Thank you Mario!
It's interesting that you use = instead of # to represent walls. "Brick walls" -- will there other wall types?
Yes, I had this hang-up early on that I wanted to have particular rules for which signs represents which beings. Mathematical operators are obstacles or gates, punctuation marks are the ground etc. That's why walls "had to" be the "=" sign
There are a few different wall types already. But they're mostly identical (some are harder to demolish/mine), so I figured I didn't need so many. Rather save some colours for future stuff like pilars and special/magical walls.
I was surprised that simply walking over stairs makes me use them. Might be problematic in some cases.
Most of all, I didn't want to add another command key just to access stairs, so I decided to treat stairs as "bumpable". The game makes sure that all stairs can be walked around, however. Making stairs bumpable is certainly a bit like swearing in church (I'm sure Krice has dismissed the game already). To be perfectly honest, I'm actually even considering turning bumping off by default. Oldtime RLers would find it very unfamiliar, I think, but I wonder how casual players would feel about it? My reasoning is mostly that some weapons can be used from a distance, or as tools on objects that are traditionally avoided or walked over. So bumping feels vague for a game with more complex object interaction than the original Rogue.
I like your message style. And the fact that the dungeon level is shown once I die. (Perhaps a little too much goblins for first level )
Yes, that can happen
The Goblin aardvarks are better to just avoid, since they are rather slow and dumb and never carry treasure. You don't get xp for killing stuff, so taking them on is really just a waste of resources. Squirm is a bit on the hard side at the moment, and I expect easing it up a little. Not so much by nerfing the monsters as by adding more "friendly" encounters, that can be used to your advantage (like the swashbucklers currently present).
For a better survival rate, I'd suggest choosing "Create character" from the menu, and make sure that you get the "weapon experience" and "military training" (and possibly "well off" or "weapon specialist") merits.
I can't move diagonally using numpad.
You can't at all, actually. This is partly because I started development on a laptop. I also had this idea to allow movement patterns more like chess (or xiangqi) pieces. I haven't taken that very far, but there are Snakes and Hopping hands which use this feature, and I'm sure I have some notes lying around with related ideas. In hindsight, I kind of wish I had made the game with explicit facing, actually.
One thing from a developer's view: Why are you using one .png for each letter and color? The .zip-archive takes endlessly to extract. ...
Just being lazy and stupid, I suppose. What you write makes sense. I'll probably get something like that done at some point.
Very cool! Let's try it!
Please do
As always,
Minotauros