 5 games. But, there are some restrictions that will need to be retained. Games need to be save only when leaving the app or switching between characters. This is already an auto-save between levels in case of a total crash of RT. The saved games need to be independent games and not multiple save points of the same game.

Enjoy life!
Steven

[OhMy!]

My suggestions all go back to the original version of Rogue I played on my Atari ST (up to and including last year, that's how much I loved the game! still on the original noisy Atari itself, emulators are just not the same!).

These for me are my 3 major qualms, I won't get into minor nitpicking just yet (and forgive me for not having read the rest of the thread prior to writing this - someone else might have made these suggestions already!)

1) I don't think Leprechaun's should be as aggressive as they are in this version. It used to be that you could pass by them any number of times and they would remain asleep. Now you can pass by them only once at best, and some have attacked me right from the get-go. It takes all the fun out of spotting them and setting yourself up for a good ranged attack (if the room dimensions allow it), or at worst leaving it be provided it's not blocking an important door or the stairway. It used to be that I felt I would only lose gold if I made a really stupid mistake, recently I've had games where several leprechauns stripped away half my gold and made it so that I felt the game was no longer about beating the high score, but instead simply about getting the Amulet with "whatever" amount of gold (thereby making the whole process of collecting gold on each level pointless in the first place). Rooms full of monsters could of course remain the exception to this, I was used to them being aggressive in that case (as after all those rooms were the 2nd most exciting thing in this game besides number 2) below)

2) I really miss those chaos scrolls that would hurt you a bit (and often lower your strength too) for just *trying* to read them. There was something incredibly exciting for me when I played rogue as a kid about finding these scrolls - the thrill of going ahead with reading them anyways even though they might do something horrible like plunge you down 5 floor traps in a row, in the off chance they might do something awesome like enable you to permanently identify everything you come across (or was it just everything currently in your pack? i forget). Especially given the fact that it seemed there were always more types of possible (good and bad) chaos scrolls no matter how many I found - it really preserved the freshness of playing the game. Rogue Touch could theoretically implement countless possibilities for chaos scrolls to give a truly exciting boost to any future update.

3) Some sort of equivalent for the "Shift" key function for searching and resting. I really love the option to double tap to traverse an entire passage or length of known room in one go, so why not something to do a couple of searches or rests in a row just like the original? All that extra tapping is really a pain, and I used to find it easier to gauge "how many searches is enough" (which would increase as levels went lower) for a given 3-square area by the shifts - individual tapping makes it easy to lose count and waste moves.