Identifying stairs and traveling between locations

[Old Slime]

How do you know whats on the other side of stairs, and will there ever be an option to travel back and forth?

[Kyzrati]

There are quite a few ways to determine where stairs lead. Some of the more common ones:

-attaching a Signal Interpreter
-hacking a Terminal
-being familiar with some exits' appearance (their surroundings)
-map layouts can give you hints that you'll become familiar with over time

will there ever be an option to travel back and forth?

You'll find there are a number of ways to revisit the same map type at the same depth, but no you can never return to the exact same map once you've left it, no. Backtracking is never possible.

[Old Slime]

What a bummer is all i can say to the backtracking part
it almost makes the map and all that useless if i can return to the same spot from an unknown location.

it also doesnt make very much sense to me.

[Old Slime]

Imagine for a second you take some stairs up, that are really stairs sideways.

[zxc]

Many roguelikes have the ability to go back up to previous floors. However, this comes with its own set of problems. It encourages all kinds of weird and tedious behaviours, like keeping track of what items were left where, and going back to retrieve them when you need them. It wouldn't mesh well at all with Cogmind.

[Kyzrati]

For it to make sense: Lore-wise think of Complex 0b10 as much much larger than what you end up exploring. This is why you can revisit other areas of the same Factory depth, for example, but going back to the same one is very dangerous, too dangerous, since doing so attracts attention and you're trying to escape.

Mechanics-wise this is why your alert drops significantly once you leave an area, because what you're actually doing is not just traveling through a door or up some stairs--you're leaving that section and going through long chains of side rooms and corridors linking it to other areas not directly adjacent to where you were. Once you've done that it's harder for them to know where you went.

[Kyzrati]

Ninja'd :P

But yeah, as zxc mentions, backtracking is actually a pretty bad mechanic in roguelikes--I intentionally designed the game around that not being a possibility, which opened up a lot of interesting and fun doors :)

I wrote about backtracking and other elements of the world design on the blog back in 2015[www.gridsagegames.com].

[Old Slime]

Why not write a small bit of flavor text when the player first travels from the area to explain all that winding and twisting?

[Old Slime]

From a long time gamers perspective, if you have all these ai to collect dropped gear and alert levels per floor it would be even better to have all that persistent per playthrough. you could do quests without reading all the terminals and rolling the dice, RPGlike was the best thing you could have done for the player because it allows more freedom to build and pick as you want. Instead of just running around with a datajack and hacking chips.

[bug_sniper]

There are a number of messages that can be implemented for when you escape from a floor, depending on your integrity and speed. If you're fast, "You deftly fly/hover away and escape into a maze of vents and tubes". If rolling or treading, "You roll up a narrow ramp and leave a trail of motor oil so nobody can follow you". If walking, "You kick a switch that closes a thick blast door behind you and then climb the staircase upwards in peace." If surrounded and alone, "You jump into trapdoor you miraculously find as soon as you leave the level. You then roll/slide around through the ramps that carry everyone into a different destination. You roll/slide towards a passage to the next floor."

Related is my idea about a hidden equipment cache between levels if you carry a structural scanner: https://www.gridsagegames.com/forums/index.php?topic=1366.0.

[Old Slime]

"after a series of twists and turns you end up in ______, sealing the access behind you."
then replace the starting tile of the new floor with some sort of hard door looking tile.