Thanks for this awesome and detailed feedback. Whilst it is now historical, there are going to be a few unusual things in the game in the future - it will not be staying 100% "realistic", though there aren't going to be fantasy creatures and zombies and whatnot. You'll have to stay tuned for the specifics, but some weird stuff will be happening. Thinks Borges/Murakami/other "magical realist" authors for a good idea of what I mean.
Re: "ASCII" (as you accurately put it!), many thanks. When I realized I wanted more characters, I debated moving to sprites, but I like working and designing within the limitations of just a foreground/background colour per tile, and I'm glad others do too. The aesthetic design of the game is a really key part, and one I intend to continue developing. For example, when weapons are implemented, they will all get a procedurally generated image, much like all the structures and things in ziggurats now.
I'm not sure what you mean by the gameplay - for the time being, at least, the puzzle generation is the gameplay. I realize it's not traditional roguelike gameplay, and rest assured combat etc is on the way, but that's the early gameplay. The next release, 0.4, is going to focus on adding traps to ziggurats to "break up" the puzzle solving. These will NOT be the kind of (in my view) rubbish traps you get in other RLs - they are invisible until seen, only take up one tile, etc. These will be visible traps with triggers (like tripwires, pressure pads, etc) and outcomes (like fire, poison, gas, arrows, etc), and it will be up to the player to navigate around them, over them, or trigger them from a distance, or trick enemies into them, etc.
As for emptiness, cities and villages are planned, along with many other types of dungeon as well as ziggurats (pyramids will be the next, then more... unusual ones...). 0.5 will be focusing on history/civilization generation, and will have some of the early stages of cities beginning to appear, though I don't yet know to what extent you'll be able to interact with them. I totally agree though - if I read your paragraph correctly, you are saying a game like this needs to be "dense" with stuff to do? If so, I totally agree, and I'm working on it
CRITICISMS:
1) Hmm, interesting. Nobody's ever mentioned this before, but two in one thread makes me think I should tone it down. I'll give it a milder colour, and your aesthetic criticism makes sense too.
2) Correct. You will *not* be able to travel over water in the future without hiring a ship, and similarly, the map will largely start undiscovered. That is just in place for the time being.
3) Agreed. That goes back to the density issue - once you've spent a long time in a ziggurat and reached the peak, for instance, a few seconds of offloading doesn't seem that bad after 10-30+ minutes on the tile. This will obviously be even stronger once there is more gameplay "in" each map grid, as it were (if you spend an hour exploring a map grid, a few seconds of offloading isn't too bad!), but I agree. I do like the idea of offloading in the background though with two threads. I will most definitely look into it.
4) The problem is, with procedural myths, legends, histories and so on, there will later be lots of text to read. I'm not really sure what the solution to this is, unless I make all fonts into 10x12, 8x10, etc. I'll have to consider this, and maybe making "tall" fonts is the best plan. Hmm. The problem is that the entire game is built around a grid-based font system, as is the main library I'm using, and I'd have to really search for a solution to that.
5) A good point. That's going on the list of "stuff to do one day" for now, as water won't play a big role for a while, but I agree with the principle. Making the flow visible whilst stationary makes a lot of sense!
What do you mean by persistent? Although unusual for the kind of game that generates an entire world, not just will there be permadeath, but you will get only one character per world. There's a whole bunch of reasons for this I've posted on my blog, but the long story short is that there's going to be a weird and complicated plot, and I want the world to reroll each time. I mean, all roguelikes without a "world" do this - you do not explore the same dungeon in Nethack twice! - and I'm just expanding that onto a bigger scale. However, death at the start of the game will be rare, so you won't be alternating between dying and generating a new world endlessly. A one/two minute generation window would be annoying as hell if a new player died as often as they do on classic RLs, but although I intend for the game to be very, very difficult, the very early game won't be. Unlike most RLs, I want the endgame to actually be the hardest part! Anyway, thanks for the fantastic feedback. It is immensely appreciated.
