Roguelike of the Year!

[guest509]

  The voting has started over at Doull's site, Ascii Dreams.
  http://roguelikedeveloper.blogspot.com/2011/12/request-for-votes-ascii-dreams.html

  Man this is exciting. How will JADE do? Still too new? What about Brogue? Good showing last year and some great updates this year. Freaking puzzles? Nice.
  What about the money RL's? Cardinal, 100 Rogues, Dreadmor, Binding of Isaac (if you don't think it counts don't vote for it). All of these are solid as a rock.
  The classics are still going strong as well. Crawl, TOME, etc...so many good ones this year it's hard to choose.

EDIT: Hey Getter if Doull decides to put up his own announcement here go ahead and delete mine or merge the threads or whatever. No worries.

[Darren Grey]

Don't forget you can vote for multiple titles at once - it's not all about the ToME4s and the Crawls, all the minor devs deserve a little praise too.  There have been a staggering number of releases this year.

[guest509]

  I even see my silly card game on there. Please don't vote for it. It may be a clone of Rogue in card game form but it hardly qualifies as a roguelike.

[getter77]

No telling who'll win this year, though I'd roughly suppose the Top 10 is likely to see some degree of shuffling at the very least.

[corremn]

Always a fun poll. Too bad I did not do a proper release this year  

Go IA FTW, DF sucks, peace

[guest509]

  With the diversity and sheer number of entrances I believe a category system of titles may be appropriate. I'll post when the raw data is available, unless Mr. Doull wants to run with it. I'll post the top 5 in each of these categories.

Best Single Developer
Best Multi Developer
Best Primarily Portable (though this can be a tough call on Powder)
Best New Game
Best Overall

  Note I chose these categories as they are easy to differentiate whether or not a roguelike belongs to a category or not. Top Roguelike-like or top graphical roguelike would be too open to argument. And I ain't about to engage in that noise.

[alexbard]

I completely agree with you. 185 completely different games, which should not and can not be compared with each other.

[mariodonick]

I completely agree with you. 185 completely different games, which should not and can not be compared with each other.

In theory I'd agree, too. However, that nice little poll is a very good measurement regarding awareness of roguelikes in general -- what are the games people know about and play and consider worth to voting.

That's the reason why some people don't want to have Dredmor on this list -- because its commercial and has, via Steam, a much greater impact on roguelike market. My hypothesis is that many of the people who voted for Dredmor haven't heard of other roguelikes at all, or never really got into the more traditional ones.

This observation and hypothesis is neither good nor bad -- it's just interesting.

I mean, even Dungeon Crawl and Dwarf Fortress have a hard fight against Dredmor.

[getter77]

I completely agree with you. 185 completely different games, which should not and can not be compared with each other.

In theory I'd agree, too. However, that nice little poll is a very good measurement regarding awareness of roguelikes in general -- what are the games people know about and play and consider worth to voting.

That's the reason why some people don't want to have Dredmor on this list -- because its commercial and has, via Steam, a much greater impact on roguelike market. My hypothesis is that many of the people who voted for Dredmor haven't heard of other roguelikes at all, or never really got into the more traditional ones.

This observation and hypothesis is neither good nor bad -- it's just interesting.

I mean, even Dungeon Crawl and Dwarf Fortress have a hard fight against Dredmor.

But think of the marvelous upside to it:  I'd strongly wager many of those voting for Dredmor exclusively now have this as their very first visit to the ASCII Dreams site, to say nothing of being confronted with such a massive list of likely unknown to them games alongside it.   As they revisit the site to see if Dredmor is winning or has won, they'll likely take note of the strongest competition---then perhaps they start checking these sites out, then said games out when they discover them to likely be free, then things snowball nicely down mountain with Dredmor having served as that which got the ball rolling as far as turning them onto Roguelikes period and Doull's Big List having given them some leads to follow on vaguely democratic acclaim. 

 

[Darren Grey]

Very nice point, getter.

Jo, if you're doing categories then 7DRLs should be a heading to itself.

[Z]

Regarding Dredmor: I don't understand why some people are against including it, you may like it or not, but it is a notable roguelike. It is a fault of the Actively Developing List maintainer that it was not included there, and this fault was fixed by adding an exception to the rules. Somebody add it to RogueBasin please, so that its enemies can rate it "@" on IRLDb.

Regarding categories: I think it's a nice idea. But probably we will know which categories make sense after the voting is finished. For example, an ASCII only category makes sense if the top three entries have graphical modes, single dev category makes sense only if the top three entries have multiple devs, and so on. Also unclear categories like "roguelike-like" might still have a clear winner.

New game category... I wonder what people mean when voting for an old game (e.g. DoomRL or DCSS). I think it means "the 2011 update is great", not "the game is great". One bad thing about the new game category is that it seems to discourage from the "releasy early" method (JADE could win if TB released it in, say, 2016, but since he released an early version this year, he cannot).

7DRL category... that's a very good category, but there is one potential problem (I don't know any example this year, but last year, Hydra Slayer was started as a 2DRL and then greatly extended, would it count as a 7DRL or not?) A bit similar for "portable games" (Hydra Slayer aims to be a good Android roguelike, but how do you tell whether people who vote for it agree with this or just like the desktop version?)

[mariodonick]

But think of the marvelous upside to it

Why "but"? I am totally FOR including DoD in the poll, because of the reasons you mention, and simply because it's a roguelike.

[getter77]

But think of the marvelous upside to it

Why "but"? I am totally FOR including DoD in the poll, because of the reasons you mention, and simply because it's a roguelike.

Oops, I meant the notion of people getting wary of a commercial entrant drawing a large crowd to potentially upset the apple cart of a poll that has generally been dominated by non-commercial projects.

I probably should have went with "Also" instead of "but" given we're on the same page, I'd just woken up!   

[Krice]

Some roguelike developers take donations. It's commercial so let's burn them!

[Legend]

I don't think including commercial games like Dredmor, Isaac, or Cardinal Quest would really upset the balance of the votes too much since, the whole thing will still be primarily voted on by the die-hard roguelike fans. Anyone who just happened to come across Dredmor and had not played roguelikes before or has no interest in them will not likely even bother to vote.

I don't see any reason why the commercial games should not be included. Although I suppose I would prefer focus on the non-comercial games for some reason I honestly can't quite put my finger on. It just "feels right" to  put more attention on games like Infra Arcana, Crawl, TSLM, Hydra Slayer, or any of the other non-commercial efforts. Some like Binding of Isaac and Desktop Dungeons, just don't really seem much like roguelikes as opposed to different games with some roguelike elements.

Although, I don't really see why some games that have already been around for quite some time are there like Crawl and DoomRL. I suppose DoomRL keeps changing so much it's a defferent game than when it started.

Wouldn't it make sens that if there are going to be separate categories that there should be separate voting for those categories?