A suggestion...

[betamin]

Hello, Im just a regular roguelike player, I registered here because I had something on my mind about the current roguelike scene.

 From what I've seeing, most new roguelikes end up being short, simple games that get abandoned shortly after they reach a playable state. That's cool since there are some good, fun games like that, but the best experience I get from playing a roguelike is from the major ones like crawl and nethack. I guess one cause for the creation of these short games is lack of motivation and the difficulty of making them, but other factor is the 7 day roguelike contest, since a lot of developers enter it they focus a lot in doing short games.

Maybe Im alone in saying this, but I think it would be a great improvement if more of the major games would be made. My suggestion is: Why dont you make a 6 months (as  TEAM contest, where at the end of it they should make a "major" (this definition should be better specified but that's something minor) roguelike?

You could make it so you would show the development each month, you could add challenges like "add the feature that people decided" and so on to spice it a bit.

What do you think?

[Darren Grey]

The problem with big, deep roguelikes is they tend to have their own dedicated fanbases.  There isn't much of a general roguelike audience that actually plays lots of different roguelikes in a lot of depth - everyone has their favourite few.  It's hard for growing projects to maintain any sort of interest unless they're already polished enough to bring in the crowds, so to speak.

Having said that there are plenty of good sized games in development.  TOME4 is possibly the most active example at the moment, but there are plenty of others like Triangle Wizard and Dance of Death.  Every now and then a new one crops up.

The Annual Roguelike Release Party was established this year to encourage more big project releases, and to make developers working on secret projects to come out of the shadows a bit.  It had some nice results for its first year, and I'm hoping that future years will be even more successful.  Having monthly reports in the run-up to it probably wouldn't be a bad idea to get developers to get more prepared in advance.

[betamin]

Haha I guess what you say about fanbases is true. I never heard about that release party project but sounds very cool.

Maybe you could do a contest where teams pick a different incomplete or abandoned  roguelike and try to take it to "1.0" in 6 months haha, that would be cool actually.

[Krice]

Teamwork could bring faster and better results, but it seems to be difficult in roguelike scene. I guess it's because there is a lot of work involved and also the question of who decides about the content of the game. I would be more than happy to give the technical development to someone else.

For me it looks like many developers are fine with 7DRL projects, but I have always tried to do bigger roguelikes. I started one 1996 (Kaduria) and another project in 2008 (Teemu). Both of them are on their way to become roguelikes.

[betamin]

You could make a votation or an organism that decide what you put into the game before the contest starts, but I imagine teamplay could be really difficult between programmers that live far away.

About the 7d contest, I think it shouldnt dissapear, just that it would be cool to have another variant of a contest.

[Krice]

but I imagine teamplay could be really difficult between programmers that live far away.

That's not a problem these days. We have this thing called internet. One special problem related to roguelikes is the long development time. People are notorious for changing their mind while they would be willing to join a team at first. It's frustrating when someone then decides to leave the team after let's say two weeks or months. Big roguelikes can take years to make. Also, some people leave roguelike development completely, when they get involved with real life (studying, job, girlfriend etc.) That's what happened to Thomas Biskup. He seems to have three minutes in a year to write in blog or forum that he's going to do something about ADOM and JADE. He needs to stop fooling himself.