I think game right now needs ESC menu with options like help,saving and quitting,suicide,game options.Its better designed,because new players wouldn’t know to press S to save,or Q to quit,or remapping keys by pressing ? than 2.Also old players can remap S and Q for other functions.
It can even be changed to pressing ESC then S to save,or ESC ->O for options,making IN query pointless.
What im saying is that this system is fine for a game demo from Whalesdev times,but it really needs a more standart aproach.
Though roguelikes never have this, i find this idea incredibly good. Also, i think it’s easy to implement? I mean, the inly thubg is the prompt, and the prompt would call all the functions that we already have. This would help new people feel at home in the game much faster. It’s brilliant!
We have one, but it’s not mapped to a key by default. It’s called “action menu”.
There’s no such thing as a “standard approach”. As StopSignal points out, direct keybinds ARE the standard for roguelikes, and having a help menu bound to “?” is also pretty common.
The problem with using Esc in particular is it’s the key we used for exiting out of other menus, so you’d end up exiting out of menus and then entering that one all the time.
What about being only usable when no other menus are there, and when the player’s character is in the normal view? And the escape menu would be toggleable with escape?
That’s basically the suggestion yes, but right now you can just hit Esc a couple of times to exit out of whatever menu you’re in, if Esc was also mapped to entering a menu you’d have to count how many you’re using and it would slow things down.
Feel free to set up your own keymap like that, but I don’t think it’s a good default.