Played weird Roguelike in my dreams last night...

[NeedsFoodBadly]

Last night I had this weird dream were I was playing a Roguelike called Aynrand (Angband).  It was this dungeon crawler based pretty much on Ayn Rand's novel, "Atlas Shrugged".  It was set in the 1950s eras, where you could pick from various classes of suit-wearing, cigar-puffing, (Penguin-like) business tycoons wandering through randomly generated city streets and industrial settings beating down poor factory workers and picking up stacks of dollar bills instead of gold.

I swear I'm not making this up.  Don't ask me how this crept into my subconscious, I don't know.  I've never even read Atlas Shrugged but the basic premise is a 1950s society where the government is waging war on the poor business elite of the world by taxing and regulating them.  To fight back, a group of CEOs go on strike and refuse to share their "genius" with the world.

Atlas Shrugged has been brought up in modern parallels and there was a movie made recently as well.  But IMHO, the fallacy of Atlas Shrugged when comparing it to modern day is in Atlas Shrugged the government sought to control industry.  Today, you have only to look inside the pockets of any politician to see that industry controls our government.

Anyway...my dreams aren't normally political commentary...maybe tomorrow night I can dream about just playing Spelunky or something.

P.S. Whaddya think?  Would it be worth making?

[getter77]

Might as well---we almost had a Roguelike based on A Modest Proposal.

[NeedsFoodBadly]

Might as well---we almost had a Roguelike based on A Modest Proposal.

Lol, I wonder how that would play out.

[getter77]

I forget the original details, it was due to come out back on ARRP 2011 but all things seemingly went silent on the applicant's end.   

[guest509]

  I've heard of this. Dreaming about Roguelikes. I've heard it talked about on roguelike radio. I think it was the Binding of Issac episode. Can't be certain. It's never happened to me though. Sounds freaky.

[corremn]

Yeah I have dreamed about roguelikes on a few occasions.  Cant really remember the specifics of them now though.  Next time it happens I will try to remember... Although I am certain they never had a plot like NeedsFoodBadly dream.  Please turn that into a reality.  Surely the dream was a sign from the roguelike gods.

Plus A Modest Proposal could make a cool 7drl.

[NeedsFoodBadly]

Yeah I have dreamed about roguelikes on a few occasions.  Cant really remember the specifics of them now though.  Next time it happens I will try to remember... Although I am certain they never had a plot like NeedsFoodBadly dream.  Please turn that into a reality.  Surely the dream was a sign from the roguelike gods.

Plus A Modest Proposal could make a cool 7drl.

This actually happens to me on a pretty regular basis.  Whatever thing, subject or game I'm currently obsessed with has a tendency to creep into my dreams.  I'm also a pretty lucid dreamer and have a knack for remembering my dreams a lot of the time in astonishing detail.

I used to regularly post to a dream journal I kept here and that was stuff was just insane, not only were the dreams insane but the level of details, faces, places and words I would remember was also crazy.

[Z]

On a tangential topic, I think there could be a roguelike where the PC has dreams. Like, you get moved to a weird location, where you get killed or not, and some reward would be given after you wake up, for example a deadly dream could not heal HP, or a good dream could give you some visions. From the designer's point of view, dreams would be a way to create a situation where you could take deadly risks or find/use up rare resources without unbalancing the game.

[getter77]

Z has a point here, essentially taking some of the stuff that can happen in Elona when you sleep to the next logical step beyond a check against your perks and dumb luck.

[NeedsFoodBadly]

On a tangential topic, I think there could be a roguelike where the PC has dreams. Like, you get moved to a weird location, where you get killed or not, and some reward would be given after you wake up, for example a deadly dream could not heal HP, or a good dream could give you some visions. From the designer's point of view, dreams would be a way to create a situation where you could take deadly risks or find/use up rare resources without unbalancing the game.

A Total Recall/13th Floor/Matrix/Inception/Kirby's Dreamland sorta thing?  That could be cool.

[AgingMinotaur]

Dream sequences (or indeed other variants of "a story within a story", it doesn't have to be in the form of a dream) could also be used to impart information to the player – stuff like map layouts, vulnerabilities of uniques, etc. The goal of a dream (from a gameplay point of view) could then be to find out as much as possible before the sequence ends.

As always,
Minotauros