Ye Olde Roguelike Grimoire

[njerpe]

Hello,

Wanted to bounce an idea off you guys here - imagine a screen where the player is looking at the yellowed pages of an old musty grimoire. The book is full of recipes and magic formulae but with proper training the reader can make the text come alive, can make it move and rearrange itself at the behest of ahem, keystrokes typed from his, umm, magic keyboard. (This part of the metaphor needs work) Anyway this interplay between the reactive text and the player's decisions results in a little scene or a battle which feels like a roguelike game.

For the moment I'm bringing this up just to focus on whether this kind of interface would *look* good. Almost all roguelikes I've encountered use a black background. For something like the grimoire you'd want the color of old pages and text that was black or at least dark enough to show up well against parchment. Fonts and so forth would reflect Renaissance moods, Arthurian, Gothic, etc.

So are there any text-centric games out there (bonus points if it is a Roguelike) that look like this? MUDs could conceivably fit but they typically look like Telnet consoles. Browser-based text games are typically too modern, full of buttons and menus and combo boxes. Kingdom of Loathing comes close but it isn't really a text-centric game imo.

[Pueo]

I'm not sure about the *looks* part, but might I offer some input on the content part?

I don't whether you have read this series, but it's "The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel." A major plot point is the "Codex," a 21 page book that contains all the information in the world.  The letters are arcane Greek and Sumerian and older symbols, but for the right person, the letters will shift into recognizable text.  Perhaps you could use something like that?  The player is the "right person," and as they touch the "grimoire" (keyboard), the text will shift into words they can read.

[kraflab]

Legend of Grimrock's map kind of looks like what I imagine you are talking about:

http://thecontrolleronline.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Legend-of-Grimrock-Level-Six-Trapped-Secret-Eight.jpg

This is just the popup map of a first person dungeon crawler, but I think you could easily imagine a game unfolding on this page.

[Z]

The "Fictional Roguelike" from the 7DRL 2012 challenge attempts to have a map which looks like a piece of paper.

[njerpe]

Cool thanks for the suggestions, I didn't know about any of these.

[george]

I can't think of a game that's exactly like this; I think the first Textfyre game Shadow in the Cathedral has a book-like interface, and there is an IF interpreter Folio written in Python that had a similar UI.

http://home.cogeco.ca/~peter_rogers/folio/

I don't know if this is what you mean but the idea of reading a little section of story where the text then transforms into a roguelike scene would be badass in my opinion. Not unlike a text/graphical mashup with flavors of JRPG world-wandering/turn-based-battles. It just might work!

[TheIronPainter]

I would look into the old adventure game LOOM. In that game, you used the keyboard to play and weave songs to create magic spells. If nothing else, it's an epic game with some really amazing scenes.

[ant]

Hello,

Interesting idea, i wish you much fun with it.  Old and
strange fonts, cryptographic teaching, there a lot of
room for fun in this for people who may not otherwise
be able to understand cryptology.

I really liked the first game called Enchanter from the
old Infocom series.  I never was able to play the second
(or later if there were any), but always wanted to...  If
you've not played it give it a try. 

Having puzzles to solve and using scrolls in combinations
were the fun parts.  Fighting, well, I'm ok with some, but
I like games where it isn't the only reason for being.

[requerent]

Be sure to check out Junicode- an awesome font set that includes runic, gothic and other obscure medieval fonts.

[Legend]

I really like the idea. I have actually always wanted to play a roguelike game that used ascii on a book or old parchment background.

[njerpe]

Me too, Junicode might be just the thing too. Maybe add some wiggling or crawling effects for particular glyphs that you target or stare at too long...

[Holsety]

Why not make it an eeeevil grimoire?
Thus the pages could be 90% black, 10% red and dusty.
And you'd be able to overlay the roguelike over it in white (or if you want to be fancy, in chalk).

Just my two cents, I'm not a big fan of having the ascii in black on a light background.

[mariodonick]

LambdaRogue's overview map:

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-6JFyOFnMrLU/TsZQSom2a6I/AAAAAAAACcY/pJ7dqW92fuk/s800/09_map.png

Combine this with a font you like, and sure, it would work. It's just a background, after all.