Sunday, April 7, 2013

Episode 68: 7DRL 2013 Failures

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...

5 comments:

  1. Why would someone put a let me google that for you link?

    Imagine you haven't created a game yet and do not have any hosting. Imagine you're adding an entry on the roguetemple web site, and it won't let you do so without providing a download link for the game you haven't created yet. Imagine you want to create a simple link that lets people google for a download, in case you don't return to update it.

    Or it could be snarkiness ;-P

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  2. I put a retrospective for my success in the online README file (on page 2 - https://docs.google.com/document/d/1NBU5xJ4EFIKM3Y3CRsTgpkc4rQ-66XYYT6Wlfh66gec/edit) but I guess that's a little too hidden to be useful.

    I was a little unsure if I should have declared success... I had fun playing the game and it's certainly more than an @ moving on the screen but I'm not sure if anyone else would be able to understand the mechanics/UI enough to enjoy it.

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  3. Thanks for another inspiring episode guys! Hehe, the Han Yolo dungeon wall orientation problem is becoming a monument for how to fail a 7DRL! :-D

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  4. I agree about the retrospectives for failures and successes. So I added Retrospective page to roguebasin at http://roguebasin.roguelikedevelopment.org/index.php?title=Retrospectives. If you've learned anything from your successes or failures, then please share them with the developer community!

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  5. I've listened to this episode yesterday and it inspired me to write a proper post-mortem - http://wp.me/p1ZWgg-4a . Hope it will be useful to someone - don't make my mistakes :]

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