Interesting concept to explore and it seems it already have a lot of options ! I imagine it can only speak to a small audiance as even me that is using vim everyday since many years was a little confused by the controls. It can be a little frustrating to have basic vim command that are not recognized but on the other hand it is very amusing discover that a command is understood by the game and see what effect it has. Having the command mode used to write scrolls whose meaning should be understood based on the true vim syntax is quite fun. Adding the visual mode with ‘v’ to define some sort effect area for example could be interesting !
Viewing post in Vim Roguelike Challenge jam comments
Among the commands that I am using and that seems are not be recognized I can think to the following s :
- G and gg that could be used like 0 and $ but vertically
- x to attack similarly to d
- Y to take all the items on the line
- B/b to go to an ennemy behind you (and use only W/w and E/e to the ennemy in front of you)
- the replace command with R/r, I am not sure what usage it could have, may be switch the position between an ennemy and the player
Thanks for the suggestions!
You're right that Y should do something (('ve made it a synonym for yy in my eventual post-jam version), and x should be some sort of attack (attack all adjacent enemies, maybe?). G actually already does something (it scrolls the event log to the bottom), although event log scrolling with gj/gk/G is not documented yet.
B and r/R are casualties of my simplifying assumptions (no forward/backward and no free text input), since I'm not sure how either of those things should work in a 2D roguelike game setting, from a gameplay perspective. But I have some ideas about how I might make "backwards" a meaningful concept in the future.