Alternatives to hack and slash for roguelikes

[njerpe]

Anyone remember the old strategy game "The Horde"? You would have a certain amount of time/money to spend sowing, ploughing etc. and basically preparing for the annual horde of monsters invariably invading your farm every spring. Depending on how well you protected your crops, the farm grew, yielding more cash, better weapons to keep the monsters at bay, etc. A solid farming system might well change a roguelike into something... similar, but different. Who's got the time for dungeon crawling, now that harvest time is coming?

Thanks for posting this, as I had never heard of it and it sounds like a lotta fun. Plus Kirk Cameron did some voice-acting for it, which makes it a must-have.

For what it's worth I found a page about this game on Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Horde_(video_game)

[corremn]

Anyone remember the old strategy game "The Horde"? You would have a certain amount of time/money to spend sowing, ploughing etc. and basically preparing for the annual horde of monsters invariably invading your farm every spring. Depending on how well you protected your crops, the farm grew, yielding more cash, better weapons to keep the monsters at bay, etc. A solid farming system might well change a roguelike into something... similar, but different. Who's got the time for dungeon crawling, now that harvest time is coming?

There was a 7DRL along these lines called (quick check...) Defender by Ilya Bely that was similiar. IIRC you had to defend a village by an oncoming horde and depending on how much livestock you had left you could equip better items for you and the townsfolk or by more livestock for the future.  I think you could also place chicken or pigs around to defend them better.  No real farming though.

http://groups.google.com/group/rec.games.roguelike.development/browse_frm/thread/d2f08605435898f1/7868e1cde347d3b1?lnk=gst&q=defender#7868e1cde347d3b1

[Gamer_2k4]

I've always thought it'd be cool in a Roguelike to be able to research new spells and mix potions, which would be much of the same except that you'd have to search for reagents and perhaps seek out arcane magical knowledge as well.

Hmm...if you have a big enough world, you could do such things.  Let's call them goals.  Each goal would have a reward (learn the Armageddon spell, find the Sword of Divinity, etc.), that was clear to the player from the start, and a list of tasks available that may or may not aid the player in obtaining that reward (talk to the librarian, befriend the gnome city, etc.)  Of course, these tasks may require that the player has completed quests or other goals first.  Most goals would be mutually exclusive; that is, the tasks required to find the Sword of Divinity may send you down a path that prevents you from ever finding the Oblivion Cloak.  In this way, the player can have a different long-term experience each time, and it provides something to do besides killing monsters.

[Philosophical Gamer]

I posted a list of such roguelikes on my blog.

Some of the included games:

UnReal World - A survival roguelike set in Finland in the iron age.  You do do things like farming or hunting or setting traps, as someone mentioned earlier in the thread.  It's been in development for 10 years and is a very deep game.

The Doryen Chronicles/Doryen Library/Doryen Arena - A real-time roguelike game, which is being developed with a C/C++ roguelike library which is supposed to take the presentation and gameplay of rogues to "the next level", and which is available to anyone who wants to work with it.  I really believe that they can, this project is very interesting and is moving forward quickly.

Fatherhood - A rogue in which you must stop raging floodwaters from overtaking your town, with the help of your 3 sons.  Will they run off or help you?

There are several more on there, pretty much all are non-hack & slash rogues.

Personally I think that this is being discussed on two rogue boards at the same time because with people in the indie gaming scene producing games which are absolutely genre-bending right now, it's in the gaming consciousness that really anything at all is possible, in any game format.  Roguelikes have a unique potential to capture this same freeform kind of mindset in creating games, and the format of rogues also allows for rapid development of such games.