Temple of The Roguelike Forums
Websites => Off-topic (Locked) => Topic started by: reaver on February 25, 2014, 12:39:58 PM
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I'm curious to know what platform would people around here play roguelikes on. Not just restricted by the availability of existing games, but if, say, a very nice roguelike was released for a platform you own, would you try it there?
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you forgot consoles
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Amended, cheers
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I'll play on anything.
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You forgot browsers :)
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Doh, thanks! Ok, last edit
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But shouldn't iOS and Android be listed separately? :P ;) My significant other has an Android phone, so I've got the chance to try out Hoplite and Pixel Dungeon – but not, for instance, 100 Rogues. In general, if a RL looks interesting, I'll try it on whatever device/platform I can get my hands on. The treshold is higher for different platforms, though. Anything that piques my interest and runs on Linux or in a browser, I can try out in a few minutes. I have to be really intrigued to go through the hassle of trying out Windows-only applications, though.
As always,
Minotauros
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I did this poll to get a developer insight into what platforms are good to aim for if I want people to test and play stuff. Well, besides the fact that a sample size of ... 15 does not cut it for good statistics :D iOs/android are listed together as 3rd party libraries usually either support both or none.
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I voted for Windows, Android, and consoles, but when I said consoles, I really meant handhelds - I don't think playing a roguelike on a full-size console would be all that practical! Well, maybe the Wii U gamepad...
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I voted for Windows, Android, and consoles, but when I said consoles, I really meant handhelds - I don't think playing a roguelike on a full-size console would be all that practical! Well, maybe the Wii U gamepad...
I play them on my 360, psx, original xbox, and steam box, as well as handhelds. Honestly though for dev testing purposes console isn't probably something to actually target first.
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I did this poll to get a developer insight into what platforms are good to aim for if I want people to test and play stuff.
Really you have no idea? Pads and phones are used mainly by casual players with somewhat unpredictable way how games will succeed. Mostly it's a viral thing on some social media that makes it possible. Roguelikes are not that good if you want to make money, but it may work.
For traditional roguelikes the platform is PC.
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Really you have no idea? Pads and phones are used mainly by casual players with somewhat unpredictable way how games will succeed. Mostly it's a viral thing on some social media that makes it possible. Roguelikes are not that good if you want to make money, but it may work.
For traditional roguelikes the platform is PC.
I have an idea, but some data to support it is not that bad, and the poll is quite effortless anyway for both sides (poll-er and poll-ees). I'm not really doing a ... market research: I just want to know, if by any chance I ever manage to release anything into the wild, how should I balance "Multiplatform programming effort" <----> "Userbase size". Mind you, not for money and such (money is on pads/mobiles for indie devs, whether we like it or not), more like for *exposure* : "here, I made this cool thing, wanna try it?"
It's good to identify cases such as AgingMinotaur, who said: Anything that piques my interest and runs on Linux or in a browser, I can try out in a few minutes. I have to be really intrigued to go through the hassle of trying out Windows-only applications, though.
And since anything roguelikey would enjoy some level of testing here more than other places, it's a good idea to know what platform do the forumites prefer to be continuously killed on :)
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If you worry about user base size, release it to all platforms you can. I think serious (roguelike) players still use mainly PC and pads are more for casual players. I wouldn't play with pad or phone, it makes no sense to me.
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Windows. Android. And my tabletop.
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Windows and Android here. Aiming for portable devices is always a good idea because nowadays "everyone" has a portable device, including roguelike fans. This also makes spreading their popularity easier since you can show your friends all there is about roguelikes at any time and possibly even recruit some of them into the genre.
I really don't see the point of having browsers as an option in the pool as browsers are part of the OS. Anyway, if I can play it outside a browser I'll sure do it.
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I'll play on Linux, Android, or in a Web Browser.
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Oh man. I know this is an older thread, but I just gotta say I'd play a good table top Roguelike.
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For traditional roguelikes the platform is PC.
lol
For traditional roguelikes, the platform is UNIX terminals on multiuser systems (not your linux box). You really get a feel for the state of play in roguelike development when people post a poll that doesn't even include the traditional method of play (which remains the best in all important respects -- play nethack on your university unix servers, kids!) and the response from the local "purist" is that the traditional platform is one that originally couldn't even run roguelikes.
Most everyone wants roguelikes to become more like Candy Crush, except the guy who wants the future to look more like Castle of the Winds. Sad.
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For traditional roguelikes, the platform is UNIX terminals on multiuser systems (not your linux box). You really get a feel for the state of play in roguelike development when people post a poll that doesn't even include the traditional method of play (which remains the best in all important respects -- play nethack on your university unix servers, kids!) and the response from the local "purist" is that the traditional platform is one that originally couldn't even run roguelikes.
Most everyone wants roguelikes to become more like Candy Crush, except the guy who wants the future to look more like Castle of the Winds. Sad.
Crawl back to your bridge, troll. There other threads to whine about how you miss the 80s.
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I'm sorry, you're obviously right (as opposed to, say, clueless) to frame a question about platforms for roguelike games as smart phone vs. web browser vs. personal computers without any mention of public telnet (a popular and vital platform to this day). I should stop trolling about how smart dev teams (e.g. DCSS) have emphasized multiuser servers, especially via telnet but also more recently web browser based, and remember that the only gameplay experience roguelike fans are interested in is an insular, tile-based game hosted on mom's windows xp box. And smart phones, natch.
Next up in offtopic polls: Who's your favorite Star Trek character? (Go back to your caves, Spock and McCoy trolls!)
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I framed the question the way I wanted to get results that interest me. I'm not *obliged* to specify your platform of preference. If you don't want to vote, don't. Bitching about the lack of "other" option would be valid, but that's it.
Btw I don't care what the DCSS team does, I'm not "competing" with them, I'd emphasize something different, I'm not even making a proper roguelike ffs.
I don't know who McCoy is. You'll probably be burning with rage and sadness.
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Yeah, lots of people frame polls in ways that give results that interest them. It's a practice that most who do wouldn't easily admit to though.
My commentary isn't about your obligation one way or another and, like most people, I don't give a rat's ass what you're doing (or not doing). I'm simply observing that in a forum nominally about roguelike development, a poll appears asking for platforms people would play on that does not give the historically crucial, still-popular-among-actual-players option of public telnet/multiuser UNIX servers and the objection is that the list is too broad in that it includes platforms other than personal computers.
I mean, it amazes me that people somehow think the only thing they can do is release a binary on github or upload to an app shop somewhere, meanwhile nethack, DCSS, ADOM, (you know, games that are actually successful that people actually play -- as opposed to, well, nevermind) continue to cultivate large telnet followings. There's apparently no thought that maybe this is something more people should be doing. How can I make my game more "cross-platform," they wonder...
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Exactly, I didn't care to create the poll as the de facto list to refer to when talking about who's playing on what platforms.
You realize that ADOM, DCSS have teams of people that have been working on these for years and years AND they want to be true-to-source, right? The bedroom-programmers, working by themselves, while having a job or a life or both, will try to realize their game as simply as possible and will try to expose it to as many people as possible (sharing your brain-child feels good). Programming for multi-user servers is not my wet dream, and not my priority either. Btw, (I guess) nobody gets paid so there's nothing that people *should* be doing, only what they *like* to be doing. Awesome if it's multi-user, awesome if it's great graphics/sound, awesome if it's great gameplay.
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Woah woah woah. Simmer down there, gentlmen. Here - amulets of clarity for everyone.
For me, I'd stick to PC. For the general public, if your game is accessible and intuitive, seems like tablets are pretty much where this whole thing is headed.
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Here - amulets of clarity for everyone.
Ok, but they better not be cursed :)
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Exactly, I didn't care to create the poll as the de facto list to refer to when talking about who's playing on what platforms.
You realize that ADOM, DCSS have teams of people that have been working on these for years and years AND they want to be true-to-source, right? The bedroom-programmers, working by themselves, while having a job or a life or both, will try to realize their game as simply as possible and will try to expose it to as many people as possible (sharing your brain-child feels good). Programming for multi-user servers is not my wet dream, and not my priority either. Btw, (I guess) nobody gets paid so there's nothing that people *should* be doing, only what they *like* to be doing. Awesome if it's multi-user, awesome if it's great graphics/sound, awesome if it's great gameplay.
I think I have a pretty clear idea of how the ADOM, DCSS, etc. development process goes/went, but this has damn near nothing to do with how the game is delivered or played. If anything, the point is that your bedroom programmer is working too hard making a crappy tile-based interface in Qt or whatever instead of just using curses the way God intended.
Anyway, it sounds like we agree about the value of your poll.
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There's apparently no thought that maybe this is something more people should be doing. How can I make my game more "cross-platform," they wonder...
Sorry but that's definitely something I wouldn't do or care about. It would be great though, if people thought more about creating better interfaces for roguelikes, starting with mouse support (which is also something from the 80's).
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Woah woah woah. Simmer down there, gentlmen. Here - amulets of clarity for everyone.
LMAO!
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Unix/Linux. I have an Android phone as well, but I've gradually come to loathe and distrust the infrastructure, industry, and cavalier treatment of customers' security and privacy behind it, and no longer download and use new software for it.
And, seriously? For best results? Use text mode in the dang term window. Let me pick the font, let me pick the size of the font, and be ready to go with whatever number of rows and columns I happen to have it open to when I invoke it (from the command line, of course), and I'll be happier with your game than I've been with most of what I've seen lately.
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Unix/Linux. I have an Android phone as well, but I've gradually come to loathe and distrust the infrastructure, industry, and cavalier treatment of customers' security and privacy behind it, and no longer download and use new software for it.
And, seriously? For best results? Use text mode in the dang term window. Let me pick the font, let me pick the size of the font, and be ready to go with whatever number of rows and columns I happen to have it open to when I invoke it (from the command line, of course), and I'll be happier with your game than I've been with most of what I've seen lately.
I want all new games to support 1x9000 text resolution!
But seriously, term window doesn't need to be used to get this effect. With a bit of effort, libtcod can handle some of it. With nearly no effort SquidLib can exactly handle the font changes to arbitrary fonts.
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For traditional roguelikes, the platform is UNIX terminals on multiuser systems
I'm sorry, I didn't think about historical computers.
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And, seriously? For best results? Use text mode in the dang term window. Let me pick the font, let me pick the size of the font, and be ready to go with whatever number of rows and columns I happen to have it open to when I invoke it (from the command line, of course), and I'll be happier with your game than I've been with most of what I've seen lately.
I want all new games to support 1x9000 text resolution!
But seriously, term window doesn't need to be used to get this effect. With a bit of effort, libtcod can handle some of it. With nearly no effort SquidLib can exactly handle the font changes to arbitrary fonts.
Yeah, 1x9000 is silly. I'm not upset about a "your term is too small to play this game" message if it gets down to less than, say, 14x50. But just as a matter of normal use? My term window defaults to open at 100x100 characters. If I'm doing something I want to see in large scale, I use the term window open 250 characters wide; I have a couple of apps that generate debug logs with settable margins, and I set 'em to 250 when I'm tracing a problem.
I'm just saying, a term window, at least for me, is normally 100x100, not 80x20. Special-purpose term windows to monitor processes or network comms or whatever, I normally open at anything from 14x50 to 350x160.
Write a game that detects the size of the term window and uses "extra" space for a good purpose or decides what to skip displaying when the space is smaller than you expected, and I'll count it as a good thing.
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I used to have a DOS laptop that only had a 80x25 character screen... And not when it was state of the art sadly.
I'm all in favor of adaptive display (put them into my own games), but realistically it can take a lot of time away from other development. The bigger reason to have terminal support and adaptability might be to support screen reading software. Blind video gamers is a seriously underserved group of people. And I'm serous about that, unlike my 1xFOO comment :)
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Write a game that detects the size of the term window and uses "extra" space for a good purpose or decides what to skip displaying when the space is smaller than you expected, and I'll count it as a good thing.
That's more like poor design trying to fit the gameplay to window size. I think it's essential to use fixed size gameview whatever it is, because the range of visibility and also the physical size of level has important role in the gameplay.
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Write a game that detects the size of the term window and uses "extra" space for a good purpose or decides what to skip displaying when the space is smaller than you expected, and I'll count it as a good thing.
That's more like poor design trying to fit the gameplay to window size. I think it's essential to use fixed size gameview whatever it is, because the range of visibility and also the physical size of level has important role in the gameplay.
Amen. It's like preferring to read a book in an ASCII editor using wordwrap so that you can adjust to whatever resolution you want, versus a nicely typesetted PDF.
On a mobile, I'd take the ascii out of necessity. On everything else I Read It As It Was Meant To Be Read. But again, that's just me.
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I think it's good design practice to take into account that different users will have different screen/terminal sizes and so, though. My primary computer used to be a netbook, and there was nothing more annoying than games which didn't fit on my small display. I also totally get that people with humongous monitors would like to be able to put some of that screen size to good use. pdf rulez, but it might make more sense to compare UI design to a format like css?
As always,
Minotauros
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My primary computer used to be a netbook, and there was nothing more annoying than games which didn't fit on my small display.
It may be annoying, but if you want to play don't use toys, get a real computer (whatever it is..).
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Brilliant. Why spend a few hours making sure your application plays nice with small displays, when you can just be a jerk instead?
As always,
Minotauros
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I put a selectable font size on my roguelike so that people can play with small screens. Easy and fast to make the game playable on different sized screens.
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if you want to play don't use toys....
But Krice, that's what toys are for!
In fact, that's why we CALL them toys!
Now it's true that some games are for little toys (2-inch screen on a phone) and some games are for big toys (dual-monitor gamer box with a pair of 24-inch 1920x1080 monitors) but ... come on, this is a games forum! Obviously, every machine we play with is going to be in use as a toy!
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My primary computer used to be a netbook, and there was nothing more annoying than games which didn't fit on my small display.
It may be annoying, but if you want to play don't use toys, get a real computer (whatever it is..).
It's one thing to say that about the newest ultra-realistic 3D game with realistic fluid physics or whatever, but a roguelike? Especially one that's played in a terminal?