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Other Announcements / Re: Roguelike Bundle
« on: July 28, 2013, 05:58:41 PM »
Hi. I joined just to comment on this, so I hope I'm not being too presumptuous. I'd love to help out with the website.
In my opinion, the most important aspect of a bundle like this is curation. Anyone can go to RogueBasin and download all the RLs their hearts desire in not much more time than it would take to download a bundle. What they can't do is figure out whether what they've downloaded is any good or not, and if they have no prior experience with RLs and try something with serious flaws, it might be enough to turn them off the genre entirely. The learning curve for even excellent RLs is pretty high.
I realize that these things are subjective, but I expect there is some consensus in this forum about the most popular/well-designed/whatever RLs around, and I really think you should strive for quality over quantity. I haven't touched the Reddit bundle because it's just too much at once for me even though I've been playing RLs for like 2 decades; it needs some kind of "beginner"/"intermediate"/"advanced" tier system like this article or some points of entry or something. Even the "notable games" section is like 25 games. Gah!
I like all of Z's suggestions, especially the one about descriptions, and have some nuts and bolts ideas of my own:
Looking forward to seeing this develop! Please let me know if there's any way I can help.
In my opinion, the most important aspect of a bundle like this is curation. Anyone can go to RogueBasin and download all the RLs their hearts desire in not much more time than it would take to download a bundle. What they can't do is figure out whether what they've downloaded is any good or not, and if they have no prior experience with RLs and try something with serious flaws, it might be enough to turn them off the genre entirely. The learning curve for even excellent RLs is pretty high.
I realize that these things are subjective, but I expect there is some consensus in this forum about the most popular/well-designed/whatever RLs around, and I really think you should strive for quality over quantity. I haven't touched the Reddit bundle because it's just too much at once for me even though I've been playing RLs for like 2 decades; it needs some kind of "beginner"/"intermediate"/"advanced" tier system like this article or some points of entry or something. Even the "notable games" section is like 25 games. Gah!
I like all of Z's suggestions, especially the one about descriptions, and have some nuts and bolts ideas of my own:
- I agree that torrents would be a lot easier than finding good hosting. Perhaps you could add version numbers to the torrents and, in the README, link to a homepage or forum thread or something that's more easily updateable so that people can check whether they have the most recent version. Then you could make changes, update the version number and have things be more likely to propagate.
- As I mention above, something like a tier system might be nice. Some kind of roguelike directed graph or next steps recommendation list might be nice too, something that can tell people e.g. "If you like Crawl, you might also like Brogue." Edit: Anvilfolk's idea is also a great one.
- Prefer using the website as the meta-information repository rather than including text files etc. in the bundle itself. This makes it easier to make incremental improvements.
- Throw the whole website code on GitHub and manage it like any open source project if you haven't already.
Looking forward to seeing this develop! Please let me know if there's any way I can help.