Various notes minus quoting this time in order to save time:
1. Ah, makes sense on the Zelda stuff in that regard, then.
2. Huh! Using the dead ships as turrets for invasions is actually
fascinating.
3. Thanks to Watashiwa, we actually have an awesome reason for how the ship stuff works:
As for why the Hydral doesn't die when the pods do, it's because the Hydral isn't there. Since the Hydral is WAY TOO BIG to fit in a normal sized ship, it pilots the pods remotely. It does so like it's actually there by cloning its own brain to make a biocomputer, then going into sensory deprivation. The biocomputer acts like an extra head, so the Hydral feels like it's there in the pod. Suffice it to say, venturing out knowing that you aren't sure if you'll be the brain in the box that dies, or the one that stays back at the ship and lives, is really cool.
4. With Rogue Legacy I agree that the lack of item pickups during the runs was super frustrating. I liked the fact that you lost all those coins when re-entering the castle, though, because I felt like that was the only thing keeping tension during runs. Worked well for me, anyhow. You could actually get it up to only losing half your coins on death via that one ability (it went in increments of 10%).
5. Overall we want to try to avoid ANY menus whatsoever in the game, other than the main menu, escape menu, and settings menu. So no menus whatsoever for any sort of in-game stuff. We may not succeed in that, but there are a variety of games in this sort of genre that have. The Zelda-1-style ships work fine for doing purchases, for instance. And there are plenty of familiar ways for swapping out items and choosing which to keep by just re-swapping them. Anyway, I think that lots of complexity can demonstrably be had in these sorts of games without having to get into equipping/purchasing/upgrading/crafting menus. Those always tend to make me yawn in any game; at best I tolerate them, at worst I actively hate them. But a lot of games have managed to have satisfying complexity minus those.
6. BD is really a bit of a different beast from what I'm going for here, because it has a strategy layer on top of the roguelike layer. This is meant to be a single-layered thing with no strategy layer (though there's plenty of that sort of thinking in roguelike games in general). The persistence layer is more a matter of an inter-run progression.
7. Torchlight is another really different beast, because that's one where you're playing more of an RPG in some respects. I mean, in general with dungeon crawlers it's about character progression and so losing your stuff would be horrible. This game is meant to be more about your own skill gains and finding lots of crazy different scenarios in terms of items/enemies/weapons/etc on different runs. The crazy stacking of items and weapons that you get is part of the fun, and that gets tossed out the window if you wind up being able to keep those between runs. Instead dealing with what you find and using new tactics because of that is something I like.
