Most roguelikes, and the vast majority of RPGs/item-heavy games in general, have consumable items. From a design perspective this makes a lot of sense since consumables are the easiest and most direct way to indicate that effect X can be achieved Y number of times. They’re also a logical way to enable the player to […]
Sound effects are not something you see (hear) in many traditional roguelikes. This makes sense from a developer perspective because there is often such a huge variety of content that it becomes a massive and difficult undertaking to provide sounds for everything. Adding sound effects is akin to adding high-resolution art assets–it detracts from gameplay/mechanics/content […]
Traditional roguelikes are both at an advantage and disadvantage when it comes to accommodating color blind players. On the one hand recoloring monochrome glyphs is a fairly straightforward process; on the other a game lacking any method of adjusting colors can be difficult for some to play, more so than say a game with unique […]
Traditional roguelike aesthetics are all about abstraction. Object representations are distilled to a simple symbolic form, thus it’s no surprise that roguelikes sometimes come paired with ASCII art. Of course this is also often due to practical limitations–the engine/system itself may only be capable of displaying characters–but it’s also stylistically appropriate for art to use […]
Arguably the most vital part of a traditional roguelike’s interface, a message log gives the player all those details that might otherwise be depicted by (or lost in the confusion of) greater graphical detail. It’s also a nice after-the-fact record of why you find yourself flirting with the brink of death when things suddenly start […]
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