All the secrets

When I set out to build this game I don't think that I really knew where it would end up but I knew that at least part of the vibe for me was games that I have loved playing and that included Nethack, the original rogue variant that really combined everything from the earlier releases of the game into a really solid and coherent playing experience. One of the pleasures of Nethack was the kinds of things you would discover along the way - it felt like the designers had added a feature in the most general way and then run with it.

For example at some point you could #dip your longsword in a fountain and it might get converted into the magical Excalibur as a mystical hand rose out of the waters. Now I'm not sure what came first but at some point you discover that you can #dip a sword into a potion of holy water and it becomes blessed. Or you could dip a potion into a fountain and it becomes a potion of water, or a scroll becomes a blank scroll. All of those features from one verb.

So in that spirit I added a lot of features to the game that you could only discover by trying things out, however on reflection I have decided to reveal at least a few of those secrets in the initial tutorial pages. I guess audiences of today are not the same as audiences of thirty years ago - then we were starved of decent gameplay (I was playing Nethack on university mainframes) and we had the patience to stick with it and explore. These days games exist in a rich ecosystem and have to fight for the precious attention of a sated audience.

Anyway, enjoy the tutorial pages, or skip them and find it all for yourself!