The ROGUE-LIKE Thread

rogue survivor is lacking polish but i'm kind of loving it at the moment. -- it has very realistic damage/survival prospects, i.e. i keep getting worn out and killed in my sleep

http://www.qcfdesign.com/?cat=20

oh hey a roguelike thread

Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup is my poison of choice, i've played a lot of these and it's by far the best one right now. it's more intuitive, more fair, and more fun than nethack; there's no 'hidden cheats' like Elbereth that you have to know to have a chance of surviving the early game, and it's very rare to end up in an unwinnable situation without it being your fault, as evidenced by a few of the really good players on the telnet server putting together 10+ game winning streaks without dying.

it's also actively under development all the time so there's new stuff to check in on every once in a while

love love love desktop dungeons

UGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHH spent the whole day playing DD!!!!!!!!!!!!

MERRY CHRISTMAS

A ten-minute roguelike dash sounds pretty perfect to me. I've been hooked on various roguelikes (most recently Stone Soup and its predecessor Crawl) but usually reach a point where I just don't seem to be improving and where the game gets less fun with every attempt and I think "man, this was so much better when I rarely got past level 3 and games lasted 5-20 minutes each"

PS I have not beaten a roguelike since (charming - well, I would think that, I grew up with it - but severely dated 80s roguelike) Caverns of Larn ;_; I can't even beat DCSS with severe savescumming, like I cheated my way down to the last level and it was just insane to me how anyone could beat that even while cheating, never mind for real

nethack; there's no 'hidden cheats' like Elbereth that you have to know to have a chance of surviving the early game,

Nethack is designed to be played with the spoilers in hand, so that isn't quite as hidden or unfair as it seems at first glance.

i love that this was the only thread active on ILG on christmas day

does anybody have anything cool to say about Eschalon? I know it is not totally a roguelike in the strict sense

I've been playing this over Christmas: http://roguebasin.roguelikedevelopment.org/index.php?title=Brogue it is well worth a download, and it works/looks great on OSX which is a nice change.
Also the game that dan i. was asking about several years ago was either Super ZZT or The Caverns Of Thor.

Here's the real link, sorry
http://sites.google.com/site/broguegame/

I'm really keen to try Brogue - I've heard good things! Has anyone done a tileset for it?

I can't stand a tileset.
The thing about roguelikes is that you're fighting letters and punctuation, not actual creatures. A little bitmap of a red dragon is missing the point: you are actually fighting a red D.
That said, Brogue really makes the ASCII graphics beautiful, like, gorgeous.

I can't even beat DCSS with severe savescumming, like I cheated my way down to the last level and it was just insane to me how anyone could beat that even while cheating, never mind for real

i haven't played a full game of DCSS in a while so maybe this has been addressed in the newer versions, but overall the game is not as difficult as it seems at first. there's a huge survival hump to get over at the beginning, but if you can stay alive long enough to get down to the Lair of Beasts and clear that out, the difficulty starts to plateau and you can cruise through a lot of the game unchecked.

Brogue looks promising, i'll have to give it a try. i remember playing this Incursion one a while back because of how nice it made the ascii look, but was disappointed that it didn't play well (way too much focus on D&D style character building for a game with permadeath)

My younger brother, home from school, showed me about FTL last night
I showed him about ADOM, which I hadn't played in three years. Instant addiction for him, re-addiction for me. My "quick tour around the facility" blossomed into a L20 wizard and a shameful 4am bedtime

FTL is really good. I hope it gets a lot of DLC.

Oh nooooo we played for ~five hours~ yesterday and we're saving the wizard and going for an ultra
Worst christmas ever

http://www.quartertothree.com/fp/2013/11/11/five-reasons-get-new-ftl-expansion/

Another Christmas, another rogue-like k-hole.

After a hugely successful Kickstarter, ADOM is back in development, has been all year, and the current build (1.2.0 p20) is free-to-download, stable and balanced and beautiful. Lots of new artifacts and corruptions, a few new creatures, tilesets and music for those who like that sort of thing. I was sick-in-bed last week and played a Gnomish beast-fighter through to a standard victory, still my favourite game of all time.

i had never heard of this ^ but i played it a lot and now i hate games and myself

i haven't quite had the patience to get into it enough to get hooked, always hate stumbling around learning all the key functions

played a lot of Nethack back in the day tho

I am ashamed/not-ashamed to admit that I've logged more time playing ADOM than I have reading Russians or doing chin-ups or w/e. I've won it three times :( Once with a gnomish monk (a surprisingly easy character, try it), an ultra win with a grey elven wizard (hospital stay), and then once this past Chrimmas with a wee beastfighter.

Brogue is getting a lot of play these days, too, the new version is crueler than ever and I keep dying and dying and dying.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/01/10/wot-i-think-tales-of-majeyal/

OK, I gave up on Brogue for good. After a month of good gaming I'm replacing play with swimming. I feel, with these games, that sometimes it's just like the sun comes out from behind a cloud, and the pointlessness of the activity becomes visible. Roguelikes are so unforgiving in that there's no reward in investing your time, it's like playing seven hour games of Tetris.

I tried Stone Soup but I can't get into roguelikes where the map is centred on the @ and is larger than the screen, it loses the visual appeal of the play and feels more conspicuously like inventory management

Just started Brogue, looks extremely pretty.

In Brogues

Just got FTL iPad. Addicted. Tips?

I won FTL, twice iirc. I think the first time was with a stealth + precise laser + missile combo. The second time was with a boarding party. I liberally checked FAQs for tips, didn't feel like it spoiled the game at all to do so.

Though I was all "this is not a rogue-like" about it (and stand by it), what a game. A very unproductive week when that game came to my house.

the ipad version is quite different. i haven't played it, but a friend was walking me through all the additions.

ok this game has sucked me in to the point where i'm getting mad at people for attempting to interact with me at all while i'm playing

yeah, totally. for those who haven't played it yet, it is very much worth your time.

thing i like about games like this is that they always feel so fresh. love random worlds.

got so frustrated when I would finally make it to the last boss through what I thought was savvy play only to be hilariously outgunned

i wish they'd release it for iphone :(

everything would be horribly tiny though
this game made me so mad after a while ftr

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

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

Not familiair with it but perhaps I should get acquainted.

What did you name the wimpy monster?

haha Moggy, after my mates wimpy cat

Anyone played The Swindle (stealthy roguelike-like for all PS platforms)? It's on sale in the PS store this week and I'm considering it but reviews suggest that its difficulty level is brutal.

They had a convention!!! nobody tells me anything

https://roguelike.club/schedule.html

Coverage:

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/281688/Rogue_cocreator_permadeath_was_never_supposed_to_be_about_pain.php

http://kotaku.com/rogue-creator-says-we-need-a-better-word-for-permadeath-1786822855

it won't be a conventional roguelike but i am stoked for aria end

http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-extremely-strange-world-of-infinite-dungeon-video-games

peter burr rules
porpentine charity heartscape appears to rule too but i'm just learning about her stuff

I enjoyed this article about blind people playing roguelikes via screen readers:

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2017/04/05/playing-roguelikes-when-you-cant-see/

That's p. hardcore.

was reading that this morning, it is a good piece. used to work with a visually impaired guy who was into interactive fiction

that's a great piece, thanks!

we have to comply pretty strictly with WCAG and 508 for all our stuff and in my limited experience it's impressive how much accessibility requirements actually improve the UX for everyone.

good read

for those that love to roguelike and enjoyed rogue legacy 1:

The release of the Drifting Worlds marks our third content release patch, and the halfway point on our road to completing Rogue Legacy 2. It’s hard to believe it has already been 9 months since the game entered Early Access, and we’ve added an immense amount of content and features. Since launching we’ve released 4 new biomes, 7 new classes, numerous major systems, and a consistent stream of new enemies, spells, traits, skills, relics, and runes. RL2 is absolutely brimming with content, and we believe it is time to raise the price from $19.99 USD to $24.99 USD. A price-rise was always on our roadmap, and our development trajectory has not changed since we launched in Early Access.

Before all this though, we want to celebrate the release of the Drifting Worlds and the passing of our halfway-mark milestone, so starting on May 18 at 10 AM PDT and ending on May 24 at 10 AM PDT, RL2 will be discounted at 20% off its current price (not the raised price). The hike in price will only occur after the sale is over, so this gives gamers an opportunity to get Rogue Legacy 2 at its lowest price ever. This is the lowest price it’ll be for quite a while! If you’re on the fence, now is a great time to dive in and check out everything new and exciting in the Rogue Legacy universe.

i am diving in

and i just bought it and realized it's pc only. oh.

welp, nbd and it's easy to get a steam refund, but dang. i was getting excited.

Owen P was right in 2011; the game that I couldn't remember the name of in 2005 was Super ZZT, specifically Monster Zoo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6VljA7WSSM

But it's not even a rogue-like, is it!

KM, I loved Rogue Legacy 1, but I'm a little wary after having been really excited for Spelunky 2, then being disappointed with it because it was just "more of the same", even though I had thought that's exactly what I'd wanted.

Haha what a highly delayed exchange/realization

ZZT is not a roguelike in any way, it was an ASCII puzzle-action game designed by a very-young Tim Sweeney (who went on to start Epic, now an Unreal engine/Gears Of War multi-multi-millionaire). I designed a game for it when I was 12 and at least one person played and reviewed it last year haha

https://museumofzzt.com/review/q/tiara.zip

Nice! ZZT graphics really appealed to me as a kid, probably in the same way that Minecraft does to kids today.