Haven't had a lot of time lately to work on the game... work's been really busy, personal medical issues, and whatnot. The question of character statistics I've been dealing with also raises the issue of how much feedback you should get while playing.

Consider the original Tunnels of Doom. The game offered very little direct feedback on the characters. Your hit points and level were a general indication of power, and you had an abstract attack/defend rating for armors and weapons. But you never knew how much damage you actually did in an attack, only what the potential was.

Part of the reason for this was, of course, the fact that the game runs in a very low footprint of memory, and a lot of feedback just isn't possible. But is it desirable?

Recently in World of Warcraft, I was running an instance with some guild mates. The leader, a tank who's usually in on the guild raids, asked if I used Omen, a popular add-on for the game that calculates threat levels. I don't use such add-ons, because I'm not into raids (who has the time?) and while it may make fighting raid bosses easier, it certainly doesn't make it more fun.

Another example is when I was younger, I wanted to write a better version of TI Trek, the basic program released by Texas Instruments on cassette. (I eventually wrote an assembly conversion of TI-Trek, in fact.) I wrote a fairly impressive version in TI Extended BASIC with the 32k memory expansion which offered a lot of refinements like a torpedo course calculator.The technique was pretty simple, I used an arc-tangent function to derive the exact angle at which to shoot a torpedo to hit an enemy.

It sounds great, but then I begin to realize that part of the charm of TI-Trek was guessing exact courses. The challenge there is visual acuity and abstraction of the angle into a degree course. By removing the challenge by putting in a "cheat" that just told you what angle to use, the gameplay was greatly diminished. When I wrote an openGL C++ version of TI-Trek (called GL-Trek) for a school project I created a GUI compass with needles you could drag to a specific angle, which kept some guesswork in the game.

So for my CRPG, I'm still debating how much feedback to provide. I think the amount of damage done on an attack should be indicated, but I want to preserve some mystery and hide some numbers from the player's general view. Unlike Tunnels of Doom, monster statistics will NOT be immediately available on the press of a button, that I know for certain.

Links:

TI-Trek in Assembly Language

GL-Trek for PC