10 ms·

A history of roguelike games

180 points by aww_dang 7y ago

nyolfen 7y ago
if you're homebound and enjoy exploring game systems, you could do worse than diving into a few rl's
- jim_and_derrick 7y ago
  So I am a gamer for sure, spent tons of time playing all the dark souls, bloodborne, sekiro over the past 4 or 5 years. After souls i was left wanting, a void in my game life so to speak. Monster Hunter World captured my attention for a good while. Then i found roguelikes and specifically Darkest Dungeon. I had seen people playing on twitch, it looked cool. Turn based, RPG, permadeath, difficult. All up my alley. Jumped into it and got my butt whooped for a while but then it clicked. And BOOM i was off, many months later and hundreds of hours later i was done with Darkest Dungeon. Since then, Slay the Spire baby. Wow that game owns hard. about 300 hours here. It's a deck-building (card game) turn based rogue-like. Recommend it to all!
  - gundmc 7y ago
    Slay the Spire is fantastic. The day they release their Android port is the day my productivity hits an all time low.
  - eterm 7y ago
    Calling it a deck builder is misleading and I think puts off people who might otherwise enjoy it. Sure, the abilities are card-shaped and there are drawing mechanics, but it doesn't really play like a deck-builder at all. I think the main differentiator for me, and where I thin Slay the Spire sets it apart from normal deck builders, is that the enemies you're fighting aren't playing by the same rules. The enemies don't have cards, or decks or similar abilities. Because of this, the enemies can be really thematic and varied and have interesting mechanics and don't need to be balanced around playing by the same rules as the player. As a consequence it doesn't feel like a deck builder to me, the abilities just happen to be card-shaped. Add in the relics which are one of the more important parts of the run, and really the skills involved aren't at all like other deck building games. But yes, huge recommendation from me too, definitely the best rogue-lite game in years. (~450 hours played for me, and probably twice that watching it on twich).
    - jim_and_derrick 7y ago
      Fair enough. I'm not a big card game guy so i understand where you are coming from!
    - gambiting 7y ago
      I played it for about 5 hours and I just don't have any motivation to keep going. The trickle of new cards is super slow and I don't really feel like much depends on my skill at all. But I also have friends who rave about it, so maybe it's an acquired taste thing.
      - chongli 7y ago
        It's a very challenging game that exercises different muscles than other games, especially if you've never played a deckbuilder before. One of the hardest things to get used to is the fact that skipping a card reward is often the best play. The key insight is that every card taken decreases the probability of drawing all of the other cards in your deck. Another tricky aspect to the game is that any given card may be great in one deck and terrible in another, to the point where taking it makes your deck worse. Strong players (such as jorbs, whom you can find on twitch) tend to lean very heavily on the card remove feature in order to get rid of bad cards. There is definitely a luck component to the game but skilled players are pushing that boundary every day. Winning streaks on ascension 20 (the hardest difficulty level) are possible and always growing.
        hnick 7y ago
        I'm nearing 500 hours on StS and I still have so much to learn. Approaching it as a deckbuilder can definitely be a noob-trap - anyone who has played MTG or similar is very tempted to build into archetypes instead of understanding that you have to deal with the problems at hand with the solutions you are given, because you can't force the game to give you what you want. Taking a "will be good later" pick is nearly always a problem, often because it reduces your chances of reaching "later". Funnily enough a really thin deck can also be a problem. If you have 15 cards and Nemesis adds 5 burns, you're in trouble without a way to handle that. Instead of thin or fat, the best way to think of it IMO is consistency (draw and exhaust help this). I really like how each Act tests different strengths and exposes different weaknesses. A20 is tough but rewarding.
  - mcphilip 7y ago
    If you’re in the mood for some more punishing difficulty that’s still fast paced, definitely give Spelunky HD a try! It’s a classic for a reason. I finally started playing it recently and am hooked. I’m still working on the zero gold run achievement —- it’s so frustrating making it to the caves and stepping on gold buried behind the snow foreground :( I’m determined to finish it before the lockdown is over, though.
dmbaggett 7y ago
If you’re looking for a fresh roguelike rabbit hole, check out Cogmind. It’s PC only but takes RL in an interesting new direction. (Not affiliated with it other than begin somewhat addicted.)
- abhorrence 7y ago
  It works fairly well via wine on Mac and Linux.
- pyridines 7y ago
  The development blog https://www.gridsagegames.com/blog/ https://www.gridsagegames.com/blog/ is a fascinating look into the design of the game that goes back years.
platz 7y ago
The roguelike game mechanic is fantastic, but it really needs to break out of the fantasy theme in a big way.
- Andrew_nenakhov 7y ago
  FTL did this, but once you figure out the mechanics, game becomes way to easy.
  - lawn 7y ago
    You might be the first I've seen that describes FTL as too easy. But as someone who's done just about everything in that game I see where you're coming from.
    - Andrew_nenakhov 7y ago
      Yeah, FTL has several different ways to build a killer-ship that can destroy any opposition in seconds, including final boss mothership, so if you survive first few jumps, you're basically guaranteed to win. And that is a bit boring. In the end I have gravitated towards my personal favorite style of play, building a vicious boarding squad comprised of mantis or those rock dudes, that still required a constant danger of losing some crewmembers, but yielded more scrap in return after victory.
      - the_af 7y ago
        FTL is punishing to me, and people who've won it describe it as hugely chance-based, i.e. that though there are some prevalent strategies, chance is likely to ruin them (and not just in the first few jumps). For the sake of curiosity, can you describe those surefire ways to win?
        Andrew_nenakhov 7y ago
        Well, It's been a while since I played it last time (Steam says, summer 2016), so I might mess up some details like weapon names. The core principle is to be able to adapt to whatever the have is sending your way. For every ship/layout variant, there are several paths which you can exploit. Some ships are more heavily skewed towards certain strategies (like if you have a 4-person teleport pad, you DEFINITELY should employ a heavy boarding strategies), but you always have some options. There 2 main aspects to FTL warfare: you should kill your enemy and you should keep yourself safe. To kill enemies, there are 3 reliable ways that I've found: lasers, drones and boarding. With starting cruiser, you already have Burst Laser II that does 3 shots, and it's arguably the best starting gun. What you need to win the game is to have 2-4 shots more than enemy shield level, to drop down their shields and then do damage to systems. The heaviest shield level is 4, so if you are capable to deliver an 8-volley barrage, you can reduce the final boss ship quite fast. If you do NOT have firepower to drop enemy shields, missiles/bombs really help, since they can bypass shields and damage the critical systems. So, for starting ship, all you have to do is to luck your way for some more firepower. You can also augment it with teleporting, if you happen to find a couple of mantis crew members. If you find some good beam weapon, you can use this instead after shields drop, targeting most dangerous systems (I always tried to disable cloaking / mind controlling structures first, but that depends.Sometimes you need to disable their drone control first, if they have some nasty repair drones or attacking drone) Drones is another surefire way to kill the enemy. Augment a couple of Mark II offensive drones with ion weapons, and most enemy ships will be disabled 5 seconds after combat starts. Third reliable way to win is boarding/teleporting. Just find a couple of mantis crew members (though rock guys are no slouch either), and drop them to the enemy to kill off their crew, just be ready to bring them back or do some micromanagement running away from enemy if your teleporter is disabled. And of course be sure to destroy their medlab facility, so wounded enemy won't be healed. This way requires the player to be most alert, cause you can lose your crew rather easily, but it's the most rewarding, cause you often get the ship intact, giving you the most scrap bonuses. Curiously, the last boss battle is split into 3 phases, and if you manage to kill all enemy crew on the first approach (rather hard, you need to disable their level3 healing facility), then all other phases are really easy: you just teleport your killer crew and disable their piloting, shields, and other systems really fast. You can also easily disable their isolated crew who run their offensive beam weaponry, and disabling those really helps. That was about killing enemies. Now, about keeping yourself safe. One, evade chance really helps, so try to have your evade ratio as high as possible, with best possible pilot. Second, try to bring your shields to a lever where expected opposition can't drop it with one volley, this progressively needs a raise towards the later stages. Third, CLOAKING helps, if you have it. Time it for the heaviest volleys/missile barrage, like those launched by the final ship. Four, defensive drones rule! With Mark II defensive drone, you can practically not worry about incoming missiles. Though it's a bit expensive to maintain, unless you have a drone retraction arm (or how it's called, it allows a drone parts reuse, or something). That's basically it. I never figured out good ways to fight with missiles, but I'm sure there is a strategy that works for them too. Hope that helps. :) All in all, after figuring it all out, I don't remember losing a game ever if I managed to get past sector 1. P.S. Bonus: if you ever run into a droneship that can't get past your shields, there is a gamey tactics to level up all your crew with zero risk: just reduce your offensive attacks so you hit their shields, and wait till your pilot, shields, drive and weapon operators level up after evading shots. Then rotate them in their stations, and continue. This can be achieved even on sector 1 easily, and having high level crew REALLY helps. Leveling up combat ability is not that easy, unfortunately, but doable, too.
kamikaze675 7y ago
For a modern pixel roguelike, check out OneBit Adventure on mobile
- toupeira 7y ago
  Also the Open Source Pixel Dungeon and its many mods.
cpeterso 7y ago
No mention of NetHack?
- autarch 7y ago
  Try Ctrl-F? It does mention NetHack quite a bit.
  - moomin 7y ago
    Or try Page 2..,
- philsnow 7y ago
  Nethack definitely has a place in the history of roguelikes, but for people reading this HN thread, please don't play it as your first roguelike. It was not only my first roguelike but also the first C codebase that I ever played around in. I was blown away in the 90s installing Linux as a teenager and it coming with GCC built in. I owe the dev team for getting me really interested in computers as more than a consumer of games. But, it's creaky and idiosyncratic and has a lot of sharp edges that people who have been playing it for decades are quick to forgive, but if you're coming to the genre from, well, anything else, you're going to get put off, hard.
- dri_ft 7y ago
  No, mention of NetHack.
Andrew_nenakhov 7y ago
Ragnarok deserves more than one paragraph. Among many of it's great features was the one I personally loved most: sometimes you could meet a ghost of your past self, complete with all your inventory. Sometimes I even made this my strategy, dying as lots of scribes (weakest class at start, who carried a highly prized and rare item, a quill), then starting as blacksmith, which was easiest to survive in early stages. Quill was essential to win: you could always switch class to scribe after some level to write scrolls, but finding a quill was extremely hard.
- schoen 7y ago
  NetHack also has this, but most of the ghost's inventory will be cursed. :-)
- pfarrell 7y ago
  I’ve been playing iNethack on my phone (Uses 3.4.3). I ran into a ghost of myself last night. I was in a 1 square dead end tunnel with no digging tools and out of food. I thought I was going to starve to death before it finally moved. Really starting to have fun with it, but can barely make it 12 levels down :).
  - moomin 7y ago
    So back at University a friend of mine had NetHack (3.0) and a lot of us played in it. I had a game where I simultaneously had the incredible luck to have my dog get polymorphed into a Xorn and then the bad luck to leave a bones file. Quite a lot of people got wiped out by a pet Xorn.
    - schoen 7y ago
      Did your old xorn end up as part of their bones files, too? I feel like I've seen this online at some point, where there were lots of ghosts because they were all getting killed by the same thing and then accumulating in new bones files.
      - 7y ago
jsilence 7y ago
Enjoyed the article very much, but missed Caves of Qud.
- moomin 7y ago
  Yeah, I haven’t played it myself but it’s unquestionably a significant entry in the genre.
danbolt 7y ago
Each year Roguebasin hosts the 7DRL challenge where people look to create a finished roguelike in seven days. I participated this year and found it a pretty thoughtful meditation on the genre. https://7drl.com/ https://7drl.com/
- philsnow 7y ago
  There's a lot of gems in here, and in older 7DRL entries as well. The nature of the format means that games (the ones that are actually finished) are focused, often highlighting one or two novel gameplay mechanics and/or mood/design elements. Anything more than that and the designer can't finish in 7 days. This also means that entries from 10 years ago is just as playable (IF you can get them to run) as the entries from this year. Cogmind (mentioned elsewhere on this thread) started as a 7drl. Each year they have judges grade each entry, so you can look at archives like http://www.roguetemple.com/7drl/2010/ http://www.roguetemple.com/7drl/2010/ to find the highest-rated ones and focus your search there, if you like. Roguelike Radio usually has a show about the 7drl results, e.g. http://www.roguelikeradio.com/2018/05/episode-145-7drls-2018.html http://www.roguelikeradio.com/2018/05/episode-145-7drls-2018... .
sdenton4 7y ago
I looooove Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. There was a five-year period or so where it was about the only game I played. (Things got worse when I discovered that there are two-week tournaments that are essentially a war on productivity... How many times and in how many different ways can you beat the game in a two-week period? Your team is depending on you! Down with sleep!) Their design philosophy is fantastic: https://github.com/crawl/crawl/blob/master/crawl-ref/docs/crawl_manual.rst#n-philosophy-pas-de-faq https://github.com/crawl/crawl/blob/master/crawl-ref/docs/cr... The core concept is that all choices should be /meaningful/. 'No-brainers' are ruthlessly pruned away, or given interesting side effects that could be situationally useful or terrible. And also, avoid anything that looks like grinding. These people speak my language...
- fiddlerwoaroof 7y ago
  I like DCSS, but I’ve found the recent releases are making it less fun by removing mechanics I liked. E.g. removing inventory weight limits, food types and nerfing abilities that modify the dungeon.
  - Igelau 7y ago
    When they got rid of chokos they got rid of me.
  - pmarreck 7y ago
    Inventory weight limits add grind due to having to manually shuttle items around instead Also there is just nothing fun about inventory management IMHO. In Skyrim I always did a player.modav carryweight 10000 and things became SO much more fun.
    - fiddlerwoaroof 7y ago
      I always enjoyed optimizing my items for the next branch in DCSS, plus worrying about dropping dangerous weapons, lest an enemy pick it up and use it on me. (Which has also been removed)
jhallenworld 7y ago
I enjoyed urogue (ultra-rogue I think) as shipped with SCO Xenix. I had previous experience with nethack, but urogue was frankly easier. I think it's this: https://github.com/RoguelikeRestorationProject/urogue1.03 https://github.com/RoguelikeRestorationProject/urogue1.03
oweiler 7y ago
While more of a twin stick shooter, Enter The Gungeon deserved being mentioned here. I've spent the last 4 months with that game and it's still fun. I has a huge number of weapons, actives, passives, synergies which can be combined in crazy ways (some break the game deliberatly). Almost no run plays like the other.
- cheald 7y ago
  I think ETG is technically a "roguelite", but yes, it's a wonderful entry. Binding of Isaac is another, but it's so dark and disturbing that it puts many people off - which is a bit of a shame, because mechanically, it's spectacular. Dead Cells, Nuclear Throne, Crypt of the Necrodancer (and its sister game, Cadence of Hyrule), Risk of Rain, and Wizard of Legend are some of my recent similar favorites, too. Slay the Spire is often also called a roguelike, and if it gets its teeth into you, watch out. Steam says I have 350 hours logged in it and I still enjoy the heck out of it.
  - vvanders 7y ago
    Nuclear Throne is outstanding and really deserves more recognition.
  - Igelau 7y ago
    Re: Binding of Isaac, it's not so much that it's dark and disturbing. There's plenty of that in ascii roguelikes of you know where to look. My issues with BoI: - I could plainly tell how hard it was trying to be edgy - the graphics were an eyesore - the gameplay just wasn't fun for me
pfarnsworth 7y ago
I've been playing Hack/Nethack since 1982-ish. My friend got it for his IBM PC, and we were both addicted. The only reason why I kept asking for a computer for my parents was so that I could play Hack. I was the one who figured out that the Amulet of Yendor was underneath a boulder on level 26. My friend, however, one-upped me. At some point, his version of Hack was corrupted, so every time he read a scroll of identify, the game would crash. So he had to go through the entire game without reading a scroll or using rings. He was able to make it through the entire game and finish it, which I admit is an impressive feat. I've been playing Nethack since, although I haven't played it in the last few years because of work and kids. There was a time in Nethack where it wasn't as complicated, but once they added all the deeper features, I've never completed the game and ascended. The game is now so deep and so complicated that I couldn't solve it without reading the cheats, and even following those, and even saving my games and redoing them, I've never gotten to the point where I could ascend. I'm really good at surviving the lower levels and stealing from shops, but I've never been able to figure out how to ascend. At some point, I should reattempt this now that I'm locked down for 2 months.
- schoen 7y ago
  You can learn a lot from watching other people play on nethack.alt.org -- sometimes realizing important stuff that you didn't know before.
- phs318u 7y ago
  I was in a similar boat but finally mustered the commitment to mount a serious ascension attempt that spanned a couple of months part time (playing iNethack on the phone helped). It was SO enjoyable despite being killed by the High Priest of Moloch on level 45. My daughters (21 & 23) have inherited this addiction though the prefer the isometric Vultures’s Eye. First encountered Nethack in 1988. Only ever ascended once in the early days. It’s definitely gotten harder over the years. But maybe that’s just my attention to detail deteriorating.
- mihaifm 7y ago
  It can certainly be completed without spoilers, but it requires a bit of trial and error. I managed to ascend after 2-3 months of intense play...and a lot of dying. I think part of the joy of playing nethack is discovering how things work, so highly recommend not to read any spoilers. The best way to learn the mechanics is to install the game locally and play in explore mode. The game offers a lot of alternate ways to do stuff (because of conducts), but if you don't care about conducts characters tend to become a bit too powerful towards the end game. It's all a matter of surviving the early game, where you don't have resistances, skills etc. and where most people give up.
floatboth 7y ago
> Out of the two-dozen-or-so NetHack variants, the most notable are probably SLASH'EM/SLASH'EM Extended and UnNetHack Congratulations Amy, slex has been noted by Ars Technica now :D
- tpurves 7y ago
  #evilhack is one of the newest variants and has me hooked right now. You can find it on the hardfought server. It’s harder though and better for anyone who’s already managed to win the vanilla version of nethack (which only took me about 12 years lol)
allan_s 7y ago
Funny I'm trying to make a rogue-like game with my son these last days. Anyone has experienced using the C library `notcurses`, or some demo project ? (the library seems to be made to on purpose break curses API compatibility for the sake of sanity)
- simonh 7y ago
  I don't know how keen you are on using C, but there's an excellent open Roguelike library for Python, with a whole community round it. The subreddit is pretty active.. http://www.roguebasin.com/index.php?title=Complete_Roguelike_Tutorial,_using_python3%2Blibtcod http://www.roguebasin.com/index.php?title=Complete_Roguelike...
  - allan_s 7y ago
    thanks for the link I didn't know about this project. However here it's specifically a project to learn C :) but your link is still full a useful information (notably their dungeon generation algorithm )
- earenndil 7y ago
  Notcurses is ok, not great. Tickit[1] is much nicer, and comes with what is possibly the only good way of reading modifier characters from a terminal (seriously). Alternately, if you're ok with not running in a terminal, check out bearlibterminal[2]. 1: http://www.leonerd.org.uk/code/libtickit/ http://www.leonerd.org.uk/code/libtickit/ 2: http://foo.wyrd.name/en:bearlibterminal http://foo.wyrd.name/en:bearlibterminal
- philsnow 7y ago
  I haven't looked into roguelike game dev in a long time, but libtcod [0] used to be the gold standard, especially among 7DRLs because it gives you so much to start with so you get to focus on what makes your game interesting. [0] https://github.com/libtcod/libtcod https://github.com/libtcod/libtcod
every 7y ago
As luck would have it, I've spent much of the afternoon working on my orc rogue in nethack 3.7.0 via ssh on hardfought.org. Being elderly and self-sequestered from the plague has its rewards...
unbalancedevh 7y ago
Happy to see Omega in the list. I enjoyed so many hours playing that in college! Too bad the version I had was buggy and impossible to win.
umvi 7y ago
I know permadeath is a core mechanic of roguelikes, but I absolutely hate it. It's an artificial time waster. Imagine trying to learn a piano piece, but instead of being able to practice the hard parts over and over until you've mastered them, you always have to restart from the very beginning at the first mistake. Net result: you get extremely good at the beginning, to the point that it's boring, and you always get whooped by the hard part because you barely ever get to practice it (you have to sink an hour doing easy stuff just to get 5 seconds practicing the hard stuff)
- the5dysfunction 7y ago
  All video games are an artificial time waster. You either get roguelikes or you don't. You clearly don't. Let's take your analogy and flip it around: Imagine trying to play a game, but instead of a logical progression with consequences, you can just pick it up from whatever point you like. If you die, it doesn't matter. You can just completely skip over that part and head to the next. In fact you can begin the game at the final boss if you want. Net result: you get extremely good at nothing to the point that it's boring because you never have to practice or repeat a single thing.
  - umvi 7y ago
    I get roguelikes, but as my life has gotten more time constrained, I've grown less tolerant of shenanigans like permadeath that artificially prevent me from practicing and mastering the parts of the game I'm weakest at, instead making me sink most of my time into the parts of the game I've already mastered. I'm not saying get rid of permadeath, I'm saying make it optional like Hollow Knight, IWtbTG, or any numerous other games where time constrained people can use save points to master the game mechanics more quickly, and kids with infinite time can play permadeath mode to their heart's content.
  - Teckla 7y ago
    All video games are an artificial time waster. I couldn't disagree more. It depends on the video game, but a lot of them really get the brain working hard. And it's simply impossible for most people to be purely "productive" all the time. Video games are a great way to break from the grind but keep the brain engaged in something more challenging than, for example, watching TV. You either get roguelikes or you don't. You clearly don't. Once again, I couldn't disagree more. I've played Rogue-likes for more decades than I care to remember, and I "save file scum" to avoid perma-death. Sure, some individuals might "cheat" and jump to the "conclusion" of the game quickly, but that's their problem. I don't care to repeat the same beginning of a game over and over (and over and over). It's just repetitive and annoying.
earenndil 7y ago
This is not that great of an article, IMO. A prominent developer of one of the roguelikes mentioned says: > you can immediately see that this article was stitched together by throwing some wikipedia articles together if it references the Berlin interpretation > it's also hilarious if the guild of disgruntled adventurers is referenced as fun addition :) > I'm not sure if I should feel insulted [by the article's description of my roguelike] I mostly agree with these. I also feel a bit slighted by one of the descriptions. I'm also not sure quite what to make of the fact that they don't mention the two most prominent recent roguelikes: caves of qud, and cogmind.
ridiculous_fish 7y ago
This post has so much love for roguelikes, what a joy! I Carbonized [1] Angband to make it playable on OS X. Then I Cocoaized it a few years later. What a rarefied game, that you can play it for years! 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_(API) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_(API)
wmorse 7y ago
Shout out to Lincoln-Sudbury RHS where Hack began...and JOVE! Can't imagine that fantastic experiment happening again; PDP-11 running Unix given to a cohort of teenagers to maintain. Thanks Brian!

180 points by aww_dang 7y ago

nyolfen 7y ago

if you're homebound and enjoy exploring game systems, you could do worse than diving into a few rl's

jim_and_derrick 7y ago
So I am a gamer for sure, spent tons of time playing all the dark souls, bloodborne, sekiro over the past 4 or 5 years. After souls i was left wanting, a void in my game life so to speak. Monster Hunter World captured my attention for a good while. Then i found roguelikes and specifically Darkest Dungeon. I had seen people playing on twitch, it looked cool. Turn based, RPG, permadeath, difficult. All up my alley. Jumped into it and got my butt whooped for a while but then it clicked. And BOOM i was off, many months later and hundreds of hours later i was done with Darkest Dungeon. Since then, Slay the Spire baby. Wow that game owns hard. about 300 hours here. It's a deck-building (card game) turn based rogue-like. Recommend it to all!
- gundmc 7y ago
  Slay the Spire is fantastic. The day they release their Android port is the day my productivity hits an all time low.
- eterm 7y ago
  Calling it a deck builder is misleading and I think puts off people who might otherwise enjoy it. Sure, the abilities are card-shaped and there are drawing mechanics, but it doesn't really play like a deck-builder at all. I think the main differentiator for me, and where I thin Slay the Spire sets it apart from normal deck builders, is that the enemies you're fighting aren't playing by the same rules. The enemies don't have cards, or decks or similar abilities. Because of this, the enemies can be really thematic and varied and have interesting mechanics and don't need to be balanced around playing by the same rules as the player. As a consequence it doesn't feel like a deck builder to me, the abilities just happen to be card-shaped. Add in the relics which are one of the more important parts of the run, and really the skills involved aren't at all like other deck building games. But yes, huge recommendation from me too, definitely the best rogue-lite game in years. (~450 hours played for me, and probably twice that watching it on twich).
  - jim_and_derrick 7y ago
    Fair enough. I'm not a big card game guy so i understand where you are coming from!
  - gambiting 7y ago
    I played it for about 5 hours and I just don't have any motivation to keep going. The trickle of new cards is super slow and I don't really feel like much depends on my skill at all. But I also have friends who rave about it, so maybe it's an acquired taste thing.
    - chongli 7y ago
      It's a very challenging game that exercises different muscles than other games, especially if you've never played a deckbuilder before. One of the hardest things to get used to is the fact that skipping a card reward is often the best play. The key insight is that every card taken decreases the probability of drawing all of the other cards in your deck. Another tricky aspect to the game is that any given card may be great in one deck and terrible in another, to the point where taking it makes your deck worse. Strong players (such as jorbs, whom you can find on twitch) tend to lean very heavily on the card remove feature in order to get rid of bad cards. There is definitely a luck component to the game but skilled players are pushing that boundary every day. Winning streaks on ascension 20 (the hardest difficulty level) are possible and always growing.
      - hnick 7y ago
        I'm nearing 500 hours on StS and I still have so much to learn. Approaching it as a deckbuilder can definitely be a noob-trap - anyone who has played MTG or similar is very tempted to build into archetypes instead of understanding that you have to deal with the problems at hand with the solutions you are given, because you can't force the game to give you what you want. Taking a "will be good later" pick is nearly always a problem, often because it reduces your chances of reaching "later". Funnily enough a really thin deck can also be a problem. If you have 15 cards and Nemesis adds 5 burns, you're in trouble without a way to handle that. Instead of thin or fat, the best way to think of it IMO is consistency (draw and exhaust help this). I really like how each Act tests different strengths and exposes different weaknesses. A20 is tough but rewarding.
- mcphilip 7y ago
  If you’re in the mood for some more punishing difficulty that’s still fast paced, definitely give Spelunky HD a try! It’s a classic for a reason. I finally started playing it recently and am hooked. I’m still working on the zero gold run achievement —- it’s so frustrating making it to the caves and stepping on gold buried behind the snow foreground :( I’m determined to finish it before the lockdown is over, though.

dmbaggett 7y ago

If you’re looking for a fresh roguelike rabbit hole, check out Cogmind. It’s PC only but takes RL in an interesting new direction. (Not affiliated with it other than begin somewhat addicted.)

abhorrence 7y ago
It works fairly well via wine on Mac and Linux.
pyridines 7y ago
The development blog https://www.gridsagegames.com/blog/ https://www.gridsagegames.com/blog/ is a fascinating look into the design of the game that goes back years.

platz 7y ago

The roguelike game mechanic is fantastic, but it really needs to break out of the fantasy theme in a big way.

Andrew_nenakhov 7y ago
FTL did this, but once you figure out the mechanics, game becomes way to easy.
- lawn 7y ago
  You might be the first I've seen that describes FTL as too easy. But as someone who's done just about everything in that game I see where you're coming from.
  - Andrew_nenakhov 7y ago
    Yeah, FTL has several different ways to build a killer-ship that can destroy any opposition in seconds, including final boss mothership, so if you survive first few jumps, you're basically guaranteed to win. And that is a bit boring. In the end I have gravitated towards my personal favorite style of play, building a vicious boarding squad comprised of mantis or those rock dudes, that still required a constant danger of losing some crewmembers, but yielded more scrap in return after victory.
    - the_af 7y ago
      FTL is punishing to me, and people who've won it describe it as hugely chance-based, i.e. that though there are some prevalent strategies, chance is likely to ruin them (and not just in the first few jumps). For the sake of curiosity, can you describe those surefire ways to win?
      - Andrew_nenakhov 7y ago
        Well, It's been a while since I played it last time (Steam says, summer 2016), so I might mess up some details like weapon names. The core principle is to be able to adapt to whatever the have is sending your way. For every ship/layout variant, there are several paths which you can exploit. Some ships are more heavily skewed towards certain strategies (like if you have a 4-person teleport pad, you DEFINITELY should employ a heavy boarding strategies), but you always have some options. There 2 main aspects to FTL warfare: you should kill your enemy and you should keep yourself safe. To kill enemies, there are 3 reliable ways that I've found: lasers, drones and boarding. With starting cruiser, you already have Burst Laser II that does 3 shots, and it's arguably the best starting gun. What you need to win the game is to have 2-4 shots more than enemy shield level, to drop down their shields and then do damage to systems. The heaviest shield level is 4, so if you are capable to deliver an 8-volley barrage, you can reduce the final boss ship quite fast. If you do NOT have firepower to drop enemy shields, missiles/bombs really help, since they can bypass shields and damage the critical systems. So, for starting ship, all you have to do is to luck your way for some more firepower. You can also augment it with teleporting, if you happen to find a couple of mantis crew members. If you find some good beam weapon, you can use this instead after shields drop, targeting most dangerous systems (I always tried to disable cloaking / mind controlling structures first, but that depends.Sometimes you need to disable their drone control first, if they have some nasty repair drones or attacking drone) Drones is another surefire way to kill the enemy. Augment a couple of Mark II offensive drones with ion weapons, and most enemy ships will be disabled 5 seconds after combat starts. Third reliable way to win is boarding/teleporting. Just find a couple of mantis crew members (though rock guys are no slouch either), and drop them to the enemy to kill off their crew, just be ready to bring them back or do some micromanagement running away from enemy if your teleporter is disabled. And of course be sure to destroy their medlab facility, so wounded enemy won't be healed. This way requires the player to be most alert, cause you can lose your crew rather easily, but it's the most rewarding, cause you often get the ship intact, giving you the most scrap bonuses. Curiously, the last boss battle is split into 3 phases, and if you manage to kill all enemy crew on the first approach (rather hard, you need to disable their level3 healing facility), then all other phases are really easy: you just teleport your killer crew and disable their piloting, shields, and other systems really fast. You can also easily disable their isolated crew who run their offensive beam weaponry, and disabling those really helps. That was about killing enemies. Now, about keeping yourself safe. One, evade chance really helps, so try to have your evade ratio as high as possible, with best possible pilot. Second, try to bring your shields to a lever where expected opposition can't drop it with one volley, this progressively needs a raise towards the later stages. Third, CLOAKING helps, if you have it. Time it for the heaviest volleys/missile barrage, like those launched by the final ship. Four, defensive drones rule! With Mark II defensive drone, you can practically not worry about incoming missiles. Though it's a bit expensive to maintain, unless you have a drone retraction arm (or how it's called, it allows a drone parts reuse, or something). That's basically it. I never figured out good ways to fight with missiles, but I'm sure there is a strategy that works for them too. Hope that helps. :) All in all, after figuring it all out, I don't remember losing a game ever if I managed to get past sector 1. P.S. Bonus: if you ever run into a droneship that can't get past your shields, there is a gamey tactics to level up all your crew with zero risk: just reduce your offensive attacks so you hit their shields, and wait till your pilot, shields, drive and weapon operators level up after evading shots. Then rotate them in their stations, and continue. This can be achieved even on sector 1 easily, and having high level crew REALLY helps. Leveling up combat ability is not that easy, unfortunately, but doable, too.

kamikaze675 7y ago

For a modern pixel roguelike, check out OneBit Adventure on mobile

toupeira 7y ago
Also the Open Source Pixel Dungeon and its many mods.

cpeterso 7y ago

No mention of NetHack?

autarch 7y ago
Try Ctrl-F? It does mention NetHack quite a bit.
- moomin 7y ago
  Or try Page 2..,
philsnow 7y ago
Nethack definitely has a place in the history of roguelikes, but for people reading this HN thread, please don't play it as your first roguelike. It was not only my first roguelike but also the first C codebase that I ever played around in. I was blown away in the 90s installing Linux as a teenager and it coming with GCC built in. I owe the dev team for getting me really interested in computers as more than a consumer of games. But, it's creaky and idiosyncratic and has a lot of sharp edges that people who have been playing it for decades are quick to forgive, but if you're coming to the genre from, well, anything else, you're going to get put off, hard.
dri_ft 7y ago
No, mention of NetHack.

Andrew_nenakhov 7y ago

Ragnarok deserves more than one paragraph. Among many of it's great features was the one I personally loved most: sometimes you could meet a ghost of your past self, complete with all your inventory. Sometimes I even made this my strategy, dying as lots of scribes (weakest class at start, who carried a highly prized and rare item, a quill), then starting as blacksmith, which was easiest to survive in early stages. Quill was essential to win: you could always switch class to scribe after some level to write scrolls, but finding a quill was extremely hard.

schoen 7y ago
NetHack also has this, but most of the ghost's inventory will be cursed. :-)
pfarrell 7y ago
I’ve been playing iNethack on my phone (Uses 3.4.3). I ran into a ghost of myself last night. I was in a 1 square dead end tunnel with no digging tools and out of food. I thought I was going to starve to death before it finally moved. Really starting to have fun with it, but can barely make it 12 levels down :).
- moomin 7y ago
  So back at University a friend of mine had NetHack (3.0) and a lot of us played in it. I had a game where I simultaneously had the incredible luck to have my dog get polymorphed into a Xorn and then the bad luck to leave a bones file. Quite a lot of people got wiped out by a pet Xorn.
  - schoen 7y ago
    Did your old xorn end up as part of their bones files, too? I feel like I've seen this online at some point, where there were lots of ghosts because they were all getting killed by the same thing and then accumulating in new bones files.
    - 7y ago

jsilence 7y ago

Enjoyed the article very much, but missed Caves of Qud.

moomin 7y ago
Yeah, I haven’t played it myself but it’s unquestionably a significant entry in the genre.

danbolt 7y ago

Each year Roguebasin hosts the 7DRL challenge where people look to create a finished roguelike in seven days. I participated this year and found it a pretty thoughtful meditation on the genre. https://7drl.com/ https://7drl.com/

philsnow 7y ago
There's a lot of gems in here, and in older 7DRL entries as well. The nature of the format means that games (the ones that are actually finished) are focused, often highlighting one or two novel gameplay mechanics and/or mood/design elements. Anything more than that and the designer can't finish in 7 days. This also means that entries from 10 years ago is just as playable (IF you can get them to run) as the entries from this year. Cogmind (mentioned elsewhere on this thread) started as a 7drl. Each year they have judges grade each entry, so you can look at archives like http://www.roguetemple.com/7drl/2010/ http://www.roguetemple.com/7drl/2010/ to find the highest-rated ones and focus your search there, if you like. Roguelike Radio usually has a show about the 7drl results, e.g. http://www.roguelikeradio.com/2018/05/episode-145-7drls-2018.html http://www.roguelikeradio.com/2018/05/episode-145-7drls-2018... .

sdenton4 7y ago

I looooove Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. There was a five-year period or so where it was about the only game I played. (Things got worse when I discovered that there are two-week tournaments that are essentially a war on productivity... How many times and in how many different ways can you beat the game in a two-week period? Your team is depending on you! Down with sleep!) Their design philosophy is fantastic: https://github.com/crawl/crawl/blob/master/crawl-ref/docs/crawl_manual.rst#n-philosophy-pas-de-faq https://github.com/crawl/crawl/blob/master/crawl-ref/docs/cr... The core concept is that all choices should be /meaningful/. 'No-brainers' are ruthlessly pruned away, or given interesting side effects that could be situationally useful or terrible. And also, avoid anything that looks like grinding. These people speak my language...

fiddlerwoaroof 7y ago
I like DCSS, but I’ve found the recent releases are making it less fun by removing mechanics I liked. E.g. removing inventory weight limits, food types and nerfing abilities that modify the dungeon.
- Igelau 7y ago
  When they got rid of chokos they got rid of me.
- pmarreck 7y ago
  Inventory weight limits add grind due to having to manually shuttle items around instead Also there is just nothing fun about inventory management IMHO. In Skyrim I always did a player.modav carryweight 10000 and things became SO much more fun.
  - fiddlerwoaroof 7y ago
    I always enjoyed optimizing my items for the next branch in DCSS, plus worrying about dropping dangerous weapons, lest an enemy pick it up and use it on me. (Which has also been removed)

jhallenworld 7y ago

I enjoyed urogue (ultra-rogue I think) as shipped with SCO Xenix. I had previous experience with nethack, but urogue was frankly easier. I think it's this: https://github.com/RoguelikeRestorationProject/urogue1.03 https://github.com/RoguelikeRestorationProject/urogue1.03

oweiler 7y ago

While more of a twin stick shooter, Enter The Gungeon deserved being mentioned here. I've spent the last 4 months with that game and it's still fun. I has a huge number of weapons, actives, passives, synergies which can be combined in crazy ways (some break the game deliberatly). Almost no run plays like the other.

cheald 7y ago
I think ETG is technically a "roguelite", but yes, it's a wonderful entry. Binding of Isaac is another, but it's so dark and disturbing that it puts many people off - which is a bit of a shame, because mechanically, it's spectacular. Dead Cells, Nuclear Throne, Crypt of the Necrodancer (and its sister game, Cadence of Hyrule), Risk of Rain, and Wizard of Legend are some of my recent similar favorites, too. Slay the Spire is often also called a roguelike, and if it gets its teeth into you, watch out. Steam says I have 350 hours logged in it and I still enjoy the heck out of it.
- vvanders 7y ago
  Nuclear Throne is outstanding and really deserves more recognition.
- Igelau 7y ago
  Re: Binding of Isaac, it's not so much that it's dark and disturbing. There's plenty of that in ascii roguelikes of you know where to look. My issues with BoI: - I could plainly tell how hard it was trying to be edgy - the graphics were an eyesore - the gameplay just wasn't fun for me

pfarnsworth 7y ago

I've been playing Hack/Nethack since 1982-ish. My friend got it for his IBM PC, and we were both addicted. The only reason why I kept asking for a computer for my parents was so that I could play Hack. I was the one who figured out that the Amulet of Yendor was underneath a boulder on level 26. My friend, however, one-upped me. At some point, his version of Hack was corrupted, so every time he read a scroll of identify, the game would crash. So he had to go through the entire game without reading a scroll or using rings. He was able to make it through the entire game and finish it, which I admit is an impressive feat. I've been playing Nethack since, although I haven't played it in the last few years because of work and kids. There was a time in Nethack where it wasn't as complicated, but once they added all the deeper features, I've never completed the game and ascended. The game is now so deep and so complicated that I couldn't solve it without reading the cheats, and even following those, and even saving my games and redoing them, I've never gotten to the point where I could ascend. I'm really good at surviving the lower levels and stealing from shops, but I've never been able to figure out how to ascend. At some point, I should reattempt this now that I'm locked down for 2 months.

schoen 7y ago
You can learn a lot from watching other people play on nethack.alt.org -- sometimes realizing important stuff that you didn't know before.
phs318u 7y ago
I was in a similar boat but finally mustered the commitment to mount a serious ascension attempt that spanned a couple of months part time (playing iNethack on the phone helped). It was SO enjoyable despite being killed by the High Priest of Moloch on level 45. My daughters (21 & 23) have inherited this addiction though the prefer the isometric Vultures’s Eye. First encountered Nethack in 1988. Only ever ascended once in the early days. It’s definitely gotten harder over the years. But maybe that’s just my attention to detail deteriorating.
mihaifm 7y ago
It can certainly be completed without spoilers, but it requires a bit of trial and error. I managed to ascend after 2-3 months of intense play...and a lot of dying. I think part of the joy of playing nethack is discovering how things work, so highly recommend not to read any spoilers. The best way to learn the mechanics is to install the game locally and play in explore mode. The game offers a lot of alternate ways to do stuff (because of conducts), but if you don't care about conducts characters tend to become a bit too powerful towards the end game. It's all a matter of surviving the early game, where you don't have resistances, skills etc. and where most people give up.

floatboth 7y ago

> Out of the two-dozen-or-so NetHack variants, the most notable are probably SLASH'EM/SLASH'EM Extended and UnNetHack Congratulations Amy, slex has been noted by Ars Technica now :D

tpurves 7y ago
#evilhack is one of the newest variants and has me hooked right now. You can find it on the hardfought server. It’s harder though and better for anyone who’s already managed to win the vanilla version of nethack (which only took me about 12 years lol)

allan_s 7y ago

Funny I'm trying to make a rogue-like game with my son these last days. Anyone has experienced using the C library `notcurses`, or some demo project ? (the library seems to be made to on purpose break curses API compatibility for the sake of sanity)

simonh 7y ago
I don't know how keen you are on using C, but there's an excellent open Roguelike library for Python, with a whole community round it. The subreddit is pretty active.. http://www.roguebasin.com/index.php?title=Complete_Roguelike_Tutorial,_using_python3%2Blibtcod http://www.roguebasin.com/index.php?title=Complete_Roguelike...
- allan_s 7y ago
  thanks for the link I didn't know about this project. However here it's specifically a project to learn C :) but your link is still full a useful information (notably their dungeon generation algorithm )
earenndil 7y ago
Notcurses is ok, not great. Tickit[1] is much nicer, and comes with what is possibly the only good way of reading modifier characters from a terminal (seriously). Alternately, if you're ok with not running in a terminal, check out bearlibterminal[2]. 1: http://www.leonerd.org.uk/code/libtickit/ http://www.leonerd.org.uk/code/libtickit/ 2: http://foo.wyrd.name/en:bearlibterminal http://foo.wyrd.name/en:bearlibterminal
philsnow 7y ago
I haven't looked into roguelike game dev in a long time, but libtcod [0] used to be the gold standard, especially among 7DRLs because it gives you so much to start with so you get to focus on what makes your game interesting. [0] https://github.com/libtcod/libtcod https://github.com/libtcod/libtcod

every 7y ago

As luck would have it, I've spent much of the afternoon working on my orc rogue in nethack 3.7.0 via ssh on hardfought.org. Being elderly and self-sequestered from the plague has its rewards...

unbalancedevh 7y ago

Happy to see Omega in the list. I enjoyed so many hours playing that in college! Too bad the version I had was buggy and impossible to win.

umvi 7y ago

I know permadeath is a core mechanic of roguelikes, but I absolutely hate it. It's an artificial time waster. Imagine trying to learn a piano piece, but instead of being able to practice the hard parts over and over until you've mastered them, you always have to restart from the very beginning at the first mistake. Net result: you get extremely good at the beginning, to the point that it's boring, and you always get whooped by the hard part because you barely ever get to practice it (you have to sink an hour doing easy stuff just to get 5 seconds practicing the hard stuff)

the5dysfunction 7y ago
All video games are an artificial time waster. You either get roguelikes or you don't. You clearly don't. Let's take your analogy and flip it around: Imagine trying to play a game, but instead of a logical progression with consequences, you can just pick it up from whatever point you like. If you die, it doesn't matter. You can just completely skip over that part and head to the next. In fact you can begin the game at the final boss if you want. Net result: you get extremely good at nothing to the point that it's boring because you never have to practice or repeat a single thing.
- umvi 7y ago
  I get roguelikes, but as my life has gotten more time constrained, I've grown less tolerant of shenanigans like permadeath that artificially prevent me from practicing and mastering the parts of the game I'm weakest at, instead making me sink most of my time into the parts of the game I've already mastered. I'm not saying get rid of permadeath, I'm saying make it optional like Hollow Knight, IWtbTG, or any numerous other games where time constrained people can use save points to master the game mechanics more quickly, and kids with infinite time can play permadeath mode to their heart's content.
- Teckla 7y ago
  All video games are an artificial time waster. I couldn't disagree more. It depends on the video game, but a lot of them really get the brain working hard. And it's simply impossible for most people to be purely "productive" all the time. Video games are a great way to break from the grind but keep the brain engaged in something more challenging than, for example, watching TV. You either get roguelikes or you don't. You clearly don't. Once again, I couldn't disagree more. I've played Rogue-likes for more decades than I care to remember, and I "save file scum" to avoid perma-death. Sure, some individuals might "cheat" and jump to the "conclusion" of the game quickly, but that's their problem. I don't care to repeat the same beginning of a game over and over (and over and over). It's just repetitive and annoying.

earenndil 7y ago

This is not that great of an article, IMO. A prominent developer of one of the roguelikes mentioned says: > you can immediately see that this article was stitched together by throwing some wikipedia articles together if it references the Berlin interpretation > it's also hilarious if the guild of disgruntled adventurers is referenced as fun addition :) > I'm not sure if I should feel insulted [by the article's description of my roguelike] I mostly agree with these. I also feel a bit slighted by one of the descriptions. I'm also not sure quite what to make of the fact that they don't mention the two most prominent recent roguelikes: caves of qud, and cogmind.

ridiculous_fish 7y ago

This post has so much love for roguelikes, what a joy! I Carbonized [1] Angband to make it playable on OS X. Then I Cocoaized it a few years later. What a rarefied game, that you can play it for years! 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_(API) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_(API)

wmorse 7y ago

Shout out to Lincoln-Sudbury RHS where Hack began...and JOVE! Can't imagine that fantastic experiment happening again; PDP-11 running Unix given to a cohort of teenagers to maintain. Thanks Brian!