Okay so I’m making a game with some pretty controversial design choices, mainly revolving around active and hostile NPCs that create navigation hazards for the player, in a map where puzzle elements have been randomized and scattered about before play begins. (I have plenty of other design decisions to make this manageable, for what it’s worth.)
For such a game, though, I feel like including a map for the player to use would be an excellent practical tool, and I also have an in-lore reason why the player would have access to one. While the puzzle elements are randomized, the room layout is not.
The thing I’m stuck on is what to have as an alternative for our non-sighted playerbase.
Right now, I’m contemplating a verb that makes the game enter “map mode”, where the NPCs and world simulation are paused, so the player can freely explore a simplified version of the world as a ghost, though they are unable to interact with objects until “map mode” is ended, and the player returns to what they were doing before, with all the other elements unpaused again.
For what it’s worth, this would not be difficult for me to implement.
(An even simpler idea would just be a text file that details the arrangement of the rooms on the map, in case this turns out to be more convenient for some reason. I could do both, as well.)
I’d appreciate your thoughts and feedback. I feel like there’s already a precedent for this, but I just don’t know about it.