>>487I've been thinking about this myself. I've been wanting to make my own little roguelike for some time now, and one of its gimmicks is that the player controls an entire party, not just a single character who might have followers or pets. So far I've come up with a few ideas.
The most basic idea is your typical player-controlled leader/AI-controlled followers scheme, except you can choose who will be the leader at any time. This one's the easiest to learn and control. Switch to controlling the party's rogue so she can unlock the door, then switch back to your fighter so he enters the room first. However, it's unsuitable if you want total control of your party in a combat situation. For instance, if you're controlling the fighter, and you want to control the rogue, you would have to give up control over the fighter and wait until it's the rogue's turn.
A workaround for that would be to allow the player to give AI-controlled members orders that they follow on their next turn. For example, you're controlling the fighter, it's his turn to act, and there's a goblin you'd like to approach. But you also want to make sure the rogue shoots it on her next turn. So you issue an order to the rogue telling her to shoot the goblin, then you go ahead and take a step towards it. Then the goblin approaches the fighter on its turn, and the rogue shoots the goblin on her turn. Then the fighter's turn comes up, and you get control of the game again.
Alternatively, the game can go into "combat mode" whenever a monster engages you or vice versa. In this mode, you control each of your party members every time their turn comes up. It'd give you absolute control over your entire party when you need it the most, but the constant switching of party members would probably be a huge pain. To alleviate that, turns in combat mode could be long enough to allow each creature to perform multiple actions in one turn. So instead of having to move each your party members one square at a time towards the enemy, you could have each of them move several squares each turn, and possibly even attack if they have enough time left.