Absolutely love the latest version of IVAN, really cool. Some thoughts

Hello everyone,

I'm incredibly excited that IVAN has resumed development with such a dedicated team. I just started learning how to code in July, so I won't be much help on that end, but hopefully some of my thoughts/suggestions might be valuable/viable. I'm going to spend some time reading/getting familiar with the code as well so hopefully I'll be useful in the not so distant future. I am also fluent in French so I could potentially help with translations.

I might be forgetting some things(i'll edit more in as I remember everything) but here goes:
It would be nice if there was some sort of counter to mustard gas, that is usually what kills my early GC characters before I have enough endurance to survive, even while r'u"nning out of the gas. As long as I have more END it's fine, but its tough at the very beginning of GC. Acid resistance does not seem to protect against them, and I think it probably should.

I think maybe refining some game mechanics to encourage less grinding might be a good idea, like how you can pick what skills you train in dungeon crawl as you descend deeper, so grinding isn't really viable. Another idea would have standard leveling like in most RPGs. with the choice of what stats you upgrade when you level up.

I'm not sure if this one is a good idea but it would discourage more grinding: in DCSS shops don't buy anything, they only take gold. This way there is no use for hauling a bunch of trash items for gold.

Another feature from Dungeon Crawl that I didn't realize I needed until I played it is the "ctrl f and g" functions. Ctrl F in Dungeon Crawl is a 'find' command where you can search for any type of item you've come across thus far, really useful after you've descended a couple levels. Ctrl G is the 'go' command, you can specify what level you want to go to and your character will walk there.

I think I saw this mentioned either somewhere on this board or on GitHub, but in the latest version I seem to find rare/powerful weapons *slightly* too often.

I have no idea how we would do this, but it would be cool to have a more reliable way to win with more skill at the game. I've only won by delivering Elpuri's head twice and it was a combination of playing this game for a long time and also just blind luck. Take this with a grain of salt, I'm sure people on this board have a lot more/lot more difficult wins. Obviously this tweak would still ideally keep IVAN extremely hard to win. I'll think about this one and see if I can flesh out this idea some more.

I know there has been some talk of this and if I recall correctly this is currently being worked on, but it would be cool to have a magic and ranged system, like summoning pets, elemental attacks, necromancy, crossbows, bows, javelins etc. I did notice a mana bar in the latest build, but I couldn't find any use for it yet.

I'm going to be playing quite a bit so I will be sure to report bugs as I find them. If there is anything else I can do to help with development, please let me know.

Hi dirtydingusmagee and welcome to the forums!

You are more than welcome to contribute in any way you want.


I'd be hesitant to nerf mustard gas, as there are already mutliple ways to counter it. Gas immunity preotects from it completely, you can newly 'T'aste healing liquid to heal only a few hp, effectively countering the DoT of mustard gas with only one or two bottles of healing liquid, searching or levitation makes you not trigger the traps in the first place, plus there's regeneration, polymorph etc.

Acid resistance is also too readily available, IMHO, and the original devs made mustard gas use a non-acid damage for a reason - it should be scary. Think about how dangerous landmines are, and how you can best survive them by not triggering them - that's how you should treat mustard gas.


No, just no. IVAN is awsome and unique in how smoothly and naturally it integrates gaining power to normal gameplay. Level-ups would be completely out of place in IVAN. The same goes for training skills - in DCSS, you can fight with spears, but train axes, because that's what you picked to train... Really?

If you're concerned about grinding, think about it like that - grinding by definition quickly becomes boring, tedious and not worth it in the long run. Let the few players who want to be bored do what they want to do, but the rest will play normally. Thus grinding is not really a problem.


That may work in DCSS, but IVAN is designed around finding valuables (gems, treasure) in the dungeons and selling it for gold. There is no other way to gain gold, so you must be able to sell stuff.


Yeah, that would be great.


But skill already let's you win much more reliably! You probably already can easily get through the UT, and you couldn't do that when you started playing. GC or TX just needs different tactics to reliably plough through, and some poeple on the forums (JoKe or Serin-Delaunay) seem to be able to win nearly any game.

But yeah, it takes some time to get from blind luck wins to pure skill wins. I'm not even close in skill to be able to win the game without some luck.

It's really difficult to compare IVAN and DCSS. DCSS has a lot of excellent ideas in it, which a lot of other games could learn from... but adding some of these ideas would make IVAN feel like DCSS with limbs.

That being said: If you are interested, and get the coding skill, you could probably write a DCSS-esque fork! A lot of people have made excellent forks of IVAN, with all sorts of interesting additions and changes. Most of them don't play with the mechanics, but as long as you're doing the coding you're free to do what you like!

Yeah I thought about it more and most of my suggestions would probably make IVAN lose it's unique charm. Are there any plans to introduce ranged/magic attacks like summoning pets, necromancy, offensive magic, javelins, bows etc? I think that would be insanely cool in IVAN.

One other thing I forgot to mention, I'm a professional sound designer and a hobby musician so I'd be more than happy to make SFX or music if you need any.

As far as range goes... How about a throwing skill?

There is already throwing and bows are planned... one day in the future. There already is offensive magic and necromancy in the form of wands. IDK about actually casting spells by yourself, as that would clash with the premise of you being a lowly slave and spells requiring years to master.


That would be most appreciated! We have some sound, but more variability would be great, plus I think many areas are missinf a theme music.

I already make use of thrown weapons. Spare light-weight weapons (daggers, spears, axes, or hammers - depends on which primary weapon skill I'm training) go into my inventory and thrown at enemies before I engage them. Trains the weapon skill and lets me hurt them at a distance. Requires a lot of micromanagement though...

It's much better now that we have automatic pick-up of thrown weapons. I love that change.