The ROGUE-LIKE Thread

ya that would be impossible iphone, ipad is almost too msall

*on iphone

reached min maxing point with ftl in a couple too few play cycles mb

did they release the update for the PC version ever?

Aye and it's a free update. You have to make sure and check the 'advanced edition' tickbox when you're starting though, for some reason they assume you want to play the default version.

there's an "advanced content" checkbox on the ipad version i haven't clicked yet. should i? what kind of stuff is there?

got to the last level last night but was WOEFULLY underpowered. how the eff do i get there w/o sacrificing some crucial ship system? its like how can i afford enough weapon slots AND shield slots AND blast doors AND evasive power?!! i guess going for a balanced ship is not a good strategy huh

really the only way to do everything is boarding parties since that accumulates more scrap

nb, i haven't been able to beat the new hard mode so it could be there are more effective strategies now

intriguing

shattered planet is a great little small-doses roguelike for ios.

anyone else playing Card Dungeon (iOS)?

not since they updated. it felt kinda pointless as it was?

i just downloaded it and im not feeling it really

i don't think it's pointless, it's just needlessly difficult. the farthest i can get is the third dungeon (out of like 10 or whatever). although you can unlock different character traits, none of them are really much of an improvement on the default set, so you aren't able to gather experience and gradually progress farther like games like Rogue Legacy. i like my roguelikes to at least 80% skill, but card dungeon feels like 80% luck.

rogue legacy is maybe too easy tho

card dungeon seems to be 'did you randomly find a better attack card in the first two minutes? no? then you're dead', though

i did get slightly better at it once i realized that the red health fountain thing not only fills up your health but also repairs your cards. but still, i think i'm done with it.

recommendations for a fairly light roguelike i can sink some but not too many hours into to occupy my higher brain functions for a little while?

--has to be turn-based, not a procedural platformer or shooter (bleh)
--i unlocked everything in the desktop dungeons alpha and didn't like the released version

Did you play hoplite?

yes. which is a shame, because it would be exactly what i would be looking for.

i am enjoying this:

http://gamejolt.com/games/malleus-goblinficarium/54134

try invisible inc

finished invisible inc ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

brogue?

did you try darkest dungeon? i enjoyed it a lot when it first came out, i guess since then they fucked it up and then unfucked it up, so i am not sure exactly what the current state is but the core game was a decent concept

dungeons of dredmor?

bionic dues maybe?

dredmor turns me off in a lot of ways i can't explain, given that i am unsure about the level of fuckedupness of darkest dungeons bionic dues i guess it is. i am still trying to finish malleus goblinfcarium w/ the unlockable characters though

have u played tales of maj'eyal already? ftl? oh - new game that i haven't played yet but looks fantastic: renowned explorers

i remember trying renowned explorers at pax east earlier this year, it was neat but didn't really register as a roguelike to me

http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/dragonlair/dragonlair.htm
!

ha, super esoteric!

the curious expedition is free atm:
http://free.curious-expedition.com

i'm about 40% convinced by it. idk. whereas my first time playing ftl was swiftly followed by my second, third, fourth, fifth times, i feel i can walk away from that.

i thought the same and then i ended up playing it until 2 last nite

you 100%ed ftl right

the original yes not the extended edition

yeah i did not have that much patience with it

so curious exhibition:
1. combat feels kind of un-fun, even though the basic mechanic seems okay. maybe it's because of that other dice-rolling combat game i was playing upthread, which seems finely tuned and tense. partly its a matter of not having any knowledge what combos are available from your dice--also a matter of not knowing what the enemies are capable of at all. (if combat was preceded by 'you encounter x -- these are its dice' that would maybe help.)
1.a. it also has the least convincing dice-rolling animation i ever saw.

2. world map is kind of boring until you're dealing with low-sanity events--but these are occasionally enough to totally fuck you. it would be better if more shit happened, and if the more minor events (you start talking to your animals) happened before you hit zero sanity, or if there was a negative range for sanity, rather than a huge number above zero and then at zero a random chance of all the bad things.

3. a lot of deadly things don't seem very signposted. partly this seems like roguelike fair game, partly just poor balancing
a. didn't realise cannibals would eat members of your group at camp even if you had high sanity (fair enough)
b. wish the game would warn me if one of those spreading geographical events was about to spread into my travel route, the animation in the in-browser version is kinda laggy for me so i can't always click the 'stop moving' button
c. the chance of setting an out-of-control wildfire appears to be about 50%

4. it's kind of an awkward mesh between 90s cd-rom game presentation and pixel art, not that i know what they could do about that

5. feel like it needs a separate hunger stat. feel like you ought to be able to camp in any more-or-less safe situation, not only special magic healing springs.

i did just play-through an entire six-expedition chunk though. at the end i was leading two baggage dinosaurs--everyone else was dead--but on the way to the last seal to unlock the pyramid we got sucked into the ever-spreading blackness i'd triggered early in the expedition and which was by that point around 40% of the map

darkest dungeon on sale on steam rn. hm

75% off or bust

i really don't like some aspects of this game's aesthetic

the you-know-if-we-aimed-for-tongue-in-cheek-it'd-be-painful-so-we-just-went-for-deliberately-bad narration

ADOM makes it to Steam:
http://store.steampowered.com/app/333300

anyone into caves of qud? i'm not experienced with this genre beyond an ancient version or three of nethack (and less classical stuff like ftl) but have been sucked into this.

when i was like seven, my dad helped me build a little unfinished roguelike in C, and i remember having my mind blown by how quickly we got unplanned but stable emergent behavior from our monsters. (i also remember trying to add a new enemy while my dad was at work and thru a lack of real understanding of code creating a terrifying, invulnerable, phase-shifting bug of a monster.) it was the first time i'd understood the computer as something you could use not just to build worlds but to grow them. the density of the overlapping systems even in o.g. rogue and hack make promises that maybe haven't been fulfilled outside of the genre.

anyway caves of qud is an endless cascade of systems (run screaming from a "dreadroot", slip on the pool of blood from the monster you just stabbed, slide into the embrace of a carnivorous wall vine, etc) but in other respects an outlier: it's a lore-dense game with a huge, sprawling overworld (aligning to scale, screen-to-screen, with the huger underworld beneath it) and reams of cod-gene-wolfe descriptive text. this blends strangely with the permadeath and unforgiving mechanics: rather than death meaning losing a relay runner at an easily quantifiable point of progress (and trying to surpass that point next time), it means losing a longtime resident of a giant nonlinear world. i've barely scratched the surface and maybe never really will, and i'm not sure it actually ends -- there is a "main questline" buried in the heap but most of what engages me is exploring and breaking things down for scrap. (this is also what engaged me in fallout 4, which btw i have stopped playing like everyone else.) when my characters die there is much less of a sense that some narrative has been violated and left incomplete than there is in almost any other rpg i've ever played -- i'm just one more casualty of the wastes who couldn't keep eking it out. are roguelikes where the best game stories are?

reams of cod-gene-wolfe descriptive text

was just thinking what a nightmare this must sound to thomp. this stuff really only appears when you use "look". find i've gotten less patient for plotty game text with time but i do like being able to read a lil graf about a kobold. enjoy the grotesquely garrulous pillars of eternity for similar reasons.

bwahaha i saw that bit and i was about to reflexively go OH GOOOOOOOOOODDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD

so is this stuff ~slightly procedural~ because that's kinda neat i guess

https://waltorious.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/xrl-2013-02-06-12-30-14-42.png

lol @ caslainard and polluxus. i'm not sure if the prose is procedural, tho other things about recurring npcs def are, including their places in a giant faction system which may or may not have an implemented point yet. (so-and-so is "disliked by X for Y"; you're always finding banners or armbands or necklaces of teeth that are +100 to rep with A or -100 with B.) btw check out the style on that light-obfuscating lens.

lots of combat moves (with experience), including "stances" and the like. a complicated second skill tree for mutants (growing new limbs etc) i haven't really touched yet because i've been playing as unmutated arcology dwellers, but i think you can, like, have a different magic battle axe in each of six hands, if you want.

world map is always the same but individual screens are randomized based on terrain type. adom, which i've never played, maybe has this stuff covered, but i've enjoyed the different kinds of underground terrain: twisty corridor-and-room dungeons giving way through ruined walls to screens and screens of wide caverns, with maybe a river of flickering blue tildes running through them. anyway, idk, just lost another char to this, somewhere in a gloomy cavern of apostrophes. definitely a game for lovers of compulsive "depth" over people looking for something more elegant and iterative.

yeah i was really hoping 'caslainaird and polluxus' was the output of a prefix-suffix dictionary mishap

i am still playing and not particularly enjoying dream quest while i wait for michael brough to finish making what sounds like that game only good

Trying our Alphaman on Dosbox tonight, so far quite intriguing. Post apocalypse themed.

Anyone familiar with it?

"Killed by a centipede"

hmm