Meat Arena (testing for Hellmouth)

[Eronarn]

Hellmouth is the roguelike that I started work on during 7DRL2012. Because I'm nowhere near having a playable version of it, I decided to put the engine to use for another game: Meat Arena.

You can look at the same page for information about how to play Meat Arena. Right now, I'm looking for feedback on its interface, rather than how fun it is as a game (unless some of the mechanics directly make the game less fun). It is 'winnable' - there's a boss, even! - but it isn't meant to be particularly polished. (Eventually, Meat Arena will become the 'debug mode' for Hellmouth.)

Thanks for taking a look at it!

[swamply]

I tried version 0.2-meat. Here are the thoughts I thought when I tried it.

That deus-ex style limb health diagram of a guy in the upper right is really cool, but I assume I'm looking at its back or maybe in a mirror, since when I get hit in the left arm, the arm on the left side of the stick figure turns yellow.

If I hit 'v', then cycle through the cursor styles, then hit 'v' again, it doesn't save the way I liked to look at stuff.

Is there a way to get a full list of what's in a tile full of lengthily-named items? I'm looking at a tile now containing "meat slave left hand and maimed left ". I'd like to know what's at the end of that long ol string.

In 'skill levels' on the character sheet, what does (DX/E), (DX/A) and stuff like that mean?

The first few times I tried waiting a turn, I tried '.' (since '/' and '*' weren't in the help screen but did something). It's probably fine just as '5' though.

How do you unequip stuff or drop equipped stuff?

Different colors for the combat spam would be really helpful.

I just picked up a whole pile of corpse and armor and extra weapon instead of getting a menu to select which thing to pick up. Guess I wanted all of those.

The stair direction indicator is really useful, but it pings around when I scroll through a character sheet (?), sometimes even when I hit a key that doesn't do anything.

Sometimes, when I go down a stair, it takes a keypress before the camera pans to me.

When I went downstairs on arena level 4, the game closed abruptly and I got this output

Code: [Select]

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "src/hellmouth.py", line 20, in <module>
    curses.wrapper(main)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/curses/wrapper.py", line 43, in wrapper
    return func(stdscr, *args, **kwds)
  File "src/hellmouth.py", line 14, in main
    loop = game.loop()
  File "/home/mrben/games/hellmouth/Eronarn-Hellmouth-0e7baf1/src/games/meat.py", line 50, in loop
    if self.level.loop() is False:
  File "/home/mrben/games/hellmouth/Eronarn-Hellmouth-0e7baf1/src/levels/meat/arena.py", line 30, in loop
    self.go(self.map.destination)
  File "/home/mrben/games/hellmouth/Eronarn-Hellmouth-0e7baf1/src/levels/meat/arena.py", line 47, in go
    self.generate_map(destination)
  File "/home/mrben/games/hellmouth/Eronarn-Hellmouth-0e7baf1/src/levels/meat/arena.py", line 74, in generate_map
    self.map.generate_terrain()
  File "/home/mrben/games/hellmouth/Eronarn-Hellmouth-0e7baf1/src/maps/encounter.py", line 98, in generate_terrain
    cells, self.exits = generator.attempt()
  File "/home/mrben/games/hellmouth/Eronarn-Hellmouth-0e7baf1/src/generators/maps/meat.py", line 44, in attempt
    cells = line(self.center, self.exits["down"][1])
KeyError: 'down'

Game looks really cool, thanks for making it.