Dorky poll not entirely unrelated to hypothetical roguelikes

[zwol]

Square or hexagonal grid system? You must pick one. State your reasons.

Comments

[brooksmoses]

Hexagonal. It's prettier.

(Also easier to line up, if using tiles, but that may or may not be relevant.)

Edit to add: Also, a hexagonal grid means that any point near a space is on an adjacent space, and that any adjacent space is equidistant from the current space. With squares, you get only one of those two (depending on whether diagonal squares count as "adjacent"). And you get more "natural directions" (six instead of four), which is slightly closer to the ideal of an infinite number as occurs in a continuous universe.

[xorphus.livejournal.com]

The second part (so you don't have to try and cheat by making diagonals one move, or two, or one and a half) is my reason for preferring hex.

[kaolinfire.livejournal.com]

yes. :)

though the awkwardness of moving through a hex system with the keypad is an issue...

[madmanatw.livejournal.com]

Assuming it is a text based roguelike, square carries two advantages- simpler to represent the data, and easier to render to the user. I'm not really sure how to do a hex grid with a monospace font, though it's probably doable.

[packbat.livejournal.com]

Maybe staggered letters? Something like

# # # # . #     #   #
 # . . . . # # #   #
# . , . . .       #
 # . . . k # # $ #
# ; . . . . #
 # # # # #   #
          #   #
           # . #
            . @ #
             # .

Edited to be less crappy.

[packbat.livejournal.com]

Hex grids are terrible for computer games. It's an interface thing: computers are designed around rectangular motion, so in a hex grid you miss two of the directions. Unless you do something really weird, like have

w   e
 \ /
a-s-d
 / \
z   x

be your control system, and that will confuse the half of your audience who tries to use the arrow keys.

To be honest, my favorite systems are the gridless systems. Any game where you can hold out a ruler and say, "I'm going two centimeters in exactly that direction" gets serious cool from me.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

this is pretty much exactly what I was going to say about squares, though I'm not taken with ruler and exact direction; it's a degree and scale of realism that does not often seem to do that much for actual gameplay IMO.

[packbat.livejournal.com]

In the interest of full disclosure, I shall admit that I have never played a ruler-and-exact-direction game myself. :)