Thanks for all the replies. I knew I could count on you (larger communities didn't reply with anything useful).
If every command is triggered by a single key, why do you need the confirm mode?
To prevent the player from accidentaly pressing the wrong key. If he needs to press enter and he presses 3 instead of 2, he still has the chance to remove the 3 again and press 2 and then enter to correct his mistake.
Many decisions are quite important and can not be undone anymore.
It's a single player MUD or sort of? Those and roguelikes are from the same "era" but are quite different. Anyway, if you limit yourself to four directions it feels strange not to have a minimap and wasd/arrow keys. That being said it's a bit sad since you can do so much more in a text based RPG, like "hidden" exits, mazes with twisted directions (loops), overlapping rooms and the like.
If you didn't already, I'd give MUDs a go for inspiration.
Not making full use of the game idea is not a concern for me. I'm pretty confident it's the best text-based game ever made (at least going by my personal taste). In fact MUDs inspired me to do it, but it's quite different. I played MUDs but I was really annoyed that they require you to learn a list of commands and thus are hard to get into and I thought to myself "Wouldn't it be much cooler if all possible actions where onscreen like '1.Do that 2.Do this' and you just have to enter a single character instead of typing in long phrases?"
But that's also why I absolutely can not use MUDs as inspiration for the controls.
Do you have a link to your game?
Right now I don't really want to release it. It's because I don't want players to be able to create save states before I'm not finished with the overall balancing. I guess I could make a screenshot of it, though.
I guess it depends on how prominent is the minimap, if you are navigating by that most of the time then wsad + arrow keys would be best. That also depends on whether you are pressing the keys constantly or if you press a key then read some text or battle or whatever then nsew would be just as good. The arrow/WSAD keys are usually used for fast paced games, NSEW would work better for slow ones.
The minimap is only 3x3 size (1x1 = size of a normal room), but I still found that ever since I added it, I'm using mainly it instead of the direction descriptions. That's basically what got me to think that I need to add a mode where you can move without confirming.
As I said, for arrow keys it's clear. I just wonder if WASD is needed additionally...
So this is like a IF but is purely combat based? Or is it more like Monster Den with descriptions?
Think of it as a text-JRPG. It plays like a JRPG and has a story like a JRPG, but instead of graphics, it describes everything what happens.
You should try posting on some Interactive fiction forums. You would definitely get help there.
As a fan of interactive fiction, I'm used to using. n,s,w,e or north, south, east, west, and up/down as needed.
Are you programming it from scratch, or using Inform or Tads?
Personally, I don't really see the need to use wasd. I've never played an interactive fiction that used it. I know the original Wizardry games did. You might also check out Zyll to get some ideas since it sounds similar to your game.
Ah, so "interactive fiction" is how the genre is called? I always was looking for "text RPG" on google but the only things I found was Pen&Paper stuff that is played online in a browser. Do you know any good community for this genre?
I'm programming it from scratch.
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