Dang, that's some nice ASCII art.
The game itself is pretty tedious though. Even quick attacks missed all the time, the enemies have too much hp, and they get multiple consecutive turns for some reason.
Movement and interaction with the dungeon is indeed awkward, it would be much better if it was done as classic roguelike. But it seemed the game has some interesting story after I spoke to prisoners and was intrigued by lever puzzles, finding clues how to solve them, so I kept playing and eventually got used to tedious menu controls.
The combat is actually easy at early stages (on 'easy' settings), try experimenting a little with mixing in strong attacks instead of just using quick ones, but the real trick is to parry monsters attack on their turn, and if you do it on time you execute "combo breaker", which ends their streak and you get two free counter attacks. That will defeat low class monsters in one round and then you get "perfect". There is also "fatality" strike (ala Mortal Combat, with ASCII art animations), but you have to play on 'hard' settings and activate the feature by pressing some key code combo at the start menu, see README file for details.
Later on, as your skills improve, you get to execute more attacks and counter strikes, but tougher monsters have more moves per turn too, so it gets harder to make "combo breaker" right and on time. I got to the top of the tower where the final battle is supposed to take place I guess, but I didn't find some item I was supposed to bring and it was game over. I wish I had nerves to play it again, but unfortunately it's not random so I'm not too excited to go through all that from the beginning.
That's an interesting concept and a worthwhile goal. I'm not sure what you'd need to do to accomplish that. Obviously a test of technical skill works, but I'm more interested in something traditionally rogue-ish.
Definitely roguelike, basically I just want to expand on melee combat. Everything else stays classic rogue-like, only instead of simply bumping into an enemy take some additional input from the player to determine the outcome, that's all. Originally I thought of some improvisation on mechanics used for combo moves in "Fragile Wrath" mixed with special moves as done in "Sword in Hand" 7DRLs. In any case there is definitively room for more gameplay value in replacing simple 'bump to attack' with something a bit more user involved.
What about this: you have a mostly normal turn-based roguelike, except instead of alternating between the player's turn and the AI's turn, you alternate between which is attacking and which is defending on any given move (so like SAPFA2G). On your offensive turn, you use an ability like using an attack or casting a spell. Every attack hits a certain range of tiles (so a sword attack might hit one tile in front of you and the two tiles adjacent to it, a fireball spell might hit a 3x3 area of tiles, and so forth). On the defensive turn, you can take a step or cast teleport or barrier spells, and other protective things like that.
The player and the AI input their defensive/offensive commands at the same time, but the defensive ability is resolved first. If the defender chose to step away, your sword attack would fail. But at the same time, they would be putting themselves too far away to effectively use their sword against you. You could go with the fireball instead, but that's less damaging, costs more energy, and if your opponent moves right next to you, you'll get caught by your own splash damage.
I think that could be pretty cool. What do you think?
Something among those lines, for sure. Perhaps simpler and quicker, say based on rock, paper, scissors. You bump into monster, or monster bumps into you, and you get to input three choices of three moves. Monster gets to do the same in the same time, so the attack/defence is resolved as soon as you press three keys. You either loose all three bets, win one, win two, or win all three. If lost all three your attack gets, say 30% less power or chance than it would normally be without this minigame. If you win one attack result doesn't get modified. If you win two attack gets 30% more power/chance to hit, and if you win all three you get to execute some additional special move. Or something.
Specific monsters could also have some typical way they play this minigame, so it wouldn't be totally random and based on luck, therefore after fighting several of the same kind you could figure them out and thus have a better chance of winning this minigame against same type of monster. The way particular monsters play the minigame would of course be randomized for each new game and perhaps change depending on their level or some other factors. I really should make a little testing ground demo so all the ideas can be tried out, it would make it easier to see what's fun, what's not, and then improve or come up with new ideas based on that.
I think inspiration could be taken from some RPG games, I just don't play them, so I don't really know what kind of stuff did they came up with in all these years. Perhaps on old 8-bit systems, SNES or Gameboy games, some console or handheld with limited input where developers were forced to come up with something simple yet interesting. I think Digimon for Playstation has some system mixing luck, stats and strategy which resulted in what seemed to be tactical yet quick to play combat.
In any case keep the ideas rolling.
By the way, have you participated in any 7DRL?
