Tuesday 4 August 2009

Spicing up ASCII: Combat

I was browsing through the archives of r.g.r.d. when I came across this thread about indicating attack results within an ASCII paradigm.

I've had a similar idea in mind for Kharne for a while now. To summarise:
  • if you take damage, the character's symbol (@ of course) flashes red briefly. How deep a red depends upon how much damage has been taken.
  • if you inflict damage, the symbol of the monster that has taken damage flashes red briefly. This is not graduated.
  • if a monster attacks you, its symbol changes briefly to a green colour.
  • if a monster has a status effect, for example, held, paralysed, sleeping, poisoned, then its ascii character is shaded a different colour.
Thoughts?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

In LambdaRogue console mode, monsters are colored according their health. While monster not yet attacked are simply white, monsters with full health are green,

This is to reflect the health bars which I use in graphical modes.

I also experimented with fading animated damage numbers, as seen in MMORPGs, but this was more distracting than useful.

Anonymous said...

Eh .. sorry, I forgot to end my sentence, it seems. I wanted to write:

"While monster not yet attacked are simply white, monsters with full health are green, than yellow, orange, red."

Currently, by the way, the Kharne blog is one of my favorite roguelike readings. Keep it up.

Dave said...

I also experimented with fading animated damage numbers, as seen in MMORPGs, but this was more distracting than useful.

Ah, Scrolling Combat Text. I remember that add-on well from my WoW days... ;-)

"While monster not yet attacked are simply white, monsters with full health are green, than yellow, orange, red."

Yeah, I considered that but went with the healthbars instead. They're a bit less intrusive.

Currently, by the way, the Kharne blog is one of my favorite roguelike readings. Keep it up.

Thank you very much!