Roguelike Radio podcast

[Legend]

woot. Frozen depths is one of my favorites.

***EDIT***
Good show guys. Frozen depths is one of my favorite rl's.

I was a bit disappointed that you didn't cover the dungeon features more. Such as the alters that you can place items on, the corpses that you can loot for items, the pools with something shiny at the bottom that you can decide to try and retrieve. These are some of my favorite parts of the game.

I agree that the shopkeepers can be too expensive for such the small amount of gold that the player ever manages to find during the game.

The blacksmith as well is a cool idea, but requires far more gold and raw materials to make anything really useful than the player can manage to find. 

[Z]

Yeah, this episode is very good. Many good points there.

Frozen Depths: I have played (and won) an early version, and I remember that I had a feeling that cold was dangerous, and I had to be careful about it. I had to wear roughly the best clothes to keep the cooling effect at a survivable level, and a single cursed clothes could cause trouble (IIRC curse halved the amount of warm up, so on later levels cursed cashmere would give only 2.5 instead of 5, which meant that you got 2.5 warmup less than recommended and cooled really fast). Also it was nice to do tricks to get good deals from sages (use only cheap ones and make them even cheaper using the wand of haggling). So I was happy with both how cooling and cash/id worked. I have not played newer versions, so I cannot say how it works now.

Food: I am happy that there was some critique of food. In ADOM food is a nuisance rather than a challenge (and so is gold: we have two sources of practically infinite gold, so you can consider everything you find in shops as yours). Of course you can do better, like Crawl does. Using some other interesting clock (freezing, corruption, torchlight, whatever) will make the game more interesting, and also more realistic, I think (should not a dragon have enough meat to make you happy for the rest of the game?)

Tactics: I disliked the tactics in ADOM. It was not that clever to switch to Berserker or Aggressive whenever fighting, and to Coward whenever doing anything else (in particular, mages would always cast spells on Coward; it would be better to have spellcasting affected by tactics too). I am trying to do something better in VoI (you distribute extra concentration points between your skills, and it takes some time to change the distributions), but this seems to be complicated, somehow.

[Ari Rahikkala]

Strongly agree on the pointlessness of the tactics feature in ADOM. It's nearly always obvious what tactics are best to use (save some oddities like using aggressive tactics to train shields). And then, even worse, once you've conditioned yourself to do things like always mash f7 before running away from a fight, you get frustrated when other roguelikes don't let you power up your character so cheaply like that .

Madness/Featurecreeper is a nice example of a game with a light clock, although one with the same problems as food clocks in most roguelikes: It's pretty tight early on, but later on you tend to have at least a torch if not a lamp available pretty much all of the time.

edit: On the portability of console roguelikes, is it not possible to just make platform-specific batch files that open a terminal window with the game in it? It's not pretty but I know that at least DoomRL's Linux version does that.

[Darren Grey]

Latest episode is now up, focussing on Dungeons of Dredmor:

http://roguelikeradio.blogspot.com/2011/10/episode-6-dungeons-of-dredmor.html

[Darren Grey]

Special interview with Ido Yehieli:

http://roguelikeradio.blogspot.com/2011/10/interview-with-ido-yehieli.html

Now that we've had a good few episodes and had a special interview I'm curious to get more feedback.  Has the tone been right so far?  Should we stop concentrating on specific games so much?  What would you like to see change, or indeed stay the same?

[NON]

I think the show is great, no changes necessary. Just hope you keep it up.
Maybe some sort of summary at the end, what you think the game's strong points and weak points are.

[Darren Grey]

New episode on 100 Rogues:

http://roguelikeradio.blogspot.com/2011/10/episode-7-100-rogues.html

We even convinced the developer of the game to join in the discussion 

[Darren Grey]

New episode about character progression systems in roguelikes:

http://roguelikeradio.blogspot.com/2011/10/episode-8-progression-systems.html

This goes into a fair amount of detail about the various systems found across the major roguelikes and some of the minors, and some of the positives and negatives about them.

[Z]

Technical: the mp3 download has incomplete tags, which is a bit annoying (hard to find the episode I want if they are all titled simply "Roguelike Radio" and the genre and album are "Unknown"). I have learned how to subscribe to the podcast from a music player (other than iTunes) and I see that the tags are assigned correctly when I download using this method.

POWDER: POWDER has skills.

ADOM: there are several instances where who you are influences what you find. As you said, mages get much more spellbooks than fighters, which makes a big difference. The manual says that bards have a "knack to stumble upon strange items", I don't know what exactly that means and whether it actually means anything for gameplay. There are talents to find more stuff. Corpse preservation, gemmology, and herbalism make it easier to find respective things in respective ways. A high perception value leaves more missiles lying around (at least according to 0.8.1 changelog), I would not be surprised if it also affected other item finds.

I think such things are OK only if they make sense from a logical point of view. Let's say I get a level with an ant hive (ADOM ants mine the walls), but skip it without killing the ants. Then I learn the gemmology skill, and go back to the ant hive. I would not find gems in this case, but I would find them if I learned the gemmology skill before the ants did their mining work. So this makes no logical sense and I would like it to be designed in a more logical way (it would be better if the gems did exist but did not show on the screen, and it would be nice if you could hire a dwarf to look for the gems for you). The concept of not all monsters leaving a corpse behind also makes no logical sense for me (it would be better if they all left a corpse, unless killed in some disintegrative way, but sometimes this corpse would not produce a desired effect when consumed).

Crawl: Well I don't understand why victory dance is ridiculous and why it was removed in the new versions of DCSS. Are all people who train in gyms or do homework ridiculous? Maybe the system was not perfect, but still, training by use is better than improving a skill for no reason IMO.

General: You seem to be strongly opposing "too much junk" in some games. Well, I believe junk items are useful for flavor,  role playing, and logic/realism purposes. Crawl shows items that it considers useless for my character in black. I think that's a good design. Better than pretending that the useless items just don't exist (especially if they could become useful in specific circumstances). For a non-Troll giant clubs are useless, and for Trolls most of the armor is useless, but I would like them to be shown, so that I know what I am losing and what I am gaining by plaing a Troll.

[ido]

Crawl: Well I don't understand why victory dance is ridiculous and why it was removed in the new versions of DCSS. Are all people who train in gyms or do homework ridiculous? Maybe the system was not perfect, but still, training by use is better than improving a skill for no reason IMO.

Doing homework & going to the gym aren't fun (for me anyway) so I wouldn't add those to a game either

At the end I think it's more important for games to be fun than to make sense (up to a point), and victory dancing wasn't much fun.

[Z]

Yes, making training really realistic would not be a good idea. Training should be very quick, otherwise it would become boring. IME the act in Crawl involved performing just a few times, the free XP pool got back to 0 very quickly. But it still makes more sense for me if training is done by performing (possibly even losing some resources*) rather than by choosing it from a menu. And it is fun for me. I need to relax after defeating a dangerous enemy.

* a quick idea for a skill training mechanics: you can use a ruby either to cast a fire spell, or to "train", which makes all the fire spells in the future stronger. Thus, you need to balance your rubies between casting and training.

[Legend]

I noticed a couple new episodes that haven't been posted here yet.

One is an interview with the developer of Brogue
http://roguelikeradio.blogspot.com/2011/10/interview-brian-walker-aka-pender.html

The other is about Powder
http://roguelikeradio.blogspot.com/2011/10/episode-9-powder.html

[Darren Grey]

Yeah, whoops, should keep up the links here.  Another one today, an interview with Dungeons of Dredmor developers Gaslamp Games:

http://roguelikeradio.blogspot.com/2011/10/interview-with-gaslamp-games-developers.html

Quite a funny interview overall.

[Darren Grey]

New episode talking about deity systems:

http://roguelikeradio.blogspot.com/2011/11/episode-10-deity-systems.html

Just Jeff and I talking in this one, and on a fairly limited topic, but I think there's some interesting points covered for those interested in making a game with a prayer system.

[Z]

A pity you have not mentioned IVAN, it might have the best deity system known to roguelikes. There are currently 15 deities, each of whom has their own personality, and each monster, item, and material is attached to some deity, so they are well tied to the gameplay. You can get various benefits by worshipping the gods (you can pray each 3 or 4 hours), and you can worship several gods at once, but they need to like each other, which depends on their alignments. So you could for example worship the three neutral gods (Silva, the goddess of nature, Loricatus, the god of smithing, and Mellis, the god of trade), or you could go slightly more lawful and worship Sophos, the god of knowledge (who is weakly lawful) instead of Mellis, who is slightly chaotic. Or you could try to worship all four, hoping that Sophos will like you for being friends with Loricatus and Silva, despite that you are also friends with Mellis (although this could be a bit more risky). There is a Wisdom stat, and a higher value would allow you to increase the range of gods that you are worshipping (so you could successfully worship 5 gods at once, for example).

ADOM: It is not true that the only way you know about the Paragon of Order challenge is by reading spoilers. There is a fortune cookie which says "They say that a paragon of Order must not violate his beliefs by any means", which is a big hint that there might be a reward for committing no chaotic acts*. I think that, in golden days of ADOM, many people have tried the challenge and get the reward, but they all failed due to another requirement, which was not hinted about anywhere and IMO is not well thought out: that no lawful being can die by any means. They all tried to approach the challenge in a logical way: start lawful and never do anything wrong -- which would cause all lawful beings to be enemies of your enemies, and it would be quite sure that a few dwarves and blink dogs would die. The truth was discovered later by unlawful techniques, and shortly after the challenge was won (actually both of these were done by me), and some time later there was another person who claimed to win some more difficult challenge which involved getting the Platinum Girdle. I don't know what happened later, as I have left the ADOM community (I understand that Darren has won).

General: the choice of subjects for the podcast seems biased towards commercial games (after the Binding of Isaac there will be 8 episodes about commercial games (two of which are semi-roguelikes) and 5 about non-commercial ones)... one thing I like about roguelikes is how such great games as NetHack, Angband, ADOM, and Crawl (I am not sure about Rogue itself) have been created by developers for themselves and people like them, not for the masses, and can be played for free, as the developers simply want people to play their creations (and if you want to thank them, you can donate, discuss the games, promote them, or release your own free roguelikes). Commercial bias goes the other way...

* I remember an opinion that you cannot win ADOM without spoilers, as there are lots of things you do not know about. IMO this is not true, as all the important things are covered by fortune cookies, Mad Minstrel songs, Ancient Dwarf's hints, and general logic.