Perils of Contingency

I should be very much in the "adding professional polish" phase of development on MageGuild. I know this. (I'm doing a lot of that sort of thing; newest features were the ability to drop character dumps and causing the game to check a savefile's version before loading it.) Nonetheless, I find myself addicted to adding content. Every day's commute to or from work leads me to think of some cool new thing that could be crammed in somewhere. That's what led to the rash of new edges in v0.4. There are a bunch of item mix combinations that don't do anything. Some of that is intentional, and some of it's simply because I couldn't think of anything cool for that combination to do...ideas to fill those holes keep popping up.

The latest question I'm kicking around is whether or not to add a new edge that would function as a one-time "Get Out of Death Free" card, much like the famous Amulet of Life Saving from Nethack (and a couple other RLs, if I recall correctly). I'm leaning toward it pretty heavily, as it's a nice safety net, but acquiring it carries a pretty high opportunity cost; something that will help less experienced players, without unbalancing the game for more experienced players.

That's actually a pretty constant theme, I'm finding, in my attempts to balance things. All roguelikes have a pretty steep learning curve, and MageGuild is worse than most, as it does away with a lot of the trappings of RPGs that most RLs drag along. I've been strongly pushing anything I can to make the game easier to pick up and play without changing the end gameplay too much.

That leads me to the other big, big change I'm playing around with; adding an optional bitmap tiles view, to take the place of the ascii. The concept is...scary, frankly. I didn't build the game with being able to add tiles in mind, which was a rather stupid plan. But when I started this, I wanted to create a RL that I knew was going to have a steep learning curve, that I knew was probably only going to appeal to hardcore RL players. Now...I've got a couple players who are pretty hooked that are thoroughly not hardcore RL players, and that's caused me to rethink a number of things. Are tiles in the future for MageGuild? I honestly don't know.