Saturday, June 2, 2012

Episode 37: IRDC London 2012

Welcome to Roguelike Radio episode 37, recorded from the site of the International Roguelike Development Conference 2012 in London. Talking this ep are.... a dozen different people. It's probably all very confusing!

You can download the mp3 of the podcast, play it in the embedded player below, or you can follow us on iTunes. Sound quality is fairly rough and ready this week - we might try and get a more polished version out later.




Topics discussed this week include:
- Overview of the day
- The Roguelike Renaissance
- Developing for mobile devices
- Hard selling of the T-Engine
- Making a living from developing roguelikes (by Ido)
- Demographics of roguelike players
- The need to focus on tight mechanics and cut out the chaff
- How coffeebreaks deserve more attention and the need to champion them more
- What coffeebreaks can't do


We'll be back tomorrow with more from IRDC 2012!

9 comments:

  1. I don't know the exact numbers, but I think that in the "popular framework for 7DRLC 2012 entries" category, Libtcod wins with T-Engine by far.

    And Libtcod roguelikes almost always look very good, while I have seen several T-Engine games which still had some graphical elements from TOME which did not match the style of the given game at all and thus did break immersion and look poor.

    As a self-proclaimed expert in hex and various other geometries appearing in roguelikes, I am thinking about writing a RogueBasin article about them... but later.

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    1. Libtcod has been around for a lot longer. Plus there are problems with bad graphical design on it, in my opinion. More notably though, I'm the only person who has made a T-Engine game with previous experience of making games. Makes a big difference to producing a polished looking work.

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    2. The article I have mentioned is ready: http://roguebasin.roguelikedevelopment.org/index.php/Geometry

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  2. I hit the part mentioning Dredmor so I have to jump in and fill in the gaps:

    - Nicholas Vining was always the lead coder on Dredmor, though it was originally developed in some kind of partnership with the defunct indie game developer/publisher startup called Bread Brothers (which is how Ben McGraw was involved - and his "executive producer" investment in fact paid for the monster sprites, the only piece of art I didn't redo during development; He keeps sending me terrible puns to put into the game, too).

    - While we did work for a period using Nicholas' dad's basement as an office, we did in fact live in our own places and supported ourselves with regular jobs and/or contract work.

    - Nicholas always intended to make Dredmor a roguelike, albeit with a twist. My personal experience with roguelikes was less; I wasn't unfamiliar with the general, but certainly not part of any roguelike community.

    Ahem, all done.

    (Randomly, on demographics: It turns out my girlfriend was really into ADOM like 10 or 15 years ago. She *got* Dredmor from the start.)

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    1. And where, pray tell, do you find one of these types of women?

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  3. Sorry for the inaccuracies, I was talking from memory and without internet access :)

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    1. No worries! I always enjoy the episodes (and get a kick out of Dredmor coming up); I just get that terrible "someone on the internet is wrong" compulsion sometimes...

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  4. We never managed a second recording from IRDC (got way over time on the second day) so sorry to anyone waiting for that. We'll maybe try and get a retrospective some time with a few of those that attended.

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