Temple of The Roguelike Forums
Game Discussion => Classic Roguelikes => Topic started by: tangar on March 30, 2020, 09:04:31 PM
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To understand Angband variants (to 'feel' this phenomenon) and to find interesting ideas for my variant, I've started research at different web-resources (Roguebasin, oook, The Angband Variant Repository). It's great websites, but as there are so many variants - I thought it will be fun to bring all needed information and links to _one_ web-page; so you do not need to walk through hundreds of hyperlinks to get all basic information about variants. So I've combined all these sources under one table at my website:
https://tangaria.com/variants/
There are only two fields - name (with the link to source) and description; so you could read everything without clicking around while drinking a cup of tea
It's a draft for now, but I'll maintain it and will make it up-to-date in time
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Nice! I guess Angband is easy to compile, that's why there are so many variants?
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Maybe because vanilla angband is so famous yet incredibly boring and unfun that everyone can easily have a go and improve it signficantly in a few lines of code?
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Maybe because vanilla angband is so famous yet incredibly boring and unfun that everyone can easily have a go and improve
I think it has to do something with compiling, because afaik Nethack is notoriously difficult to compile. Or at least you can't just load it to an IDE, maybe that's the issue. Should take a look at Angband's source code sometimes.
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Yesterday I finally got around to beating TOME2. It was pretty fun but also very frustrating at times.
I can see the draw to making a variant. There are a lot of things I would have liked to change or implement after going through it.
Typically I don't get this idea playing other kinds of roguelikes. Variants to me seem like something made more for the programmer than for an audience.
Some of them turn out pretty decent for the general public to consume. Things like Sil, TOME, or Zangband. Most just don't seem to be worth the time though.
The average length of a band is very long, and requires a big time investment. Many variants have interesting concepts but are not "different" enough to get invested in.
On the upside some variants that are less interesting for players might attract more attention to expand on them. A lot of the popular variants are based on other variants.