Show your game at the Roguelike Celebration 2018!

The roguelike celebration, the biggest, coolest, greatest gathering of roguelike enthusiasts on Earth, is drawing close (October 6th and 7th, 2018 at the GitHub offices in San Francisco, California), and this year it will feature the ROGUELIKE @RCADE, a space where players will be able to check different kinds of roguelikes, the arcade will feature a mix of:

Developers or amateur developers, showing off their games or 7-day roguelikes.
Avid fans of various games showing them off, and explaining to people how they work.
Historial roguelike or roguelike-influential games running on very old hardware

Are you a developer or a hardcore roguelike player? or maybe you just want to help a game reach more people! Fill out this form and let the organizers know about it! We are organizing this space and would love to have more games to show. But do it quickly, time is running out!

Roguelike Celebration 2018 is coming!

The Roguelike Celebration, perhaps the biggest roguelike-centered event in the world, is happening for the third time in 2018.

The date has been set to October 6 and 7, and it will happen again at GitHub’s HQ in San Francisco, as it did last year. Get your tickets now for two days of awesome talks, meeting with roguelike players and developers, playing some games and having a lot of geek fun!

Also, the Call For Presenters is open until July 7, so if you think you have something interesting to share with the roguelike community, share your idea! Past two years have been full of great talks on a variety of topics. Check their website for the full archive of talks in the meantime too!

The Results for the 2018 7DRL Challenge are now available!

Check out all the finished roguelikes for this year’s 7DRL Challenge!

HERE!

Many thanks to the reviewing committee!

Xecutor 12.55%
irskep 7.45%
roaderful 6.67%
jere 6.27%
rubybliels 6.27%
sparr 5.88%
8BitGoggles 5.10%
MatthewLacker 4.71%
tomtl 4.71%
James McNeill 4.31%
PNJeffries 4.31%
CaptainKraft 3.92%
Deevoh 3.92%
heroicfisticuffs 3.92%
IceBoxr 3.14%
Lachlan Kingsford 3.14%
keipra 2.75%
Wazoo Labs 2.75%
AquaTsar 1.96%
jmlait 1.96%
Vedor 1.57%
Fengol 1.18%
Starstew 1.18%
PyrooL 0.39%

Roguelike Developers meet during GDC 2018

SAN FRANCISCO — In what can only be described as a brilliantly executed procedurally generated meetup (disguised as a chaotic, improvised and unplanned mess), over 20 professional roguelike developers attending the 2018 Game Developers Conference met at Yerba Buena Gardens last March 21 to talk about their current projects, share stories of development and have a fun time together.

Among the participants were the developers of Dwarf Fortress, Jupiter Hell, Caves of Qud, Cardinal Quest, Tangledeep, and Ananias, as well as the main organizer of the Roguelike Celebration event.

“I hope next year’s output will be closer to what a real planner would do and more believable too.“, said Santiago Zapata, designer of the procedural generator used for the event.

Jeff Lait has been awarded a Sci-Tech Academy Award

Jeff Lait is a long-standing figure of the roguelike scene. A pioneer on handheld roguelikes with the homebrew GameBoy Advance game: POWDER, and one of the only two persons to have participated in all thirteen yearly 7DRL Challenges to date. I interviewed him almost 10 years ago and he already had a veritable career in our micro-universe. it also looks like he managed to fulfill his main goal for the future which was “to survive”.

roomofmonsters

This year, he has been awarded a Science and Technology Academy Award for his contributions to Houdini, a high-end toolkit to generate special effects (including a lot of procedural effects), used in many companies including Disney. From our years-ago interview, it seems he was starting his career on SideFX by then.

Take a look at the clip where Patrick Steward announces the award. Congratulations to Jeff!

Migration to wordpress.com

…should be complete! all requests to the old roguetemple.com wordpress installation should be redirected to https://blog.roguetemple.com and should link to the same content.

Along the way I also cleaned up roguetemple’s web directory, the following were archived:

The complete old wordpress installation
Banners from the old banner rotation program roguetemple had
Some random files that were behind hosted in the projects, share and villaDownloads directories (contact me if you miss them)
Backups from the IRLDB which is now hosted at forums.roguetemple.com
- This is so because it has an integration with the forums to post your reviews and score
A (broken) poll for the IRDC 2009 location

Things that rightfully remained:

ZenoRogue’s portal at http://roguetemple.com/z
Roguetemple’s support page at http://roguetemple.com/support
The 7DRL archives at http://roguetemple.com/7drl
The 7DRL medals at http://roguetemple.com/medals
The page for the “Guild” roguelike at http://roguetemple.com/guild
The archive for 1KBRLs (only one actually) at http://roguetemple.com/1kbrls

Interesting things I found:

The original 2006 Roguelike World Map (prior to the Roguemundi), which I plan to revamp soon. (BTW, this is the actual add request link)
The (broken) proof of concept for “atTube“, a service to upload roguelike playthroughs similar to YouTube, using a console recorder.

Please let me know if you notice any dead links or missing content!

oldmap

Two new first level articles added to the site

Based on my recent research and considerations of the roguelikes in the videogames scene in 2018, I just published two new articles on the site. Both originate from my talk on the Roguelike Celebration 2017.

The first one is “A short history of the “roguelike” term“, which expands upon my previous article “On the Historical Origin of the “Roguelike” Term“, covering the events after the term was established and the subsequent confusion.

The other related article is What is a Traditional Roguelike; after 10 years of trying to come up with long lists of definitions, I narrowed it down to 4 critical aspects I think traditional roguelikes should keep

A summary of the Roguelike Celebration 2017 in San Francisco

20171111_095110s

November 11 and 12 2017 were the dates selected by the organizers for the second roguelike celebration in San Francisco, California. This time it was two full days, with a single track for talks, and it was awesome. You can check the videos for all the talk at the Internet archive. Following is a summary of the events that took place during the celebration.

Check out the full article here.

Researching the historical origin of the “Roguelike” term

On November 11 2017, at the Roguelike Celebration in San Francisco, I had the pleasure of doing the opening talk, titled “What is a Roguelike?, 2017 Edition”, where I explored some of the interpretations on the Roguelike term.

keynote

Something interesting I found while doing research for the talk was what could be the first efforts to organize a group of games similar to rogue under an umbrella term. This happened on Usenet, the technological precursor to Internet Forums, throughout which most of the discussion of computer games happened.

My current progress on this research indicates that the efforts to define this hierarchical relationship, intended mainly to facilitate discussion, ended up serving the purpose of creating a community of niche developers and players who through the constant usage of the term ended up giving it an evolving, collective meaning that was relatively stable until the 2010’s decade, with the growth of the indie games scene and diffusion of the more action focused “Roguelike” labeled games.

Read the full article here

Cogmind released to Steam!

Kyzrati has finally managed to go through all the process to publish his sci-fi roguelike “Cogmind” to Steam.

cogmind_fireworks_steam_ea — Awesome roguelike style celebration!

While he has decided to release it as “Early Access”, as an indication of his open commitment to continue adding features to the game for several more months, Cogmind is already one of the most complete, stable and cool looking classic roguelikes out there.

Screen Shot 2017-10-16 at 10.10.30 PM

With its amazing visuals and complex interactions, Cogmind is a game every roguelike fan should check out. Go ahead and grab it for a discounted price and witness its final steps towards an almost perfect sci-fi roguelike!