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Are there commercially successful roguelikes that use ascii art only? Dwarf Fortress is the only one I know of and it's getting an official makeover for the Ste
by kris-s 7y ago
Are there commercially successful roguelikes that use ascii art only? Dwarf Fortress is the only one I know of and it's getting an official makeover for the Steam release.
- aganame 7y agoDF is not commercial yet. Partial list of successful roguelikes with ascii: - rogue - (net)hack - moria, angband, etc
- feanaro 7y agoDon't forget ADOM, though it now has graphical tiles too.
- nyolfen 7y agocogmind has done pretty well even if a bit niche. not pure ascii but pretty close, like df. really excellent game, as well.
- kris-s 7y agoLooks really cool!
- mrmonkeyman 7y agoNot ascii technically but close: caves of qud.
- Kyzrati 7y agoIndeed, Cogmind's been my full time job for over 6 years now so far and still pays the bills every month. 11% of players even use pure ASCII mode :) So it's... technically doable.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- babuskov 7y agoI don't know about roguelikes success (Cogmind comes to mind), but I can tell you that ASCII games can be successful if you have a good idea. For example, I spent about 2 months making Rogue Bit just over a year ago: https://roguebit.bigosaur.com/ https://roguebit.bigosaur.com/ And it sold over 25000 copies so far.
- thegeekpirate 7y agoJust to add on to the "not a roguelike" list (it's an adventure game), Stone Story RPG (https://store.steampowered.com/app/603390/Stone_Story_RPG/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/603390/Stone_Story_RPG/).
- umvi 7y agoThat's not really ASCII art. I mean it is, but iirc it's custom shader code in Unity made to look like retro style ASCII art. So it's actually way more difficult to make than a grid of ASCII characters.
- giancarlostoro 7y agoDepends if its easier for you to do 3D. I remember when I found thr ThreeJS ascii shader I had a bit of fun with it...
- flafla2 7y agoAlthough I get where you’re coming from, I disagree with the assertion that this makes it “not really ASCII art”. At the end of the day modern terminal emulators use a graphics API at one point to render characters on the screen. You wouldn’t say that iTerm2 isn’t a “real tty” because it has a metal backend (in this case, iTerm2 is also using a custom shader to render ASCII/unicode — more complex than this game of course). Where do we even draw the line? Is ASCII art only legit if it can render natively in a traditional terminal? How about only one without hardware acceleration? POSIX compliant? Further down the rabbit hole we could draw a line in the sand at tty’s with no window manager. It would still be trivial for the developer to add an “textshot” feature to export a frame to .txt, so I’d still qualify it as fitting the ASCII art aesthetic.
- billfruit 7y agoCaves of Qud comes to mind.
- chungus 7y agoThis game gets a mention bottom of chapter 8 of the tutorial.
- planetsmashr 7y agoDCSS isn't commercially successful, but I think it has the potential to be if it went that direction. The tiles version is probably most popular though: https://crawl.develz.org/download.htm https://crawl.develz.org/download.htm
- gbmor 7y agoDCSS is ridiculously fun. I've spent more hours playing it than any other roguelike.
- empath75 7y agoReplacing ascii with sprites is easy to do later.
- boomlinde 7y agoSeveral commercial versions of Rogue were sold in the 80s.
- EamonnMR 7y agoRogue?
- jere 7y agoBoth Cogmind and Caves of Qud have optional tiles that look like little more than ASCII. Door in the Woods is ASCII only and has sold ~5,000 copies in about a month. In fact this game has inspired me to try to work on a pure ASCII roguelike for my next commercial project.
- svieira 7y agoADOM (Ancient Domains of Mystery) was ASCII-art-only through 1.1 and on the strength of that fan base raised a bunch of money on Kickstarter to add a visual layer (the ASCII-only version is still there and updated as the story continues). Not sure if that's a "YES" or a "NO" given your question.
- BlueTemplar 7y agoTo keep it pedantic, I'm pretty sure that Dwarf Fortress doesn't actually use ASCII, but one of its "extended" versions (the IBM one ?)...