One of the most important strategic decisions that the player has to make is deciding when to rest. There are quite a lot of things that happen when you rest. Around midgame you typically have to go through a mental checklist before you decide to rest. You look over your remaining food, if you have any food that can spoil, any Ep left to spare for identification or re-equiping, any rod that you can use to help you etc. There is a lot to think about, and it is easy to forget something. Also, it is quite taxing to do this.
I consider TGGW to be a modern and transparent roguelike in the sense that it relies on decisions and information rather than to remember quirks or punishing you for doing things you didn’t know about. For this reason I think a quality of life (QoL) improvement for the game to help you remember important things while you still make the decisions.
Review Before Resting
I have implemented a feature that lets you review exactly what is going to happen when you rest, along with warnings and reminders of things that might happen. A very early version of this feature is shown on the screen below:
You get a small review of what happens if you rest
The game will warn you about things such as:
- Having spare Ep to use without penalty.
- Food in your inventory that can go bad.
- Being diseased or aggravated (having consequences of next day).
- Unused rods in your inventory
- Inform about which effects will expire.
- Coats or conjured weapons disappearing.
- etc..
After displaying this screen you will get a prompt asking if you want to sleep or if you changed your mind.
QoL or Handholding?
My motivation for introducing this is stated above (transparency, less remembering things). Since I am very familiar with the game it helps me a lot, but it also have some other consequences:
- It may help the player too much
- It may signal to new players that they have to play optimally
- It may be overwhelming to new players
- On the other hand it can actually help them get better at the game?
- In a way it can actually help them learning the mechanics?
- It may deprive new players of learning and experiencing these things by themselves
- I’m leaning towards including it for everyone, but an alternative is to have it as an option.
- Some players may find it tedious to be prompted if they really want to rest after seeing the preview. But I think it promotes a more careful playstyle.
Let me know if you have any opinions regarding this feature.
Heya,
Thanks for the QoL update.
Another thing you might consider is prioritizing targeting non-friendly critters first in the targeting screen. I lost one game by hitting a friendly on accident.
Cheers,
As for feedback, I think making it a toggled option is ideal
> prioritizing targeting non-friendly critters first
Well, that would not be so easy to do. The targeting system works like a cursor and always goes to the nearest target in the direction you are pressing. If it would skip friendly monsters, I don’t know how it would possible to target them at all.
Thanks for your feedback though. A better solution would maybe be to prompt before attacking a non-hostile in any way.
I don’t know how big a deal it would be to WRT helping players too much. On the one hand, it would be a lot easier for them to be aware of all that will happen, but on the other, almost all of it is fairly obvious, just a matter of forgetting. The only thing I can think of that might be told that a new player might not know is the possibility of an item decaying in some way, but that’s just arbitrary spoiler territory, and I think that so far TGGW does a good job avoiding that. On the whole, I it would be good, just helpful in preventing people forgetting to apply information they already have.
I do wonder about how it might impact the whole minimalism schtick that the game has currently though. For the most part, the game is pretty nice about not overloading players with too much information. This could feasibly become an unpleasant info dump if you had a lot of things happening at once.
Finally, I most definitely like the idea of making it an option. For more experienced players, the effects of resting are fairly well accounted for, I think, and it would be a touch annoying to have to go through an extra option every time, but it might be nice to have a prevention for letting players too easily do something so irreversible.
I like the direction you’re taking this though…
I agree fully with everything you say here, especially the part about minimalism. I’ve heard new players sometimes get overloaded by the “examine monster” screen which is why removed superfluous information from there and from the attribute window. Being presented with this screen the first few times you are playing is going to be overwhelming.
Also, as you say, there is no reason to NOT display all this info to experienced players. Making in an option defaulting to off might be the way to go then.
🙁 I just lost a super cool run due to confusing order application of buffs. I had 4 HP, and wanted to use a volcanic rock, yeah. So I put on my Amulet of Resistance, and my heat ring, putting my heat resist up to 50%. I figure, that with the new, cool resists, I’ll be fine, I’ll take 3 damage 50% of the time, and 2 damage the other 50%. Buuuuuuut, when I take the Volcanic rock, turns out the effects go like so:
Tmp Lower Heat Resist, making my resist 25% -> 5 Heat Damage, with 25% resist making it 4 75% of the time, and 3 25% -> Prm Raise Heat Resist, making my resist 50% again.
I had a whip of rage! And 100% melee! And 80% magic resist! And ostrich legs made me fast! I could just spam hits and noone could touch me! Gah!
Also, the preview assessments for putting on ranged items in the fire slot is still super buggy.
Also, I just find it funny that despite /many/ runs, I have never once been able to grow the seed. I got both the seed and the soil together once, but I didn’t know how to activate it (this was pre ‘a’). And I still haven’t worked anything out for rabbits (though I suspect something happens if I feed them something…)
Yes.. and then seeds are more common than they used to. I like to have some things in the game really really rare.
Rabbits are actually not special right now, so you don’t need to put efforts there.
First of all, the tmp -25% rFire in volcanic rocks is a bug! It shouldn’t at all be like that. Thanks for noticing.
Otherwise the rule is pretty arbitrary and should maybe be brought to light somehow. When using an item the order is: first tmp effects, then instants and finally permanent ones. And within each category in the order they are listed.
I’m sorry you lost such a character to a bug 🙁
> Also, the preview assessments for putting on ranged items in the fire slot is still super buggy.
In which circumstances? Can you give an example? Is it related to comparing different kinds of ammo or launchers?
The one I saw in particular was equipping a wooden boomerang whilst I had a bow and arrow equipped.
Actually that direction gives an accurate assement, but comparing bow or arrow to the boomerang is indeed weird. The reason is that it doesn’t make sense to compare arrows when you don’t have a bow equipped (arrows give no bonus to missile so it says that missile will turn into 0), comparing to bow to the boomerang also doesn’t make sense because it doesn’t make any damage on its own. The solution is probably to disable comparison completely when ammo/launcher don’t match. Thanks for pointing it out!