Finally, after many weeks of delays and many hours of work, I managed to finish a new article based on the research I did for my 2018 talk at the roguelike celebration. I hope this article provides useful insights and allows having an additional approach to roguelikes as a genre on its own.
Many thanks to all the friends who provided useful feedback. 🙂
You can read the article HERE
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
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.
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
Lait posted his yearly analysis of roguelike games over r.g.r.d. He wrote:
So where does seven years of data put us? We are doing very well for roguelike creation – 6.75 new tracked roguelikes per month, a new peak. It is tempting to dismiss this as a 7DRL effect, but the Old column I think is correctly tracking the creation of larger projects. While it is a new high, I’d hesitate to call that a trend. I suspect we are seeing a continuation of the 30 new roguelikes a year rule identified last year.
Mr. Jeff Lait has finished his yearly analysis of roguelike development activity!
We are doing very well for roguelike creation – five new tracked roguelikes per month, a new peak. The new Old column, however, I think shows where some of the sense of stasis in the genre comes from. The early increases may be due to sampling effects as existing roguelikes were largely added to the list. But for the last three years we’ve seen a balance at about 30 roguelikes being actively worked on.
Check his analysis at this roguetemple article (or the original usenet post (Via google groups))
Mr. Jeff Lait has finished his yearly analysis of roguelike development activity!
The absolute numbers are equally impressive – 70 projects saw another point release in the last year. Of those, an astounding 54 were last updated in the last six months. Roguelike creation, as measured by roguelikes making it to this list, has tracked consistently at three roguelikes per month for the last five years!
Check his analysis at this roguetemple article (of the original usenet post (Via google groups))
Roguetemple presents you a small and comprehensive list of several factors for evaluating the roguelikeness of a game; those may help you get an idea of what a roguelike is,
Random Environment Generation
The game world and its contents are mostly procedurally generated with each game.
Permafailure (including Permadeath)
You must pay for your mistakes and choices, sometimes at the cost of life. Restoring games is discouraged and only provided to allow continuing split games.
Turn Based Interaction
All entities in the game world are queued in an endless loop and get their independant discrete turn to act.
Single command set
You can access all game commands from any place into the game. There are no artificial restrictions on what actions are available in a given game situation
Freedom
Your game is not directly enrouted into a linear progression. You get to choose what you want to do, how and when
Discovery mechanics
You must research or find out the nature and usages of the items into the world.
Single player
You control a lone character
Lots of content
There are lots of monsters, items, locations.
Complex non-trivial world and object interactions
Items have non-trivial usages, you can do some things which may not be obvious for the item nature.
High ramped difficulty
The game gets hard very quick and you are very unlikely to win until you have acquired enough experience.
Monsters are players
The nature of the monsters is similar to the player, they can have equipment, player-like stats, artificial intelligence and are subject to the same world rules.
Character-based display
The player interacts with the world via a user interface based on character symbols that represent UI artifacts and entities into the world.
Hack and Slash
Gameplay involves around killing things and acquiring treasure
Andrew Doull, mantainer of roguetemple’s friend blog, Ascii Dreams, has put up five articles on his series The Death of the Level Designer: Procedural Content Generation in Games. An interesting read for you all roguedevs out there you. 😛
Procedural content generation is yet to set the game industry on fire. It has featured in one of the greatest games of all time, Diablo and it’s successor, who directly trace their roots to roguelike games such as Angband. But the recent implementation of random level generation in Hellgate: London did little to inspire people that this method works well for game level design.
Checketh them out:
I’ve just finished work on the first release of my Roguelike rendering engine for the Mono and .NET Frameworks, RogueSDL. As the name suggests, it uses the SDL libraries (through SDL.NET) in order to display graphics. I’ve tried to make it as utterly simple to use as possible, and I think I’ve largely succeeded.
An article about roguelike games has been published on the Free Software Online magazine. A nice introduction to the roguelike genre.
By far the most popular CRPGs for GNU/Linux are “roguelikes”. Put quite simply, a “roguelike” is one of the many games that follow in the footsteps of a very popular UNIX classic called Rogue, which was itself based on older and lesser-known CRPGs for mainframes and the PLATO learning system. There are a few things you should know about Rogue. For one thing, it doesn’t have the kind of graphics you see in most videogames. Instead, it uses Ken Arnold’s “curses” library to make a sort of graphical interface using a terminal’s character set (i.e., the different symbols you can make with your keyboard or with special codes).
Temple of The Roguelike 