20 ms·

How to make a roguelike

237 points by metadat 4y ago

kelseyfrog 4y ago
As mentioned in the article, the r/RoguelikeDev summer code-along event[1] is a fantastic way to complete a basic roguelike. It provides both a bit of a push and group accountability that some people need to get started and maintain momentum. Unfortunately it takes place just once a year during (northern hemisphere's) summer break because that's when a bunch of young people have more time on their hands to do stuff like this. :) 1. Disclosure: I'm the host
- fho 4y ago
  Just to mention another event: there is also the 7 day Roguelike challenge: https://7drl.com/ https://7drl.com/
- nextaccountic 4y ago
  And https://bfnightly.bracketproductions.com/ https://bfnightly.bracketproductions.com/ is a great tutorial, not just at being a step by step guide but by introducing new ideas (for example, it has a chapter on wave function colapse for map generation [0], among other things) [0] also talked about here https://www.gridbugs.org/wave-function-collapse/ https://www.gridbugs.org/wave-function-collapse/ and other places
dan-g 4y ago
Steve Losh has a great series of blog posts on creating a roguelike in Clojure: https://stevelosh.com/blog/2012/07/caves-of-clojure-01/ https://stevelosh.com/blog/2012/07/caves-of-clojure-01/
candiddevmike 4y ago
After finally purchasing RimWorld, I don't see the point in playing most other games. The vanilla game is incredible, but with mods and scenario customizations I can basically create any kind of top down game I want: start a game playing it one way (super peaceful like the Sims) and flip on a zombie mod once I get bored.
- jawr 4y ago
  Although a great game, I’m not sure it can be considered a roguelike.
  - MrLeap 4y ago
    It has the procedural generation and permanent death. I'd say it shares many characteristics, enough to be called a cousin at least.
    - Sohcahtoa82 4y ago
      When I think of a "roguelike", I think of a game that is played in "runs" where a run is typically 60 minutes or less, but completing a game round is not completing the entire game, as it will take several runs to unlock all the features and content. You are also generally not expected to be able to complete a run to the final boss in your first several attempts. Hades, FTL, Vampire Survivors, Gunfire Reborn, and Crypt of the Necrodancer all satisfy these. RimWorld is not at all a roguelike because a "run" can easily last hundreds of hours.
      - djur 4y ago
        The classic roguelikes can take many hours to complete and do not have any kind of between-run unlocking. By some common definitions, unlockable content makes a game not a roguelike. I wouldn't go that far, but I'd never call Vampire Survivors a roguelike, either.
        Bakary 4y ago
        It's hard to say because the terms end up shifting to mean various things as the genre solidifies. I personally like using roguelite for games such as Hades, in which case the operating features are procedural generation, permadeath, and metaprogress with each run
        qu4z-2 4y ago
riidom 4y ago
Recently I wondered what the name of the site formerly known as gamasutra is. Maybe it's just my bubble, but it feels just dead since the renaming :( A pity.
- skocznymroczny 4y ago
  I miss devmaster and flipcode, both coming from the age of people writing their own engines. Unfortunately ever since Unreal and Unity went mainstream, the community of amateur game engine developers shrunk considerably.
- justinlloyd 4y ago
  I feel the same way, and I think it was the point at which the physical hardcopy magazine stopped being published.
xeromal 4y ago
Roguelike games are one of those major events that happened that I completely missed. It's hugely popular and I still don't know what a roguelike game is. lol
- pavlov 4y ago
  Rogue is actually one of the oldest computer games, the original is from 1980: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_(video_game)
  - regular 4y ago
    Huh. I was programming my Ataris at that time and have worked as a professional programmer for decades, but I never heard of "Rogue" until seeing some posts about it on this site. "Roguelike" is one of those irritating, smugly obscure terms that keep surfacing in HN post titles. What doesn't help is the failure to capitalize "Rogue," which would at least provide a clue that this is a reference to a particular work.
  - remram 4y ago
    There's a port on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1443430/Rogue/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1443430/Rogue/
- TulliusCicero 4y ago
  These days it usually refers to games that have permadeath + procedurally generated levels, so every time you die you start the whole game over (but an entire 'run' isn't very long, less than two hours definitely, often less than one). Sometimes there's "meta progression" that does actually persist some unlocks or upgrades in between runs. Originally rogue likes were that, but specifically in the gameplay genre of turn-based dungeon crawling RPG's. These days they can be in other genres: twin stick shooters, card games, action platformers, etc.
  - bbreier 4y ago
    I _think_ that the meta progression is the sticking point that determines whether the game is a roguelike or a roguelite, roguelite being the one with the meta progression.
justinlloyd 4y ago
Sudden feelings of guilt as I think "I should really give a few weeks of love to my unfinished roguelike." Maybe I'll get to it over this year's holiday season. Need to finish the multiplayer, the vendor buy/sell system, and compose the music score and I can say "done."
- krapp 4y ago
  Yeah, I think I started mine half a dozen times.
  - justinlloyd 4y ago
    I think I need to finish the one I've got, first, before taking on another :-)
  - hypertele-Xii 4y ago
    Guilty. But at least I contributed to DCSS :D
- yieldcrv 4y ago
  > and compose the music score and I can say "done." Fiverr It looks better if you add someone else to the credits anyway
  - ioseph 4y ago
    Does it? I'm always extra blown away when a great game is solo produced especially if it features great art, music and sound.
  - justinlloyd 4y ago
    What I posted as a comment: Nah, I'm good. What I said in my head: Having shipped a goodly number of video games, both as part of a team and as solo developer over a 20+ year career in professional game development, and a further 20 years as a hobbyist developer since leaving the game development industry, I strongly disagree with your statement. And based on the fact I am more than capable of composing my own music score, and really, I'd simply be pulling from my back catalogue AKA raiding either of my soundcloud accounts or my "abandoned ideas" directory, for several of the pieces, I don't think I should outsource one of my competencies.
postalrat 4y ago
Another good roguelike tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HnY7Inp74dw&list=PLea8cjCua_P3LL7J1Q9b6PJua0A-96uUS https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HnY7Inp74dw&list=PLea8cjCua_... Great gameboy translation: https://github.com/binji/porklike.gb https://github.com/binji/porklike.gb
guzik 4y ago
> I need that feature over there, and this one, and what about that one! This hits me hard as I am always 2 days before releasing my first roguelike game on Steam since 2021 (shameless plug: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2053250/Hellway/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/2053250/Hellway/). > Release early and often Uhh, I really don't think it's a good advice for gamedev. I really miss the times when games were polished since v1.0. Random crash on boss fight? Hey, it's an early access / beta / v0.0.1 / we were in rush, forced by some non-sense deadline set by our kickstarter campaign (or ego). Wait for the updates!
- kelseyfrog 4y ago
  >> Release early and often > Uhh, I really don't think it's a good advice for gamedev. It is, but it leaves out a crucial bit of information, namely who is the audience to whom the game is released. It's important to get feedback early, especially gameplay feedback. At the same time, failed releases to the general public do little to inspire confidence or provide the valuable kind of feedback required in the early phases of development.
  - Arrath 4y ago
    One potential downside to releasing early is the risk of a hardcore fanbase coalescing around the game, that knows every system and exploit in and out. As a result they then scream for the game to be harder, harder. And as such devoted and vocal fans for so long, the devs may be overly inclined to listen to them, to the detriment of the new/less experienced player experience. Among others, I think Risk of Rain fell prey to this, but I may be thinking of a different game.
    - Forgeties79 4y ago
      RoR is wildly punishing. Wouldn’t surprise me if that’s the game you’re thinking of.
      - naet 4y ago
        Risk of rain on higher difficulties was always very hard from when I first played it early on, but that's part of what makes it fun for me. I really enjoy a roguelike where you don't win every time; something about the challenge makes a deep run much more satisfying. Classic roguelikes like Nethack are also incredibly hard to win.
swayvil 4y ago
What do you like about the turn-based mechanics? What do you dislike?
wchar_t 4y ago
The original article is here: https://www.gridsagegames.com/blog/2018/10/how-to-make-a-roguelike/ https://www.gridsagegames.com/blog/2018/10/how-to-make-a-rog... The author is the creator of the popular commercial roguelike, Cogmind.
- hypertele-Xii 4y ago
  I've been a patron following development for some time, the game's really good and the devlogs even better. It lacks the variety of DCSS but is so much better.. put together. Modern, convenient. Has a twist. And sci-fi theme! Even made some CSS graphs for it (slightly outdated): https://hypertele.fi/8b7ac4d1cbecbf8b https://hypertele.fi/8b7ac4d1cbecbf8b
cultofmetatron 4y ago
Highly recommend this book on rust if you want to make a roguelike. https://pragprog.com/titles/hwrust/hands-on-rust/ https://pragprog.com/titles/hwrust/hands-on-rust/
lordleft 4y ago
It still blows my mind that a game genre I thought was the most niche of niches, that I played routinely in the early 2000s, has become one of the major influences in modern gaming today. Shoutout to ADOM, a game I spent countless hours playing.
- OrangeMonkey 4y ago
  ADOM - The game where understanding Conways Game of Life helps you farm herbs in a dungeon.
- pjbeam 4y ago
  I always really wanted to get a trident of the red rooster and even with a guide was never able to do it. Maybe I'll give it another shot! Thanks for bringing back some lovely (frustrating) memories.
  - baq 4y ago
    Wasn’t that thing an Easter egg?
- dolni 4y ago
  It's not really, though. So many games are called "roguelike" from so many different genres that the word has lost all meaning. Near as I can tell, the only thing actually meant by it is "when you lose you start over". By that definition, checkers is a roguelike.
  - Shared404 4y ago
    I think it's more common to see roguelite's than roguelike's in modern games, though the latter term is much more common.
  - furyofantares 4y ago
    You've basically debunked your own theory here since nobody calls checkers or anything like checkers a roguelike. Roguelikes almost always involve building up a character or deck or cards or whatever by acquiring more stuff that changes the gameplay, and it's the loss of this unique thing that you've built that is relevant to "when you lose you start over." Additionally, roguelikes are almost always heavily randomzied, when you start over you get brand new decisions to make. "When you lose you start over" certainly is a roguelike characteristic, but what losing means and what starting over means is strongly similar among roguelikes and not similar to losing or starting over in checkers.
Der_Einzige 4y ago
I LOVE Dijkstra maps! They are game AI nirvana. No one has any excuses for bad AI in a roguelike. http://www.roguebasin.com/index.php/Dijkstra_Maps_Visualized http://www.roguebasin.com/index.php/Dijkstra_Maps_Visualized
- b0rsuk 4y ago
  There's a mini discussion on HN about them here, when I last mentioned them. Crucially, they know alternative names such as "Flow Fields". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22848106 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22848106
dmbaggett 4y ago
I’ve been playing roguelikes since the mid 1980s, and from that perspective it’s hard to overstate Josh Ge’s contribution to the genre. Cogmind is just incredible — an absolute masterpiece that he is continually evolving. And Josh has likely written more for and about the genre than anyone else in history. This is a guy who’s put over ten thousand hours into his seminal game, and to the genre overall. I feel like Josh — along with Tarn and Zach Adams (Dwarf Fortress) — have by sheer force of will translated roguelikes into the current era. (And yes, FTL and Spelunky are awesome as well — just farther afield.) Respect.
caseyf7 4y ago
This is actually good advice for building most software products.
regular 4y ago
Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago
Btw, speaking of roguelikes, everyone knows ADOM, and it's great, but the one I loved the most was Ragnarok (1993) [0] It is bloody hard, but where else can you find corpses of your previous attempts, and with some of your gear [1]? Where else can you grow fingers? Where else rings on your fingers will cut off fingers if you morph into a giant? Where else you can switch bodies with other monsters? [0]: https://www.old-games.com/download/4031/ragnarok-a-k-a-valhalla https://www.old-games.com/download/4031/ragnarok-a-k-a-valha... [1]: I have developed a whole strategy around it. Scribe player class is extremely difficult to survive in early game, but they possess a very rare item in their inventory: stylus, which allows rewriting scrolls, an extremely important thing. So die as a scribe many times, then start as a blacksmith, and pick up a stylus from your previous character's body..
- pyb 4y ago
  > where else can you find corpses of your previous attempts? In Nethack
  - mcv 4y ago
    And also the abandoned dog of your previous character. I loved that dog.
    - Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago
      You have a sad feeling for a moment. Then it passes.
gernb 4y ago
is "roguelike" going back to its intuitive meaning of "similar to the game rogue" or is it still the new meaning of basically any game with procedure level generation. For example this Asteroids inspried game. https://www.polygon.com/2014/2/18/5423466/galak-z-the-dimensional-preview-17-bit-full-roguelike https://www.polygon.com/2014/2/18/5423466/galak-z-the-dimens...
- redrobein 4y ago
  While people continue to use it in reference to any game with rogue-like like features, I prefer the berlin interpretation http://www.roguebasin.com/index.php/Berlin_Interpretation http://www.roguebasin.com/index.php/Berlin_Interpretation
- dolni 4y ago
  > is it still the new meaning of basically any game with procedure level generation. It isn't even that. The early access game "Brotato" is described as a roguelike. It does not have procedurally generated levels. Just a square arena.
anthk 4y ago
On roguelikes (true roguelikes, not gatekeeping, my first roguelike was Angband but it was meh, then Nethack with the Falcon's Eye UI, then I switched to console in 2005 or so) there's Nethack/Slashem if you like thinking out of the box, DCSS if you like compat, Tome < 4 if you like LOTR and wandering around several towns, ADOM for combinatorics explosion. The rest are just Zelda clones with permadeath.
sudasana 4y ago
Josh is a great guy who's made tons of contributions to the community, not least of which is his REXPaint ASCII editor: https://www.gridsagegames.com/rexpaint/ https://www.gridsagegames.com/rexpaint/

237 points by metadat 4y ago

As mentioned in the article, the r/RoguelikeDev summer code-along event[1] is a fantastic way to complete a basic roguelike. It provides both a bit of a push and group accountability that some people need to get started and maintain momentum. Unfortunately it takes place just once a year during (northern hemisphere's) summer break because that's when a bunch of young people have more time on their hands to do stuff like this. :) 1. Disclosure: I'm the host

fho 4y ago
Just to mention another event: there is also the 7 day Roguelike challenge: https://7drl.com/ https://7drl.com/
nextaccountic 4y ago
And https://bfnightly.bracketproductions.com/ https://bfnightly.bracketproductions.com/ is a great tutorial, not just at being a step by step guide but by introducing new ideas (for example, it has a chapter on wave function colapse for map generation [0], among other things) [0] also talked about here https://www.gridbugs.org/wave-function-collapse/ https://www.gridbugs.org/wave-function-collapse/ and other places

dan-g 4y ago

Steve Losh has a great series of blog posts on creating a roguelike in Clojure: https://stevelosh.com/blog/2012/07/caves-of-clojure-01/ https://stevelosh.com/blog/2012/07/caves-of-clojure-01/

candiddevmike 4y ago

After finally purchasing RimWorld, I don't see the point in playing most other games. The vanilla game is incredible, but with mods and scenario customizations I can basically create any kind of top down game I want: start a game playing it one way (super peaceful like the Sims) and flip on a zombie mod once I get bored.

jawr 4y ago
Although a great game, I’m not sure it can be considered a roguelike.
- MrLeap 4y ago
  It has the procedural generation and permanent death. I'd say it shares many characteristics, enough to be called a cousin at least.
  - Sohcahtoa82 4y ago
    When I think of a "roguelike", I think of a game that is played in "runs" where a run is typically 60 minutes or less, but completing a game round is not completing the entire game, as it will take several runs to unlock all the features and content. You are also generally not expected to be able to complete a run to the final boss in your first several attempts. Hades, FTL, Vampire Survivors, Gunfire Reborn, and Crypt of the Necrodancer all satisfy these. RimWorld is not at all a roguelike because a "run" can easily last hundreds of hours.
    - djur 4y ago
      The classic roguelikes can take many hours to complete and do not have any kind of between-run unlocking. By some common definitions, unlockable content makes a game not a roguelike. I wouldn't go that far, but I'd never call Vampire Survivors a roguelike, either.
      - Bakary 4y ago
        It's hard to say because the terms end up shifting to mean various things as the genre solidifies. I personally like using roguelite for games such as Hades, in which case the operating features are procedural generation, permadeath, and metaprogress with each run
        qu4z-2 4y ago

riidom 4y ago

Recently I wondered what the name of the site formerly known as gamasutra is. Maybe it's just my bubble, but it feels just dead since the renaming :( A pity.

skocznymroczny 4y ago
I miss devmaster and flipcode, both coming from the age of people writing their own engines. Unfortunately ever since Unreal and Unity went mainstream, the community of amateur game engine developers shrunk considerably.
justinlloyd 4y ago
I feel the same way, and I think it was the point at which the physical hardcopy magazine stopped being published.

xeromal 4y ago

Roguelike games are one of those major events that happened that I completely missed. It's hugely popular and I still don't know what a roguelike game is. lol

pavlov 4y ago
Rogue is actually one of the oldest computer games, the original is from 1980: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_(video_game)
- regular 4y ago
  Huh. I was programming my Ataris at that time and have worked as a professional programmer for decades, but I never heard of "Rogue" until seeing some posts about it on this site. "Roguelike" is one of those irritating, smugly obscure terms that keep surfacing in HN post titles. What doesn't help is the failure to capitalize "Rogue," which would at least provide a clue that this is a reference to a particular work.
- remram 4y ago
  There's a port on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1443430/Rogue/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1443430/Rogue/
TulliusCicero 4y ago
These days it usually refers to games that have permadeath + procedurally generated levels, so every time you die you start the whole game over (but an entire 'run' isn't very long, less than two hours definitely, often less than one). Sometimes there's "meta progression" that does actually persist some unlocks or upgrades in between runs. Originally rogue likes were that, but specifically in the gameplay genre of turn-based dungeon crawling RPG's. These days they can be in other genres: twin stick shooters, card games, action platformers, etc.
- bbreier 4y ago
  I _think_ that the meta progression is the sticking point that determines whether the game is a roguelike or a roguelite, roguelite being the one with the meta progression.

justinlloyd 4y ago

Sudden feelings of guilt as I think "I should really give a few weeks of love to my unfinished roguelike." Maybe I'll get to it over this year's holiday season. Need to finish the multiplayer, the vendor buy/sell system, and compose the music score and I can say "done."

krapp 4y ago
Yeah, I think I started mine half a dozen times.
- justinlloyd 4y ago
  I think I need to finish the one I've got, first, before taking on another :-)
- hypertele-Xii 4y ago
  Guilty. But at least I contributed to DCSS :D
yieldcrv 4y ago
> and compose the music score and I can say "done." Fiverr It looks better if you add someone else to the credits anyway
- ioseph 4y ago
  Does it? I'm always extra blown away when a great game is solo produced especially if it features great art, music and sound.
- justinlloyd 4y ago
  What I posted as a comment: Nah, I'm good. What I said in my head: Having shipped a goodly number of video games, both as part of a team and as solo developer over a 20+ year career in professional game development, and a further 20 years as a hobbyist developer since leaving the game development industry, I strongly disagree with your statement. And based on the fact I am more than capable of composing my own music score, and really, I'd simply be pulling from my back catalogue AKA raiding either of my soundcloud accounts or my "abandoned ideas" directory, for several of the pieces, I don't think I should outsource one of my competencies.

postalrat 4y ago

Another good roguelike tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HnY7Inp74dw&list=PLea8cjCua_P3LL7J1Q9b6PJua0A-96uUS https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HnY7Inp74dw&list=PLea8cjCua_... Great gameboy translation: https://github.com/binji/porklike.gb https://github.com/binji/porklike.gb

guzik 4y ago

> I need that feature over there, and this one, and what about that one! This hits me hard as I am always 2 days before releasing my first roguelike game on Steam since 2021 (shameless plug: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2053250/Hellway/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/2053250/Hellway/). > Release early and often Uhh, I really don't think it's a good advice for gamedev. I really miss the times when games were polished since v1.0. Random crash on boss fight? Hey, it's an early access / beta / v0.0.1 / we were in rush, forced by some non-sense deadline set by our kickstarter campaign (or ego). Wait for the updates!

kelseyfrog 4y ago
>> Release early and often > Uhh, I really don't think it's a good advice for gamedev. It is, but it leaves out a crucial bit of information, namely who is the audience to whom the game is released. It's important to get feedback early, especially gameplay feedback. At the same time, failed releases to the general public do little to inspire confidence or provide the valuable kind of feedback required in the early phases of development.
- Arrath 4y ago
  One potential downside to releasing early is the risk of a hardcore fanbase coalescing around the game, that knows every system and exploit in and out. As a result they then scream for the game to be harder, harder. And as such devoted and vocal fans for so long, the devs may be overly inclined to listen to them, to the detriment of the new/less experienced player experience. Among others, I think Risk of Rain fell prey to this, but I may be thinking of a different game.
  - Forgeties79 4y ago
    RoR is wildly punishing. Wouldn’t surprise me if that’s the game you’re thinking of.
    - naet 4y ago
      Risk of rain on higher difficulties was always very hard from when I first played it early on, but that's part of what makes it fun for me. I really enjoy a roguelike where you don't win every time; something about the challenge makes a deep run much more satisfying. Classic roguelikes like Nethack are also incredibly hard to win.

swayvil 4y ago

What do you like about the turn-based mechanics? What do you dislike?

wchar_t 4y ago

The original article is here: https://www.gridsagegames.com/blog/2018/10/how-to-make-a-roguelike/ https://www.gridsagegames.com/blog/2018/10/how-to-make-a-rog... The author is the creator of the popular commercial roguelike, Cogmind.

hypertele-Xii 4y ago
I've been a patron following development for some time, the game's really good and the devlogs even better. It lacks the variety of DCSS but is so much better.. put together. Modern, convenient. Has a twist. And sci-fi theme! Even made some CSS graphs for it (slightly outdated): https://hypertele.fi/8b7ac4d1cbecbf8b https://hypertele.fi/8b7ac4d1cbecbf8b

cultofmetatron 4y ago

Highly recommend this book on rust if you want to make a roguelike. https://pragprog.com/titles/hwrust/hands-on-rust/ https://pragprog.com/titles/hwrust/hands-on-rust/

lordleft 4y ago

It still blows my mind that a game genre I thought was the most niche of niches, that I played routinely in the early 2000s, has become one of the major influences in modern gaming today. Shoutout to ADOM, a game I spent countless hours playing.

OrangeMonkey 4y ago
ADOM - The game where understanding Conways Game of Life helps you farm herbs in a dungeon.
pjbeam 4y ago
I always really wanted to get a trident of the red rooster and even with a guide was never able to do it. Maybe I'll give it another shot! Thanks for bringing back some lovely (frustrating) memories.
- baq 4y ago
  Wasn’t that thing an Easter egg?
dolni 4y ago
It's not really, though. So many games are called "roguelike" from so many different genres that the word has lost all meaning. Near as I can tell, the only thing actually meant by it is "when you lose you start over". By that definition, checkers is a roguelike.
- Shared404 4y ago
  I think it's more common to see roguelite's than roguelike's in modern games, though the latter term is much more common.
- furyofantares 4y ago
  You've basically debunked your own theory here since nobody calls checkers or anything like checkers a roguelike. Roguelikes almost always involve building up a character or deck or cards or whatever by acquiring more stuff that changes the gameplay, and it's the loss of this unique thing that you've built that is relevant to "when you lose you start over." Additionally, roguelikes are almost always heavily randomzied, when you start over you get brand new decisions to make. "When you lose you start over" certainly is a roguelike characteristic, but what losing means and what starting over means is strongly similar among roguelikes and not similar to losing or starting over in checkers.

Der_Einzige 4y ago

I LOVE Dijkstra maps! They are game AI nirvana. No one has any excuses for bad AI in a roguelike. http://www.roguebasin.com/index.php/Dijkstra_Maps_Visualized http://www.roguebasin.com/index.php/Dijkstra_Maps_Visualized

b0rsuk 4y ago
There's a mini discussion on HN about them here, when I last mentioned them. Crucially, they know alternative names such as "Flow Fields". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22848106 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22848106

dmbaggett 4y ago

I’ve been playing roguelikes since the mid 1980s, and from that perspective it’s hard to overstate Josh Ge’s contribution to the genre. Cogmind is just incredible — an absolute masterpiece that he is continually evolving. And Josh has likely written more for and about the genre than anyone else in history. This is a guy who’s put over ten thousand hours into his seminal game, and to the genre overall. I feel like Josh — along with Tarn and Zach Adams (Dwarf Fortress) — have by sheer force of will translated roguelikes into the current era. (And yes, FTL and Spelunky are awesome as well — just farther afield.) Respect.

caseyf7 4y ago

This is actually good advice for building most software products.

regular 4y ago

Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago

Btw, speaking of roguelikes, everyone knows ADOM, and it's great, but the one I loved the most was Ragnarok (1993) [0] It is bloody hard, but where else can you find corpses of your previous attempts, and with some of your gear [1]? Where else can you grow fingers? Where else rings on your fingers will cut off fingers if you morph into a giant? Where else you can switch bodies with other monsters? [0]: https://www.old-games.com/download/4031/ragnarok-a-k-a-valhalla https://www.old-games.com/download/4031/ragnarok-a-k-a-valha... [1]: I have developed a whole strategy around it. Scribe player class is extremely difficult to survive in early game, but they possess a very rare item in their inventory: stylus, which allows rewriting scrolls, an extremely important thing. So die as a scribe many times, then start as a blacksmith, and pick up a stylus from your previous character's body..

pyb 4y ago
> where else can you find corpses of your previous attempts? In Nethack
- mcv 4y ago
  And also the abandoned dog of your previous character. I loved that dog.
  - Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago
    You have a sad feeling for a moment. Then it passes.

gernb 4y ago

is "roguelike" going back to its intuitive meaning of "similar to the game rogue" or is it still the new meaning of basically any game with procedure level generation. For example this Asteroids inspried game. https://www.polygon.com/2014/2/18/5423466/galak-z-the-dimensional-preview-17-bit-full-roguelike https://www.polygon.com/2014/2/18/5423466/galak-z-the-dimens...

redrobein 4y ago
While people continue to use it in reference to any game with rogue-like like features, I prefer the berlin interpretation http://www.roguebasin.com/index.php/Berlin_Interpretation http://www.roguebasin.com/index.php/Berlin_Interpretation
dolni 4y ago
> is it still the new meaning of basically any game with procedure level generation. It isn't even that. The early access game "Brotato" is described as a roguelike. It does not have procedurally generated levels. Just a square arena.

anthk 4y ago

On roguelikes (true roguelikes, not gatekeeping, my first roguelike was Angband but it was meh, then Nethack with the Falcon's Eye UI, then I switched to console in 2005 or so) there's Nethack/Slashem if you like thinking out of the box, DCSS if you like compat, Tome < 4 if you like LOTR and wandering around several towns, ADOM for combinatorics explosion. The rest are just Zelda clones with permadeath.

sudasana 4y ago

Josh is a great guy who's made tons of contributions to the community, not least of which is his REXPaint ASCII editor: https://www.gridsagegames.com/rexpaint/ https://www.gridsagegames.com/rexpaint/