Messages

61

Player's Plaza / Re: Tolkein-esque roguelike that meets some of these criteria...

« on: November 08, 2017, 12:49:18 PM »

ADOM is definitely worth checking out. Try the current free version first to see if you like it. Other than that, you've mentioned a lot of the usual suspects in your original post. You may add Elona to your list. It's a pretty wacky, Japanese take on something ADOM-inspired. Among newer Roguelikes with immersive worlds, one could mention Shadow of the Wyrm and The Temple Of Torment.

Bear in mind that the genre is typically very hack'n'slash-minded, so games with lots of puzzles and non-violent solutions are not very common. Also, I don't know exactly what you mean by "tactical combat". Practically all Roguelikes feature combat on a grid, but a lot of them have pretty shallow tactics where you end up trading blows a lot of the time. The later years have seen more games try to amend this, but typically with a more abstract/narrow scope than huge games like ADOM and Nethack. There was a short game called PrincessRL, made for the 7 Day RL jam, which has pretty sweet tactical combat. For interesting tactics, there are also some modern, puzzley games like Hoplite and HyperRogue.

As always,
Minotauros

62

Other Announcements / Re: Roguelike Radio podcast

« on: October 30, 2017, 08:00:23 AM »

New episode out, for those who didn't notice yet
http://www.roguelikeradio.com/2017/10/episode-140-horror.html

As always,
Minotauros

63

Off-topic (Locked) / Re: My little rant about anarchism

« on: October 28, 2017, 01:50:56 PM »

Well, actually... ... there is a long tradition of anarchist thinkers, who are quite unlike one another, but the ones preaching the kind of lawlessness you describe are very few and far between (most of those would be under 18 years of age, methinks, and haven't really studied the topic). Rather, anarchist theory typically shares a lot of its analysis with marxism/socialism, but putting much more emphasis on libertarian ideas. Where Marx was preoccupied with the disparity between economic classes, anarchists are typically more concerned with power relations in general. Some may be utopian to the point of naivety, others offer practical solutions and ideas for self-organized societies. If you're interested in the topic, try reading an anthology or something, and while you may quite disagree with the goals and methods, you'll at least come to realize that anarchism really has very little to do with the kind of "anti-society" you describe in your original post.

As always,
Minotauros

64

Player's Plaza / Re: Roguelike with persistent (or seed generated) world?

« on: October 27, 2017, 07:55:38 PM »

I never got much further than early midgame of Legerdemain, actually. Still, I'm shamelessly recommending it east and west

As always,
Minotauros

65

Player's Plaza / Re: Roguelike with persistent (or seed generated) world?

« on: October 22, 2017, 09:59:54 AM »

Development of Rogue was actually started in 2019 by mole people from Venus. Toy and Wichman releasing as early as they did, was just a case of plagiarization by anticipation.

As always,
Minotauros

66

Design / Re: Approaching "enemy sees player"

« on: October 18, 2017, 07:07:19 AM »

My own design philosophy involves not to overthink whatever I can avoid. Since this mainly touches on events happening outside of the player's line of sight, I think it's okay to give one self some leeway here. I think the effect we are looking for, is two-fold: We want the player to get the feeling they are moving around in a living world, but we also don't want interesting events to play out outside of the player's line of sight. It's cool to come into a room where a knight and a bear are in the middle of a fight, for instance. It's less interesting to explore a dungeon full of already vanquished enemies.

Both my games that ever saw a release has a variant of "wake up monsters when player is at a certain distance". My first game had very strict division of the map into different rooms, and I'd simply let monsters wake up whenever a tile belonging to their home room came into the player's line of sight (including outer walls/doors, so most monsters would wake up when the player was somewhere in the room adjacent to them). My current project plays in an open landscape rather than a dungeon. Here I just divided the map into big chunks (approx. 16 x 16 points), and I make sure that all beings currently in the same map chunk as the player, or one adjacent to it, is active. As the player moves around, map chunks that are too far away are conversely put to sleep again.

As always,
Minotauros

67

Temple of the Roguelike / Re: roguetemple.com moved to wordpress.com

« on: October 17, 2017, 10:28:01 AM »

Seems to work fine from here, at least.

As always,
Minotauros

(edit: Epiphany browser on Debian)

68

Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: Cogmind (now at Beta 3)

« on: October 17, 2017, 10:22:13 AM »

Congratulations, and best of luck!

As always,
Minotauros

69

Design / Re: UI design (WIP)

« on: October 12, 2017, 06:37:13 AM »

Sheesh, these threads. For what it's worth, I don't think flaming Krice solves anything. It's like we used to have a resident troll – now instead, we have a two headed ogre that argues with itself. OP was also pretty quick to lose his temper. Bear in mind that we don't know anything about the light mechanism in your game Also, the text in those mockups is uncomfortable to read because of the vertical spacing. It's something we see a lot in libtcod games, where the defaults are set to render as pretty maps rather than legible text. When you finalize the UI, that is probably something you want to keep in mind.

Other than that, the mockups look nice enough. I instinctively feel like the HUD is taking up quite a lot of space, though, and would ideally like all of it to fit horizontally OR (more likely) vertically. Some values may not be pertinent to show each turn (eg. stats), and some might get smaller widgets (eg. HSMLX). I'm not sure what PPSS stands for... I do like the fact that you display targeted enemy and hotkeys. But five letters is perhaps a bit short for hotkey descriptions – I can guess what "Heali" does, but not if it's a spell or a potion, for instance, and the whole point of displaying this would be that player should not be forced to guess, I guess?

As always,
Minotauros

70

Early Dev / Re: Golden Krone Hotel

« on: October 01, 2017, 11:23:53 AM »

Something recently had me thinking of the C64 action game Usagi Yojimbo, where the two most important commands were "greet politely" and "draw sword".

Wow, that is pretty badass. Your idea about collecting bounties and returning them to a judge also sounds interesting. That's my next discussion topic: theme and how it's usually super boring/tired.

Yeah, I'm hoping I won't have that problem, seeing as how my original core idea was "gay cowboys on drug induced spirit quests dual wielding sawed off shotguns"

As another aside: six-directional movement actually works surprisingly well with the four arrow keys.

Really? What, with two pressed at once?

Exactly. That sounds horrible, but since pressing Up or Down doesn't do anything in itself, they actually work quite well as modifier keys. (WEADZX is also a possibility, but people I've seen try my game prefer the arrow keys.)

As always,
Minotauros

71

Early Dev / Re: Golden Krone Hotel

« on: September 30, 2017, 09:03:06 PM »

Cool stuff. I continue to enjoy the series.

As you mention in closing, it's not exactly controversial these days to aim for streamlined interfaces. Still, it's an interesting topic of debate, maybe especially in the context of RLs, which traditionally have such esoteric controls. My own game is aimed to be a "one handed roguelike", partly by way of context-sensitive commands and menus. That can work, but has the danger of becoming obscure in itself (rather than having to remember which key to "disarm" a trap, you have to know what the "default action" is in any given position). Then I need something like a zoomed out map view which skews the whole interface, and the delicate balance feels disrupted again. Well, I hope to have a snappy game when it's feature complete. I'm currently working on mouse controls, actually, and both gamepad and terminal have been on the long todo-list since day one. I think that alone has helped me work with a certain sense of direction, at least As another aside: six-directional movement actually works surprisingly well with the four arrow keys.

One strategy I'm pondering, is to shape the game mechanics and the lore/story/action to fit each other as much as possible. For instance, you can collect bounties on criminals by chopping off their heads and giving them to a judge. This uses just the basic interface for picking up and dropping items, but provides a bare bones quest system. Likewise, there is no chat command (the player is assumed to be the silent type, I guess), but NPCs will sometimes deliver lines of dialogue. Something recently had me thinking of the C64 action game Usagi Yojimbo, where the two most important commands were "greet politely" and "draw sword". With these, you interacted with farmers, wandering monks, warriors challenging you to a duel, disguised ninja, etc. I think it's really another way to see the point 1) in your post, which is to say: implement a few actions, and imbue them with a lot of meaning.

By the way, Dumuzid is one of the few 7DRLs I've come back to replay several times. The interface was certainly one of the features that struck me, but also the quite fun strategies that emerge from the basic rules. Very nifty

As always,
Minotauros

72

Other Announcements / Re: Roguelike Radio podcast

« on: August 12, 2017, 08:24:07 AM »

Nethack (which in my opinion should be the starting point of complexity for a new roguelike game).

Har! In that case, I can't think of a single Roguelike from the last 20 years. Even Angband doesn't fit the bill In all fairness, you probably just had a bad day. Jere was obviously not touting light/darkness mechanisms as something wholly unique, just a feature he'd given a bit more attention than the typical basics (tiles being lit/unlit). Apart from Golden Krone, the only RL I can think of that did anything particular with lighting, would be the 7drl Madness. So it's definitely something that sets GK apart, and there's nothing weird about discussing the particulars. There was another vampire-themed game with light and darkness featured in the less known "Procedural Death Jam" some years ago, that was quite fun (not a Roguelike, though, but a puzzler with random levels).

As always,
Minotauros

73

Programming / Re: Recommended Language/Development

« on: August 08, 2017, 09:42:19 PM »

I can echo Zireal's recommendation of Python, which I started learning some years ago by jumping in the deep end (starting on a RL when I didn't really know anything about programming). Python takes care of a lot of the low level stuff (like memory allocation), whilst retaining the versatility of a proper programming language. But it's probably true that different people will enjoy different languages for different reasons, and it's certainly true that writing a RL is >90% about design issues, which are more or less the same regardless of language. If you're more interested in finding a good game engine, Godot may also be worth a look. It's probably less polished than Unity, but completely free (as in open source), and from my limited experience easy to use (I was able to make a basic Pooyan clone in a few days, but haven't really whet my teeth on it yet).

In any case, be prepared to scrap a lot of your early implementations as you're learning. So make sure to enjoy the ride.

As always,
Minotauros

74

Design / Re: Who's published a game and found my 'Roguelike Intelligence' articles useful?

« on: July 27, 2017, 02:30:08 PM »

I think the interesting thing about state-driven AI (especially if taking into account ideas from stuff like behavior trees) is not so much that one can create tactically challenging AIs (although that's nice too, of course), but you can get very specialized behavior, AIs who seemingly "deduce" what they want/need and how to achieve it.

As always,
Minotauros

75

Design / Re: Who's published a game and found my 'Roguelike Intelligence' articles useful?

« on: July 25, 2017, 07:34:48 AM »

Nice to see you around, Bear. I always try to mention "Roguelike Intelligence" when the topic comes up, and both my rl projects (Squirm and Land of Strangers) borrow heavily from it. I can't honestly claim they cast off a lot of reflected glory for your articles to bask in, but do feel free to mention them, of course.

As always,
Minotauros

Edit: Krice, here are the articles. Bear, if your request doesn't garner a lot of response here (it's been a bit quiet lately), you could try over at the roguelikedev section at reddit.