The 7DRL crop of the year

[Ari Rahikkala]

Strange that we have had so little 7DRL discussion on Roguetemple this year. Everyone busy on RGRA or just quietly developing their own?

Most of the 7DRLs I've tried this year have been more or less the usual dungeon crawlin' monster-hack-and-slashin' fare. There's a few highlights like the clever mechanic and nice atmosphere of God of Change. If you're going to implement a Xom-like chaos god in your roguelike, you might want to try out God of Change for inspiration. hmp's Dwarftown also does a lot of atmosphere with little material: Going from the cheerful sunlit forest to the dank dark rat cave lit here and there by glowing fungi is a pretty evocative moment. Like Madness from last year it's balanced to be pretty easy, so consider it a nice stroll through some ASCII environments.

So far, though, my favourite, if-you-only-play-one-7DRL-this-year-make-it-this game is kusemono. I already praised it on the newsgroup, but I'd just like to repeat that this game does being a stealthy killer really well, with some simple and cool mechanics to govern visibility and running. It's cleverly designed so that you don't need to hide around corners to take out a single enemy: You just need to walk in at an angle and run the last couple of steps. However making good use of the environment is essential to clearing (or going around) rooms with more ants in them.

The shield mechanic is cool too. Essentially the game will always forgive you one error, giving you a variety of tools that all require having the shield charged to use. Killing an ant recharges the shield, so you can use those tools a lot... but if you should ever make two mistakes in a row, you'll be next to an angry mutant ant with a discharged shield, meaning a pretty good chance of ending up dead. It's a far more relaxed approach than consumables that you have to manage over time, yet it still keeps the game breathing down on your neck regardless of how careful you try to be.

[jim]

Played God of Change. Brutal. Fun!

[Krice]

Were there any roguelikes this time?

[Ari Rahikkala]

I don't know, they only had a week to work at it. I bet you couldn't even teach yourself basic politeness in seven days.

(Ahem.)

Anyways, I gave Broken Bottle a try. It's... an interesting idea, yeah, but it didn't make me into a believer. Substance abuse, hallucinations and guilt in a post-apocalyptic world could make a really cool game that would really tug at your heartstrings... but this game wasn't that game. This was a roguelike whose mechanics happened to make references to those things. It's going to take something more clever and immersive than this to make an old gamer like me stop doing things like carefully manage just how drunk the character is and how often he uses stims for maximal efficiency.

But, yeah, you know, it's a 7DRL, and as 7DRLs go, it was a very well-made one, with good writing, tight balancing, and interesting concepts off the roguelike mainstream. Not exactly a loss if a game made in a week is merely good rather than a profound leap in the art of game design .

[Darren Grey]

Yeah, I need at least 2 weeks for that    Glad you liked the writing anyway, as in the time-frame that's what I put the most effort into (well that and hunting down numerous mystery bugs as I tried to learn Lua).  I didn't get anywhere near as much time as I would have liked to include clever gameplay, and I'm very surprised to hear you say it has tight balancing - I didn't put any time into that at all! 

[Krice]

I don't know, they only had a week to work at it. I bet you couldn't even teach yourself basic politeness in seven days.

That was a neutral question. I know I tried to bring my own game to somewhat more roguelike than it is now.

[Ari Rahikkala]

* Ari Rahikkala nods

Tried out a couple more games.

Deep Realm Heroes didn't seem to have much to it, but the choice of graphics is neat, and it plays in your browser.

Rook has one of the most infuriatingly creative gameplay mechanics I've ever seen in a roguelike: It disallows you from dying . Or, more precisely, you start with an item which checks all of your available moves and sees if taking them would kill you, and if it would, disallows that move. Even better, your other starting item makes all hits you take kill you immediately, so if you're wearing both, the game disallows you from ever taking a hit.

It's, uh, a clever idea, but I'm not sure how well it works. Mostly it seems to help with drunkards, which have a weird movement pattern that you can mostly only run away from, but that you can sometimes toss some hits into. Watching your allowed moves while wearing the items allows you to kill drunkards while not taking any damage yourself.  But I couldn't really imagine porting the feature to any other roguelike. Not just because it would be practically impossible to implement, but also because in most situations it'll simply be more frustrating than useful for what informational advantage it might give you.

[pat]

Yeah, I need at least 2 weeks for that    Glad you liked the writing anyway, as in the time-frame that's what I put the most effort into (well that and hunting down numerous mystery bugs as I tried to learn Lua).  I didn't get anywhere near as much time as I would have liked to include clever gameplay, and I'm very surprised to hear you say it has tight balancing - I didn't put any time into that at all! 

is there any easy way to change how it looks with t-engine? I gave it a go but I simply can't stand the cluttered look of tome with ascii on top of ascii and graphics jumping all over the place. I probably haven't dug deep enough to find the setting to make that change

[pat]

also, I thought that Alamut was very good in terms of setting and potential for a solid game. Nothing amazing in terms of gameplay just yet, but it looks like a good start and hopefully they stick at it. Basically it's looking like being "Assassin's Creed: The Roguelike".

[Ari Rahikkala]

Agreed. Not a lot of new gameplay in here... if anything they should be paying royalties to Thomas Biskup for the slavish reproduction of even the really bad mechanics in ADOM, like wandering around in the wilderness hoping to be ambushed by the right kind of monsters while your food is ticking down... but the choice of setting makes me hunger for more. UnReal World had some cool magic elements inspired by Finnish paganism, here's hoping that we'll be seeing some Keramat happen in Alamut. Not to mention all of the cool stuff you could find by digging around in Christian and Jewish mysticism. Though I'll be happy even if the game just develops the assassin theme more


e: Also, while I'm within a couple of thousand kilometers of the general area, are there any roguelikes with a Ramayana theme? I ask because that book was so hack-n-slash that you could do a couple of dozen weapon and monster descriptions by just directly quoting the text. It even has a scary final boss ready to menace you!

[Joshua Day]

Rook is mine.  It's good to see that people are playing!  The only other thing the orb+ring combo helps with is enemies hiding behind brush or doors.  I'll need to get ranged attacks, paralysis, item id, and a bunch of other stuff put together before it lives up to its full potential.  I absolutely agree that you couldn't add it to an existing game; the code and the game rules both have to be designed around it.  If you have any ideas, whether for enemies that would be interesting because of it or for other items that (like the ring) are subverted by the orb, I'd love to hear them.

I was frankly amazed how much variety I ended up with, since all the actual game content was a last day push.

[Darren Grey]

is there any easy way to change how it looks with t-engine? I gave it a go but I simply can't stand the cluttered look of tome with ascii on top of ascii and graphics jumping all over the place. I probably haven't dug deep enough to find the setting to make that change

I don't know if there's specific video settings to turn some of those things off, but you can make changes to the lua code itself.  To stop the ASCII on ASCII uncomment line 121 in game/modules/broken_bottle/class/Game.lua (to uncomment just remove the "--" from the start of the line).  This will also stop squares from having a background colour, but that only affects the last two areas of the game.  To remove most of the flying numbers/text go game/modules/broken_bottle/data/damage_types.lua and comment out lines 36 to 46 (surround them in "--[[ ]]--" brackets).  Tooltips are more tricky to remove, and I wouldn't advise doing so anyway, as they're a vital source of information sometimes, as well as providing flavour text for the game.

[Vanguard]

Vicious Orcs is kind of interesting.  It manages to be both trivially easy and frustratingly difficult at the same time.

[Ari Rahikkala]

So it seems there are some people on the newsgroup who are saying that Vicious Orcs is pretty much as easy whether you play it with or without the (spoiler-rot13)rivy(/spoiler-rot13) use of magic powers. To those people, I have a question to ask, and I will ask it on the forum because newsgroups don't quite allow me to express my incredulity properly:

WHAT GAME ARE YOU PLAYING?!?!?!

Or, I guess more usefully, it seems that there's an option for a conduct in this game. Follow the conduct, and you'll be pitifully running after sadistic kobolds that are happy to pincushion you while you try to get close to them, and once you do get close they'll be even happier to run off into a room with three more kobolds who'll also have bows, and even if you painstakingly figure out the tactics to deal with the kobolds in every situation, in the next dungeon the only way to deal with the most common enemy will be to go up to it and whack it before it makes more of itself. Don't follow the conduct and you'll be a magical powerhouse scorching everything left and right with fireballs and shrugging off wounds with a quick spell. I can attest to the latter being quite easy indeed, but what on all the groves and gardens of God's green Earth are people doing that's allowing them to progress toward anything but ignominious death when playing under the conduct?

[Darren Grey]

I wouldn't say it's as easy with the restriction, but it's still fairly easy overall to a careful gamer.  Kobolds become harmless with the correct approach.  Slimes are a non-threat after getting a good weapon upgrade.  Decent armour also helps a lot with many enemies.

One rather important point is that magic is not strictly forbidden.  Only a certain power source causes the bad ending.