This is episode 70 of Roguelike Radio, where we talk about Introducing People to Roguelikes. Speaking this episode are Ido Yehieli, Darren Grey, Eben Howard and Aaron Steed. You can download the mp3 of the podcast, play it in the embedded player below, or you can follow us on iTunes.
Topics discussed in this episode include:
- /r/roguelikes, where many come to seek advice on which roguelike to play
- Aaron's Ending, which flumuxes non-roguelikers with its turn-based bump-to-attack mechanics
- Loose mechanics that allow experimentation being more approachable
- Dwarf Fortress as the most popular "my first roguelike", in spite of the usual thoughts of roguelikes needing to be streamlined with simple controls to be accessible
- Introducing people to streamlined and accessible coffeebreak games vs complex traditional games with more depth
- Catering recommendations to the individuals and what they enjoy
- How tight, focused games can be less accessible than big, messy games
- Showing people games in the right environment
- The importance of theme, story and visual style to grab people from the start, such as in FTL and Dungeons of Dredmor
- "There's no poop in Zelda" - Aaron
- A long but entrancing aside about Eternal Knights, a roguelike arcade gambling machine with real money rewards that Eben played in Japan - is this heaven or hell?
- Lack of social elements in most roguelikes, which can often help get friends together
- Genre fusion games attracting people from those other genres
- Being available to answer questions and chat about the game
- The desire to chat about procedurally generated experiences with friends
- Go out and convert people to roguelikes! Go! Enslave them!!
Roguelikes that can be good to introduce people to:
- Ending - see how much it confuses you with its outlandish "attack" ability!
- Cardinal Quest, Zaga-33, Vicious Orcs for streamlined controls and mechanics
- Dwarf Fortress for outright complexity and sim-style gameplay
- FTL, Sword of the Stars: The Pit - sci-fi theme
- DoomRL - it's Doom, muthafucka!
- Shiren the Wanderer - can appeal to JRPG fans and keeps people hooked on depth with ongoing story
- Mystery Dungeon series - very accessible for all ages
- The Wizard's Lair - A new indie roguelike being developed in the Mystery Dungeon style
- ADOM and ToME4 for overworld and story - especially ToME4's Old RPG tileset mod
- POWDER for quick plays and the joys of randomness
- DCSS and Brogue for balanced and complex games
- Desktop Dungeons - puzzley gameplay
- Bonfire - JRPG style roguelike still in development
- Shoot First, The Binding of Isaac, Teleglitch - action-y roguelikes
- Mobile games: 100 Rogues, Legends of Yore, Sword of Fargoal, Dungeon Ho, Brogue on iOS
Join us next time for potentially some coverage of Sword of the Stars: The Pit. (Yes, I know we said that last week...)
This is episode 69 of Roguelike Radio, where we talk about Boss Fights. Speaking this episode are Andrew Doull and Darren Grey. You can download the mp3 of the podcast, play it in the embedded player below, or you can follow us on iTunes.
Topics discussed in this episode include:
- RogueTemple thread that inspired the discussion
- Darren is not a boss
- The proliferation in boss fights in all the major roguelikes other than Brogue
- Special random fights vs unique enemies
- Puzzle bosses vs resource sink bosses
- Theme and flavour and how giving a creature a unique name changes a player's view of it
- Sharing experiences of preset bosses with other players, and using them as markers in the game to foster discussion
- The different roles of bosses: optional extra challenges, gating mechanisms, resource drains, structured tension, waypoints, end game "go all out" challenge
- Common mistakes in making bosses: making them impossible for certain builds, immune to status effects, able to heal too fast, too easy for certain builds
- Fitting bosses into the game's overall difficulty curve and pacing
- The ADOM bosses with themed levels and minions
- Spoiler-reliant bosses, how this can be a problem, how to mitigate spoiler reliance and sometimes just accepting that the players have to learn for themselves
- The dynamic of boss minions, as a resource drain and as extra tactical and dynamic depth to the boss fight (and a great example of this from Angband)
- Reward for bosses - opening up new parts of the game, experience progression, special items
- Our most memorable boss fights (Darren in ADOM and Andrew in Angband)
- Unique environments as part of the boss fight or additional challenge
- Fixed content vs random content
- Bosses that you don't have to kill
Join us next time for potentially some coverage of Sword of the Stars: The Pit.
This is episode 68 of Roguelike Radio, where we discuss many of the failures from the 2013 7DRL Challenge. Talking this episode are Darren Grey, Eben Howard and Simon Donnelly (aka SRD). This is the third episode in this year's 7DRL coverage, following on from our last episode covering many of hte top successes. You can download the mp3 of the podcast, play it in the embedded player below, or you can follow us on iTunes.
Topics discussed in this episode include:
- Reasons for failures, including bad scope, fiddling with visuals, or just wasting time
- Some failures of the guests, including Darren's Lion King and Rogue Rage, and Simon's KleinRL, Time Travel Roguelike and Threaky Thriday Thieth
- Simon's experience making a mind-swapping 7DRL (find a playable build here)
- The trouble continuing a failed project and finding motivation outside of the challenge
- Eben's blogpost highlighting some failures, including a cool looking FTL-like Drifting in Solar Winds with a procedural galaxy map
- gim's failure highlights on 7drl.org
- How many failures are better than the declared successes, and how learning from a well attempted failure is certainly much better than not learning from an unambitious success
- Eben's noticed trend of product quality of both success and failures being inversely proportional to developer apathy
- Forest Story by Ed Key, a survival roguelike where you forage food in a forest
- A Rogue Dream by Michael Cook, where the theme, graphics and abilities are procedurally generated based on Google searches for the noun you choose as your PC - the code is open source
- Super Mario RL by Aaron Steed, which is an interesting pre-cursor to Bump!
- Laihe Lausumahan by subliminal, which is individual and intriguing but immensely confusing
- RogueAI, a promising looking Unity roguelike
- Some videos of unreleased failures: Clerk's Creed, unnamed by Terry Cavanagh, Scar Fell by Sophie Houlden,
- The value of 7DRL retrospectives from both successes and failures
- Getting over failure, in particular by going and making another game! Just be sure to learn from your failure and be able to build on what you've done.
That's it for our 7DRL coverage this year! We'll be back to discussing design topics next week...
This is episode 67 of Roguelike Radio, where we discuss many of the top games from the 2013 7DRL Challenge. Talking this episode are Darren Grey, Eben Howard, Thomas Birkel (aka GameHunter/UberHunter) and Jo Bradshaw. This is the second episode in this year's 7DRL coverage, following on from our last episode interviewing several successful participants. You can download the mp3 of the podcast, play it in the embedded player below, or you can follow us on iTunes.
Topics discussed in this episode include:
- Discussion of GameHunter's 7DRL Let's Play videos and how useful this is as feedback to developers
- Particular highlight games for the panellists
- How some of the "not really a roguelike" games can still be interesting
- Jo Bradshaw's mini-reviews of 150 7DRLs
- Gimmicky 7DRLs, and how a game can be centred well on a single mechanic or cool idea
- Exploring mechanics when focusing on a single theme
- The need for content alongside the gimmick or theme to properly explore the mechanics
- The difficulty of getting the balance right in a 7DRL
- Some discussion about long dungeons and no-brainer exploration and combat wasting a lot of time in many roguelikes
- Huge wealth of themes explored this year, and a big departure from the usual dungeon crawler theme
- The failure of Unity, with many developers showing promising looking screenshots during the week but no games or incomplete games at the end
- rot.js as the big successful technology used this year, with some GameMaker successes too
- Roguelikes by people who don't know about roguelikes or are relatively new to the genre
There were many many many games discussed, including (in order of discussion):
- Mosaic - tile-laying game with procedural music by Darren Grey
- A False Saint, an Honest Rogue - versus nature game with interesting changing viewpoint by Jere
- 86856527 - hacker-themed resource and progression game by Michael Brough
- Attack the Geth - Mass Effect themed game by Eben Howard
- Borstal - story-based game about a juvenile prison by @thotep & @regisekpl
- Rodney - high scope dungeon crawler with many interesting special moves by Slash
- Tower of Despair - roguelike where facing matters and with customisable text files by Team Kalamakkara
- Farm RL - crazy procedural farming sim by Hi
- KlingonRL - resource-based space game with a cloaking Bird of Prey, by Jo Bradshaw
- Bump! - turn-based platformer with terrain destruction by Aaron Steed
- Gelatinous - play a slimy Gelatinous Cube eating adventurers, by Jason Pickering
- Nya Quest - cat vs many mice where careful facing and moves matter, by Geminosity
- Pugnacious Wizards - very deep spellcaster game with cool spell effects, by Trystan
- Delusions of Grandeur - illusionist roguelike where you have to trick the enemy by Derrick Creamer
- The Reset Button - time travel roguelike, though a bit incomplete, by eliotn
- Chicken and Thyme - another time travel game with a very individual theme
- Tetrogue - Tetris-themed roguelike where you build things with tetrominos, by Konstantin Stupnik
- The Aurora Wager - hot air balloon game, but sadly lacking in roguelikery, by Team Grenoble
- Cosplay Mystery Dungeon - cosplay-themed roguelike by AJ and Switchbreak
- Live As Long As Possible - roguelike where time only progresses when you're acting, by Edwin DeNicholas
- Disc RL - Tron-themed roguelike without light-bikes by skeeto
- Fisticuffmanship - positioning-based melee roguelike by Ido Yehieli
- Quadropus Rampage - action RPG with professional quality graphics by Butterscotch Shenanigans
- Possession - play a ghost possessing different monsters and getting their abilities, by Taylor Vaughan
- Hoplite - Greek-themed melee roguelike by Magma Fortress
- Double Rogue - roguelike on a 3D surface where you switch classes each move, by ratking
- Weeping Angels - based on a Dr Who episode, by Jeffrey Lund
- Liberation of Yarna - city revolution simulator by Kipar
- Malachite Dreams - Ultiamte V style exploration and puzzle game by Jeff Lait
- EXCELent Rogue - roguelike *in* Excel, by Erch and Gurg
- The Conception - play as a sperm seeking to reach the Egg, by Ondras
- So Many Jagged Shards - visually impressive game with destructible glass shard walls, by Niall Moody
Join us next time for a discussion of failure, and a look at some 7DRL failures that looked pretty cool.
This is episode 66 of Roguelike Radio, where we discuss the 2013 7DRL Challenge. Talking this episode are Darren Grey, Jeff Lait, Paul Jeffries, Eben Howard, Tom Ford and Yuji Kasugi - all 7DRL victors this year! This first episode in what will be a series of 7DRL coverage focuses on the immediate reaction of a number of successful developers. You can download the mp3 of the podcast, play it in the embedded player below, or you can follow us on iTunes.
Topics discussed in this episode include:
- Gasping in amazement at the 154 successful roguelikes, with a big pat on the back to everyone who was successful! (And a sympathetic hug for those who failed!)
- Gasping in further amazement at GameHunter's start on Let's Playing every 7DRL, and Jo Bradshaw's mini-reviews of ALL 7DRLs already!
- The 7DRL London Afterparty (if you missed it you missed out!)
- Yuji Kosugi's Versus Time, a 2-4 player local multiplayer roguelike, turn-based but with a chess clock system, an impressive success for a first time 7DRLer
- Paul Jeffries' Rogue's Eye, a first person Dungeon Master style game with roguelike gameplay (which was a big break away from what he originally started working on)
- Eben Howard's Attack the Geth, a Mass Effect themed sci-fi roguelike with cool sounds
- Tom Ford's FlatlineRL, a combat and positioning focused roguelike with a lives system, somewhat inspired by Hotline Miami
- Jeff Lait's Malachite Dreams, an exploration game that seeds itself from your character name, with procedural puzzles that require physical note-taking
- Darren Grey's Mosaic, a map manipulation game with a roughly coded procedural sound engine that generates music based on how you've filled in the map
- How sound can add to a game, and some of the challenges in getting this to work well for games
- Mucking about with random sounds on bfxr can produce good results
- Particle effects, woo!
- Lessons learned, things we're proud of, and stuff that helps build for the future
- David Craddock's daily interviews with several 7DRLers, and the advantage of having to give brief daily updates to someone else and regularly reflecting on plans
- The joys of creation!
- Remembering the failures, some of which looked very hopeful - there are some overviews from Eben and gim
- Further discussion on RogueTemple and 7drl.org
Join us next time for a wider look at this year's epic crop of Seven Day Roguelikes!
This is episode 65 of Roguelike Radio, where we discuss Roguelike Communities, including both developer and fan communities. Talking this episode are Darren Grey, Nicolas Casalini (aka DarkGod) and Brian Jeffears (aka getter77).
You can download the mp3 of the podcast, play it in the embedded player below, or you can follow us on iTunes.
Topics discussed in this episode include:
- Brian and Darren's tentacles throughout the roguelike community
- DarkGod's minions, and the community features he has built into Tales of Maj'Eyal
- How most roguelike fans are focused into single and disparate game communities: ToME, ADOM, DCSS, Angband, Nethack, Brogue, DoomRL, Dungeons of Dredmor
- The reasons why many players only ever significantly play one and only one roguelike
- How the ASCII Dreams Roguelike of the Year poll represents community acitivty
- The struggle for small games to get players and visibility
- Sites with general roguelike discussion: RogueTemple, Something Awful Forums roguelike thread, Bay12 Games "Other Games" forum, reddit/r/roguelikes
- The #rgrd IRC channel for live chat with other developers
- The confluence of developers on Twitter, including Darren and Ido
- The TIGSource development forums
- Just how lovely and friendly roguelike communities are and how welcoming they are of new players and respectful they are to each other (yes, that includes you, dear listener!)
- Player generosity in funding, including the ADOM Crowdfund, the DoomRL donation drive, and the regular donations for Dwarf Fortress and Tales of Maj'Eyal
- The role of communities in the formation and evolution of roguelikes, and how all the major roguelikes have been built upon player suggestions
- The benevolent dictator set-up for development, and how this works well for roguelikes, and why this makes it important for big projects to pull fanbases together early on
- Lots of Finns play ADOM, we don't know where the Japanese are hiding, and other such roguelike demographics
- In-person meetings, including LondonIndies, TIGJams, GDC and of course the upcoming International Roguelike Development Conference in Poland 7th June
- The blogosphere (god I hate that word) and RogueBase to keep track of roguelike blogs
- Potential for engagement with the pen and paper RPG communities
- An open question for you: What other major communities do you know of?
Join us next time for a start of our response to this year's epic crop of Seven Day Roguelikes!
This is episode 64 of Roguelike Radio, which is a large panel discussion about competitions in roguelikes, including the monthly Angband competition, the weekend Brogue competition, the Junethack and /dev/null Nethack competitions, the biannual Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup tournament and the ADOM "Weakest Link" competition. Talking today are Nick McConnell, Francis Garcia, Steven Steinke, Patric Mueller, David Ploog, Rachel Dillon, Darren Grey and Andrew Doull.
You can download the mp3 of the podcast, play it in the embedded player below, or you can follow us on iTunes.
Topics discussed in this episode include:
- The Angband competition started by Tony Holmes and currently run by Nick McConnell
- The weekend Brogue competition started by mikeym and currently run by Francis Garcia aka fugori
- A Brogue midweek competition started by Steven Steinke aka sorta-stupid, which used a shared save file in media res (this is different to the current Brogue midweek competition)
- The Junethack competition which Patric Mueller is involved with, including his presentation at IRDC 2012 (pdf)
- The differences in motivation and approach between Junethack and the original /dev/null Nethack competition
- The Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup tournament started by Rachel Dillon and the interplay between the development of DC:SS and the post release competitions (some stats from David Ploog)
- The ADOM "Weakest Link" competition started by Darren Grey and how the ADOM community approaches competitions in a different light (you can find more examples by searching for "weakest" in the ADOM forum thread titles)
- How player skill and enjoyment is affected by a competitive environment
- How scoring systems influence player behavior and ways of encouraging risky play
Join us next time for an episode on communities.
