Wednesday 2 July 2008

Frozen Depths 1.03

Frozen Depths is a roguelike written by Glowie. It has a cold world theme, but I didn't have time to notice the effect of cold since I died in the first level. I think the coldness is a gameplay clock, but I'm not sure.

A distinctive feature is the large number of floor traps. This I always thought was bad design, because you usually can't avoid traps unless you search after every step. Searching while moving is so annoying that I never do that. Floor traps make you wonder how the native inhabitans of the level ever survive. Do they all know where the traps are?

In my main project Kaduria game objects are trapped, so when you handle something you can be sure that it's your fault if you didn't check for traps. There are floor traps also but I plan to create them on specific levels that are trapped for a reason so you know there are traps. Or if traps are found elsewhere they are in obvious places (guarding something etc.) I believe that only the player's wrong actions should lead to death and there should be less random accidents that has nothing to do with how good you are as player.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

You point out well the reasons why I only rarely use traps in LambdaRogue. Currently there are only trapdoors which may be nasty, but are not dangerous. Some treasure chests may be trapped and from time to time a ghost of a dead former adventurerer appears when you examine a crypt. But that's all, because most traps in roguelikes are very randomly.

Using them to guard something is the only useful way.

Nicholas "Numeron" Ross said...

Actually, I think the point of traps is to test a player by placing them in a potentially difficult situation. I agree that damage traps are a bit lame for the possibility of direct death, but other traps like teleportation, polymorph, trapdoors and the like will force a player to handle situations they might be intelligent enough to normally not get themselves into. To top it off, once discovered and initially dealt with, those kinds of traps can be used beneficially with the right kind of preperation: even damage traps can be used to get monsters to walk over when chasing the player.

-Numeron