628: Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup 0.27.1 \\ A noob tries to grok DCSS! = o (--Spot the swamp path!)
1Playing the free, open source roguelike game Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, Windows console (ASCII) version 0.27.1. https://crawl.develz.org/
My first real sit-down with DCSS and I found myself boggled by all the options and commands and dungeon crannies and monsters rushing at me. = oo I'm also just learning the "vi keys" which makes even regular movement confusing--that part wasn't all DCSS's fault, although its single-width diagonal tunnels were what convinced me that I wouldn't be able to get through these games just with the arrow keys--and the vi keys rather annoyingly jump to letter headers rather than scrolling the view in the in-game documentation.
0:00 - start
4:53 - character creation confusion
18:22 - command keys
22:02 - Grixgr the Troll Fighter
44:42 - getting religion
48:21 - stairway ambush!
52:41 - Sigmund, round 1
59:51 - Death the Minotaur Fighter
1:03:27 - drat, shops
1:19:01 - Gakkymeimei's ghost
1:22:37 - the Sky Beast
1:36:35 - the sewer 'p'
1:46:14 - Sigmund, round 2
1:48:04 - wrap & preview!
It feels like there's way too much stuff in the game and in order for it to make sense and feel cohesive and not like just a whole bunch of random stuff; you'd have to spend a ton of time doing really hardcore editing and streamlining, and that hasn't been done.
Character creation is huge, with potentially tons of text to read up on, but thrown at you and splattered across multiple screens and lists, frequently lurking behind opaque key presses and requiring manual hunting through; I didn't find a quick way to access whatever would have told me that the troll species I ended up choosing, for instance, wouldn't be able to wear armor or cast spells, which I certainly would have liked to know beforehand.
My character got religion, but aside from a message saying plants were now more friendly to me, I had no clue as to what it was doing or what I should be doing with it; a little summary of at least the applicable keys (oh goodness there are so many keys), for instance, or a shortcut to an applicable help file (maybe there was one and I was so overwhelmed I just missed it?) would have been appreciated.
I like ASCII but the dungeon layouts are so mazey and lumpy that reading the level, much less getting around it and exploring its nooks, is painful. (I've looked at the graphical tile version, and those bitmaps hurt worse in their own way.) When one of the most robust-feeling functions in the game is the "autoexplore" that moves your character through the dungeon automatically, maybe that's a sign that a very fundamental element of your game, the exploration, just isn't fun.
And then there's this-is-never-a-good-idea stuff like the sewer maze where you, the player, have to be able to see the very slightly lighter green path of ASCII characters through the swamp of very slightly darker characters. ; P
And why does autopickup deactivate every time something around you turns invisible?
I don't think I'll be revisiting DCSS, I need something way more focused.
10/6/21
#roguelike #dcss #dungeoncrawlstonesoup