New project, trying to estimate times

[justkevin]

Hey all, I've started working on a Flash dungeon crawl RPG that might be considered "like rogue," if not an actual roguelike. 

The planned aspects that are "unroguelike":

Graphical.
Easy control scheme, allowing players to perform all actions with either the mouse, keyboard or both, depending on their preference.
Optional non-permadeath mode.

Other than that, the feel of the game will probably be very much like rogue:  The player explores a quasi-randomly generated dungeon killing monsters, collecting items, increasing in level in strength.  Action will be turn-based.

I've read most of the articles on roguebasin and am interested to hear from experienced developers which areas of development took the most time.  I'm particularly interested in hearing about what took far more time than you initially expected-- e.g., the action processing system, monster AI, equipment/stat balancing, etc.

Thanks!

[ido]

I'm particularly interested in hearing about what took far more time than you initially expected-- e.g., the action processing system, monster AI, equipment/stat balancing, etc.

Actually all of these took a lot less time than I expected and writing content took a lot longer.

-Ido.

[Anvilfolk]

Coming from a CS student perspective, anything relating to code will take a lot longer than initially planned

But ido's probably got a more in-depth and hands-on experience than I have, since I haven't programmed a roguelike (or any game for that matter).

[Ex]

The thing that takes the most time for me is always the thing I want to do least. This seems to be totally random, though. Sometimes, I don't want to implement saving and loading, other times I don't want to implement combat. Generally, adding new items and enemies has also been a very slow process for me. Quick things for me tend to be: Getting the player up and running, dungeon generation, stairs, doors, food, title and death screen.

Also, all of the features you've described are still roguelike features. Crawl has a popular tile mode. Powder is a very popular roguelike with the exact features you've described. And generally, if the author says it's a roguelike, it's a roguelike