QCF Design Community

Hi,

I recently got my first paycheck ever and the first thing I did with it was to buy the special edition of this game. Needless to say, it was likely the best way to spend that cash, as this game rocks even though it's still in beta, but I still came upon some areas, which could use some improvement. So far, my biggest eyesores are probably these:

- Spell hotkeys: I'd very much appreaciate it if didn't have to hover over the glyphs to find out the hotkey to a specific spell if such letter is contained in the name of that spell anyway. To have that letter underscored would save me a lot of effort until I know all the hotkeys by heart.

- Careless suicides allowed: I don't know if it's currently considered as a part of the game's design, but the way this game allows the player to kill himself by misclicking a strong foe seems rather cruel to me. As much a I have to admit, that most of the time this happens to me by pure carelessness as so it's my own problem to deal with, but I also have a mouse, which is quite old and sometimes does a doubleclick if I don't press it carefully enough - I have died to this quite often already. So now, wouldn't it be possible to add a prompt of a sort before attacking a foe one is most likely not to survive? I mean come on, even Stone Soup doesn't allow players to fight blindly when on low health and the screen in ToME4 goes all red in such situations, so I think it's quite fair to add some amount of foolproofness.

And that's pretty much it for the moment, I may add more in the future once I dig into the game deeper, so I'm kinda hoping my remarks will actually be considered. Thanks!

Glad you're enjoying the game

I don't think we could underline arbitrary letters in spell names easily. What if you change the hotkey (which you can do by holding shift and hitting a key on that spell/item) and it's no longer a letter in the name anymore? Maybe we can display hotkeys in the text under the name, but that might depend on the length of that text. Hrm.

If you're not being careful, be more careful - That said, if your mouse is having issues, try using the right-click selection combat menu instead. You could also use the arrow keys to select enemies too.

You're probably right about those spells, on a second though that wouldn't even go well with spells as little items. Guess I'll have to work on my memory a little more...

Anyway, about those suicide attacks - I don't really accept right mouse button or arrow keys as a solution to this, as it only adds more tedium and scrutiny to the game ( I'd rather get a new mouse then ). What I was thinking was that maybe something really simple would do the trick and save many lives without radically changing the game - for example changing the monster label from red "death" into red "really?" upon clicking as a subtle request for confirmation, how about that? I mean, sometimes I even fail to notice, that a boss retaliates from a fireball and as a consequence I have an embarassing death that makes me want to flip the table ( and I use to keep quite cool when dying in other roguelikes ).

Also, when speaking about the monster tooltip-slash-labels, is it okay that a monster with a lower level than Assasin has its info telling "safe" instead of "win"? Plus I'm quite sure that I've seen a lot of ghosts saying "mana burn" only, when they would have died as well, altough I don't know of the occasion in which this happens.

The death debate has been going on for a while. Lots of people want a no-death clause, and lots of people (myself included) are against the idea. I understand people not wanting careless mistakes to matter in a puzzle game, but I think that the game's unreasonable dickishness about it is part of the charm. I've certainly raged more than once after having a high level character trip over a 1st level gorgon, but after I calmed down I had to admit that it was pretty funny.