Messages

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Other Announcements / Re: Any fiction out there?

« on: August 16, 2007, 06:53:37 PM »

Hrm, no, those are all way too short. Most of them are pass-around stories as well, just one person adding onto another. The sort of thing I'm looking for wouldn't be posted on a forum, because I'm looking more for the short story or novel length. I was just curious if any such works were known to exist, either posted on a page online (a forum just isn't suited for that based on size alone), or published.

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Other Announcements / Re: Any fiction out there?

« on: August 16, 2007, 06:19:51 AM »

Those stories are closer to what I had in mind, though much shorter and more in the form of a backstory. They read more like a summary or a fable, very very short.

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Other Announcements / Re: Any fiction out there?

« on: August 15, 2007, 03:57:51 PM »

Gamer, Slash, are these more of a world history in something like a Tolkien style, or regular stories whose events predate the game? I'd suspect the former, although the latter would provide an interesting perspective on gameplay by giving it a specific quest or task, and discoveries within the game could tie into the backstory.

My main interest in the fiction, though, is fiction for its own sake, but written in the Roguelike genre. I don't know if anyone else has actually done that, but I'd be surprised if someone hadn't, and I'd like to see what they came up with. I don't read a lot of fantasy as I said, but what's out there that I'm aware of seems to fall into the categories of multi-generational epics or series built around a common theme (e.g. Pern). I think I'd quite enjoy reading a quest novel/story that stands alone, and if the setting of the story reminds me of Rogue and its kin, so much the better.

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Other Announcements / Re: Any fiction out there?

« on: August 14, 2007, 05:06:56 PM »

> I have heard some Dwarf Fortress related posts get pretty narrative and interesting... may be not what you are looking for but similar I am sure a link will pop out soon..

I've seen some of those, and while they're far more interesting than other Roguelike-turned-story descriptions, they're still a case of game action becoming a story rather than a story written in the world of a game.

> Talking about narrative, there was/is a project named Legerdemain which had narrative as a big part of the gaming experience... dunno how alive it is now..

I had seen that, although to my thinking that seems more game-with-story than just story. I'm just curious what other pure stories could be out there, because I have a hard time believing I'm the first person who ever thought of writing a Roguelike story for its own sake.

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Other Announcements / Any fiction out there?

« on: August 14, 2007, 02:26:28 PM »

I've been wondering, is there any good Roguelike or dungeon crawl themed fiction out there? I know there's the Rogulike Fanworks Archive, which I had thought said it listed fiction (it doesn't seem to say that now), but there's none there. Heck, I don't even know if there are any books on it. I have read fictionalized accounts of people's gaming experiences, but I don't count that in the same league because it's basically a play-by-play with window dressing, not a complete narrative. I'm looking for something that's more of an actual story set in a Roguelike environment, rather than a Roguelike experience spun into a story.

I wonder this because I've written a short story in the genre myself, and I've been looking around to see if anyone else has done the same, how they had approached it, and whether it might be of interest to me. Seeing how other authors handled the material would be fascinating, because honestly it's a difficult concept to make viable. The idea that there are monster-infested dungeons where gold is just left lying around is fairly silly, but if you posit that such gold is somewhat hidden or inaccessible, that past adventurers or monsters might have left behind something of value when they died, that some creatures hoard what they find, it gets a lot easier to swallow.

I don't read a lot of fantasy, mostly sci-fi, so I wondered if someone might be aware of a book or story that fits this theme. And are there any spots online that I haven't found that might have such stories?

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Programming / Re: Good interface ideas

« on: August 06, 2007, 10:03:22 PM »

I've always liked the idea of procedurally generated content, but #37 is the first place I've seen it suggested that a language be implemented to that end. That makes more sense than anything hard-coded ever could, really, except that the danger of creating such a language is that you have to keep adding on to it as you want new features.

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Other Announcements / Re: Ranged weapons that don't suck?

« on: August 06, 2007, 04:32:21 AM »

Nervous reloads? I like it! It also makes sense to me that a character with very little experience with the weapon would take longer to load it than one without.

Given the speed of combat, I think ranged weapons should generally be more powerful than in Rogue, but an arrow or crossbow bolt should take 1+ turns to load with a separate turn to fire, maybe more loading time for inexperienced characters. It should also be impossible to load in a melee setting; i.e. being hit with another weapon should interrupt it. This would also take into account the difference between bows and crossbows, since a bow must be loaded every time it fires, while a crossbow can be pre-loaded and fired (once) on a whim. And of course a double crossbow could be a possibility, which takes twice as long to load but provides 2 shots. Crawl uses blow guns, and the same sort of thing could be employed there.

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Programming / Good interface ideas

« on: August 05, 2007, 08:30:00 PM »

Sean Howard has an interesting post at his game mechanics page about Roguelikes:

http://www.squidi.net/three/entry.php?id=53

The first part is a neat idea, but the real meat is below. The idea is to encourage Roguelikes to go with a simpler interface instead of having a zillion and one commands that only work on one item each, or menuize item interaction in a way that's simpler. It certainly makes a lot of sense.

Also of note is his article on procedural content:

http://www.squidi.net/three/entry.php?id=37

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Other Announcements / Re: Ranged weapons that don't suck?

« on: August 05, 2007, 06:40:00 PM »

I guess mostly this is coming from my experience in Rogue. In Crawl I do tend to throw stones or darts whenever I can, because the game bestows an absurdly low number of hit points for the monsters coming at you. And in Nethack, as I mentioned darkness is usually not an issue. But still, the firing sequence is overcomplicated and requires a weapon switch, which wands and spells don't. This may be much less of a concern in later games, but in Rogue itself this can kill you. Archery becomes more useful late in the game in Rogue, and at that point most of the rooms are dark.

As for the later games that have more power in their ranged weapons, I bet they're also not looking at realistic reload times. Surely you can slash a sword much faster than you can nock and fire an arrow, and for crossbows that goes triple or more. But these games generally have more sophisticated speed systems than Rogue's, so they could make up for this problem easily.

I got to thinking about this some more and wondered if maybe the general lack of parties in RLs is to blame for the oddness of ranged weapons. In some games it's too powerful, others too weak. In reality an archer would be most formidable when backed up by a swordsman who can protect him while he readies the next shot. In a game where you're on your own, making bows too weak makes them useless, so it makes sense to me that Rogue's successors would try to beef them up. But if any of them have actually considered the tradeoff in time, I'm not aware of it.

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Other Announcements / Ranged weapons that don't suck?

« on: August 05, 2007, 08:12:54 AM »

I'm not the consummate Roguelike expert, but I've found in most of the RLs I've played that ranged combat is really only feasible with spells and wands. That is, bow-and-arrow attacks are quite nerfed. In Rogue for example, arrows do a semi-reasonable amount of damage (maybe a little less than they should), but to use them effectively you need to 1) wield the bow/crossbow, 2) go through a complex throw sequence to fire, and 3) pray you can see any other monsters coming up or that you kill your target before it gets too close. Wandstrikes don't have this problem; you fire and forget, still keeping your trusty two-handed sword in hand. #3 is a bigger concern in Rogue itself, where darkness can hurt you bad.

Have any RLs found reasonable solutions to this problem? Besides the obvious ones that is, like I suspect in Doom RL there's a lot more ranged weapons fire but simplified (I haven't played it yet).

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Programming / Re: Labyrinth generation

« on: August 02, 2007, 07:51:38 PM »

I kind of wonder if cellular automata would be good for forests as well, if it was modified to use some random rules. They follow a similar pattern after all. For instance, this might do nicely:

If no tree here
  If trees in radius 3 < 4
    If random(25%)
      Create tree
Else
  If other trees in radius 2 > 1
    If random(25%)
      Delete tree

A pattern of radius 3 is roughly 37 tiles, so 4 in 37 gives roughly 11% coverage, while the second rule is used to remove neighbors that are too close. There should still be plenty of cases of trees growing right next to each other, which is common, but not too many dense clumps.

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Other Announcements / Re: Developing Roguelikes in BYOND

« on: August 02, 2007, 07:39:42 PM »

That's cool! I had no idea anyone outside of BYOND had heard of the guild yet. How'd you find out about it?

Sadly I haven't had time to build a proper Roguelike, at least not yet. Runt was developed for one of BYOND's occasional 4K competitions--building the best game with 4K of code, but unlimited other resources--so it's severely stripped down, but still quite fun to play. It is, interestingly, extensible, although no one has ever built new maps or creatures or weapons as of yet.

The AGB Rogue source has given me some good insights into what it would take to develop a more robust Roguelike. Rogue remains my favorite of the genre, because it's so simple yet still challenging and fun. Nethack has more to discover, and it's nice you can eat corpses to keep up your food supply, but in some ways it just has too much going on, and I'm not a fan of all the nasty-surprise scrolls like fire and amnesia.

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Programming / Re: Labyrinth generation

« on: August 01, 2007, 04:18:22 AM »

Whoa, I hadn't seen RogueBasin before. I've been to roguelikedevelopment.org--it's one of my favorites--but this is so much neater and more readable. Quite cool.

That cave article is a good one. Too bad the math symbols are lost to character formatting hell instead of using HTML entities, though. I never had much luck with the cave tests I tried before using the cellular automata technique, but this one looks very promising!

I like the idea of starting with an almost-connected cave and then completing connections as corridors that were dug into the main cave by past denizens. Some would lead to special rooms (like a monster's lair, treasure vault, etc.) as seen in those results, others to another wide cavern system, perhaps some ancient bazaar now an abode of monsters.

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Other Announcements / Developing Roguelikes in BYOND

« on: August 01, 2007, 04:07:17 AM »

Hi, everyone. This is my first post here. By way of introduction, I've been a fan of Roguelikes for a long time, having played Rogue, Nethack, and a bit of Crawl (mostly just those) in my spare time. I can't say I'm an expert player of any of them but I do love the genre, especially the sheer imagination of it. So much in fact that I actually wrote a short story around the premise, and I'm hoping to get that published in a collection on lulu.com when time permits.

Anyway, I don't know if anyone here has heard of it, but there's a game platform called BYOND that allows you to create your own tile-based games (including the use of text mode), which is quite well suited for Roguelikes, graphical or otherwise. It was originally designed for graphical MUDs. I've been part of that community for almost six years now, but I'm still dismayed at the dearth of good Roguelikes there. Right now I run a BYOND guild called Dungeon Crawlers, where my goal is to get a lot of BYOND users more interested in developing and playing Roguelikes. (That way even if I don't have as much time to develop my own, I can play theirs!) Through one of the users there I was told about this site, and I've been enjoying the news here since. (The story on AGB Rogue specifically fascinated me, since I own a DS Lite and the idea of portable Rogue is really awesome. I've been playing a bit with modifying the controls.) Since then I got to thinking, I wonder if more of the Roguelike community at large would be interested in using BYOND as a development platform.

Just to give you an idea of what to expect, the BYOND platform is an interpreter for a custom language called DM, which is actually one of the friendliest languages I've ever worked with without sacrificing flexibility (my other all-time favorite is TADS). It's especially a good choice for C-phobics who'd rather get into the meat of the game than mess with structs and pointers. It also has built-in multiplayer support, although that probably isn't of as much use to the Roguelike community (though if anyone has ideas on how to make a multiplayer RL work well, do let me know).

So hey, if anyone's got any interest or ideas, feel free to stop by Dungeon Crawlers, or even respond here. My top picks for dungeon crawls on BYOND right now are Darke Dungeon (more a crawl than a true Roguelike, but good; hosted on weekends), Ruin, and my own simple game Runt. It's not much yet, but it's a start, and the whole point of the guild is to encourage more development there.