#254 Three small suggestions - Usability improve / Weapon types / Buy-sell subwidget
Hello there,
I used to follow your blog back when you kept the game in
scheme and C (or C++, I forgot). Then you wanted to abandon
scheme due to some errors, to move to python but it seems
as if the transition was too difficult or time-intensive.
Then the blog kind of vanished and I assumed you went on
to focus on other things, unrelated to Nazghul.
Now I see that you did however publishe a new release in 2014,
which is still somewhat recent, so perhaps Nazghul is not
completely dead.
I have compiled a very short list of 3 minor suggestions which
I wanted to put down. Perhaps you can consider these - I think
these are all not big changes so perhaps you can consider
these should you have time and motivation to add any of them:
- At the help section in the game, it would be nice if coloured
letters could be used to emphasize something, for example how
to (A) attack or how (F) follow someone. Currently it is only
white on black, so maybe a bit of colour could be added
optionally, like yellow/gold for this key-letter to have?
I remember in like Ultima 6, the keyphrases appeared in red.
- For shopkeeper-NPC interaction, there is a question asked:
BUY/SELL (B/S), even if I do specifically type 'buy' in before.
This information seems a bit redundant for me as a user. Maybe
in the case of when the user does input "buy" or "sell, this
question could be skipped altogether in order to save some
time, and let the player directly skip to "buy" or "sell"
already? I think that is mostly just a convenience manner
how to buy/sell something. Another idea could be to use
a F-key like F5 or something like that to directly open
a trade submenu / subwidget (or just allow typed-commands
to buy something). Not entirely sure how to best explain it,
perhaps if you test the game somewhere in a town, you could
have a look whether the buy/sell interface could be made
simpler or faster?
- Combat:
Weapons with a long range seem to have a really huge advantage
because you can strike your target before it can. I think that
is both nice and bad - from my point of view those weapons are
normally significantly better because I can arrange my party
with strong melee and backrow fighters nicely.
But it also seems a bit "too useful" sometimes. Perhaps in the
long run there could be more good items/artefacts that would
be in close range? Stuff that is common in some fantasy themes
like a bat/vampire dagger (stealing life) and so on and so
forth.
I think the game is cute and nice, hopefully you can remain
motivated with it!
Not many people know scheme well (I don't, but I looked at the
source code, and that was actually not that hard to read - I
think your code is excellent) but I think perhaps one day we
could describe whole game-worlds, at least the data subpart,
in another way, and use components from scheme addons to
script in behaviour. For example, a whole NPC should in
principle be describable in yaml or json as well.
