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.
