Improvement on keyboard commands

My intent for Kaduria was always keep it keyboard driven. It's a graphical roguelike, but I never liked mouse as input device for this type of game so I have focused on keyboard. When you think of typical roguelike experience with every key assigned to a command it's surely possible to make it better, but that's only because this game genre is so ancient. It's easy to improve that so there is nothing special in it.

The main thought in my design philosophy is that it's better if it's easier. But how to make it easier? It's not that simple always. There are many ways to use keyboard commands. The first step I did was move extremely rarely used commands to a menu. There are things like 'options' and 'save game' that could be easily stacked to a game menu. Not only there is no need to use a key for those commands, but it also saves more keys for more important commands related to gameplay itself.

Menus are an easy way to reduce keyboard commands, but sometimes they can be worse than direct keyboard commands. You need more keypresses to activate the command which is not what I'm looking for. My opinion is that there is nothing wrong with direct keyboard commands as long as they have some kind of logic in them.

One option to reduce the amount of commands is a context sensitive command like Use for using different type of objects (open door, loot container etc.). Somehow I don't like that context sensitivity. I do have use command, but I'm actually planning to limit the use to only specific type of objects that are switched on/off. Or maybe even completely get rid of it.

Some actions can be improved with simple UI tricks. For example when you open something with 'o' it's auto-selecting the nearby object. There is no need to press the direction key unless there are more than one similar object. Another option is bumping into a door to open it. I don't like it, because it should be 'attacking' the door in proper logical context. But I have included it as an option.

Dividing keyboard commands into logical groups (such as movement, inventory, combat) also helps when you are looking at the keyboard command list.

Lately I've been re-designing the keyboard command scheme and it's surprising how much you can improve it when you think hard. There is also going to be an option to re-define keys, but it's not a way to go around a good design. Keyboard commands should be designed so that the player has no need to change them.