The two started testing the game with other students at UCSC, finding that despite the limited graphics, players were filling the gaps with their own imagination. Playtester feedback helped them to improve the procedural generation routines to balance the game's challenge. One element that fell out from playtesting was the use of permadeath. Toy wanted to move away from the notion of simply learning the right sequence of steps to complete within adventure games, and instead make the player focus on finding the right moves to avoid the character's death at that moment; Wichman later called this idea "consequence persistence". Initially, a "Rogue" game had to be completed in one sitting, but by demand of playtesters, Toy and Wichman added the ability to save the state of the game, so that players could continue a game across sessions. They soon found players were "save scumming", reloading the game from the save file, an approach counter to their design goals. They changed this so that the save file was erased upon reloading the game, thus making a character's death effectively permanent. They subsequently added a scoreboard feature that let players rank their progress with others, rewarding players with more points for surviving as deep as possible into the dungeons and making the Amulet of Yendor a lucrative goal.