Increasing Challenge in Roguelikes
By Andrew Grech, aka Roguery

Have you ever felt that nothing beats the feeling of starting a new character in a roguelike game? When a character is young, it has tons of potential, and the level around it is full of opportunities and danger. Every encounter could be its last, simply because it hasn’t yet acquired the hitpoints or powerful items to blast through them. This feeling is enhanced when roguelikes have ample character creation options, so that every new beginning has some unique challenge to overcome and different strategies to be learnt. And don’t you just love it when you’re surrounded by wolves, have three hit points left, and have exactly two choices: one being to zap an unidentified wand, the other is to pray and hope that the two newts you sacrificed will have left Thoth in a good mood…

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Mr. Jeff Lait (creator of POWDER and many other smaller Roguelikes), has finished his six-month report on the activity level of the roguelike development scene.

As evident from his data and analysis, we are seeing more and more activity on roguelike projects lately, which is always good. The genre today is more alive than ever, and it is up to the developers and the player to keep this tendency like this for the years to come!

By these numbers, it has been a great year for roguelikes. We have seen the % active jump up to 40%. This is not just due to new roguelike creation, but is also due to a lot of roguelikes surfacing from the bottom of the list. After the first year, I had commented that roguelikes have a slower development cycle than people give them credit for. This is underlined once more as we see the tenacity of roguelike developers.

The absolute numbers are equally impressive – 66 projects saw another point release in the last year. Of those, an astounding 50 were last updated in the last six months.

You can read the complete report here

Better late than never… here is a pretty detailed and illustrated run through the history of the roguelike genre, from its roots to the latest games… it is comprehensive and well written… worth giving a look!

Find it at here

Here is a pretty decent in-depth game programming tutorial for C++, which follows the development of a “RPG Dungeon using ASCII art” game to teach all the basics. Pretty cool!

Also, the author seems to love Rogue, but not to know any other roguelikes… If so, I hope he finds this website useful!

(Thanks to lemmy for letting me know about it)

So, you’ve just opened this thread because you want to make a game, right? Maybe you just clicked on it because you were curious, or just checking out all the new posts on the forum. You’ve always fancied giving it a go, sure, but everything you’ve read on the subject you’ve just felt overwhelmed:

“I could never program games, all those numbers and code; it just fries my brain!?!”

If this is you, then you are in fact exactly the kind of person I’m hoping to introduce to game programming. Yes, writing a high-tech 3D engine may be out of your reach, at least for now. But actually making a nice simple game, with the proper introduction, is not as much of a leap as you might think.