In Roguelike jargon there is a term called ‘YASD’ or ‘Yet Another Stupid Death’ Which is basically something sucky that happens that causes your character to die. For example drinking an unidentified potion which turns out to kill you, or falling into a trap that you didn’t see whilst on 1 HP.

Most roguelikes have permadeath - Once your character dies, that’s it. No restoring from saves. Not all roguelikes are like this though and some are a little more forgiving and don’t wipe your save game from the hard disk when you die.

I’ve thought of a very simple way to combat YASD in my roguelike game, but I’m not sure if I’m going to implement it because it might make the game too easy. And that’s the autosave feature, whenever you go up or down in the dungeon the game is automatically saved and when you die the game is restored from the last save point.

I remember Half-life doing autosave particularly well. And saved me from alot of annoying tedium of playing through parts I’ve already played through.

Of course - I could always make autosaving an option that the player could choose to use. A ‘Normal’ mode that allows restores when you die and an ‘Ironman’ mode which features permadeath.

Each gamemode would have it’s own set of scoreboards of course. I wonder what other kind of optional game modes Caverns of Underkeep could have?