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Whats stunning is how little the author knew/knows about the genre he jumped into. "We had been playing this interesting indie game "POWDER" ... but at the ti

Whats stunning is how little the author knew/knows about the genre he jumped into. "We had been playing this interesting indie game "POWDER" ... but at the time, I had no idea that POWDER was just the tip of a massive, 30 year old iceberg - the Roguelike genre (here's the wikipedia page on Roguelikes, if you aren't familiar)." Which is surprising, but understandable. However, this: "Along the way, I also got very into "Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup", which while it is a fantastic game, the original author, Linley, was not very disciplined about throwing things into his game" That is pretty much the exact opposite of why Dungeon Crawl was created.

quanticle 16y ago
What struck me was that he was designing a rogue-like game, but he didn't know about nethack. I mean, how can you claim to know about a genre if you can't name the single most popular game in said genre?
- rcfox 16y ago
  This might a good thing. Most roguelikes are fairly similar. This person's lack of experience in the field may lead to innovations that would be lost in the sea of familiarity.
  - quanticle 16y ago
    It might lead to innovations, but his lack of experience will be equally likely to lead him to make mistakes that other rogue-likes found and fixed years ago, especially in areas of game balance. The classes in Nethack have been refined many years to be distinct, but equal. That is, each of the classes has distinct strengths and weaknesses, but the sum of the strengths and weaknesses is still roughly the same for every character. This means that there is no "ideal" character for beating the game - the ideal character depends on one's play style and the phase of the game one is in. For example, consider the barbarian class and the wizard class. The barbarian class is great for hack-and-slash players, and is extremely strong early in the game. However, high initial strength and lack of intelligence means that the barbarian peaks early, and is at a disadvantage later on, when ranged and magic attacks become more prevalent. The wizard, on the other hand, is quite weak at the beginning. He starts out with few supplies, no armor, and limited magic. However, his ability to learn new spells and increased skill with thrown weapons means that the wizard becomes quite a powerful character later on, surpassing the barbarian in most cases. These sorts of dichotomies are the sort of thing that really make games like Nethack enjoyable. By ignoring previous works in the genre, this person avoids mistakes, but also avoids a lot of the richness that adds to the depth and replayability of his games.

quanticle 16y ago

What struck me was that he was designing a rogue-like game, but he didn't know about nethack. I mean, how can you claim to know about a genre if you can't name the single most popular game in said genre?

rcfox 16y ago
This might a good thing. Most roguelikes are fairly similar. This person's lack of experience in the field may lead to innovations that would be lost in the sea of familiarity.
- quanticle 16y ago
  It might lead to innovations, but his lack of experience will be equally likely to lead him to make mistakes that other rogue-likes found and fixed years ago, especially in areas of game balance. The classes in Nethack have been refined many years to be distinct, but equal. That is, each of the classes has distinct strengths and weaknesses, but the sum of the strengths and weaknesses is still roughly the same for every character. This means that there is no "ideal" character for beating the game - the ideal character depends on one's play style and the phase of the game one is in. For example, consider the barbarian class and the wizard class. The barbarian class is great for hack-and-slash players, and is extremely strong early in the game. However, high initial strength and lack of intelligence means that the barbarian peaks early, and is at a disadvantage later on, when ranged and magic attacks become more prevalent. The wizard, on the other hand, is quite weak at the beginning. He starts out with few supplies, no armor, and limited magic. However, his ability to learn new spells and increased skill with thrown weapons means that the wizard becomes quite a powerful character later on, surpassing the barbarian in most cases. These sorts of dichotomies are the sort of thing that really make games like Nethack enjoyable. By ignoring previous works in the genre, this person avoids mistakes, but also avoids a lot of the richness that adds to the depth and replayability of his games.