How you guys feel about the new wave of rougelike games?

[Darren Grey]

Not to hijack the thread, but some context and hard numbers regarding getter77's claim:

On KS video games from 2009~2013: "In total, 37% of successfully funded projects have fully delivered a finished product to backers. A further 8% have delivered a partial product (i.e. part 1 of a promised full game, or a mobile tie-in app). 3% of successful projects have been formally cancelled, while a further 2% have been formally placed in hiatus. A total value of $21,641,800 has so far been sunk into successful Kickstarter projects that have failed to deliver, while the total value of projects that have delivered is less than $17,000,000."

A 37% success rate in seed-funding projects is really good! And if you're not an idiot about throwing money at things, and you pick and choose projects that have good demos and reliable managers then you'll see a much higher success rate. My own success rate of backed projects is over 80%.

People seem to be very depressed in this thread. I don't see why. We have an amazing wealth of history we're sitting on, and many of the classics are receiving new leases of life thanks to crowdfunding or active fanbases. Meanwhile we have lots of excellent experimental 7DRLs each year that push the boundaries and innovate mechanics, and some of them get turned into full-fledged games in their own right. And on top of that full-fledged games like CataclysmDDA, Caves of Qud, Sproggiwood, Dungeonmans, ToME4, Cogmind, The Great Expedition, Ultima Ratio Regum, and whatever else is being worked on in the shadows.

Ten years ago things looked fairly dark for the genre, but things have picked up massively of late. I'd say that the release rate of new traditional roguelikes is higher than its ever been, and the design quality is far better. The community is growing, partly driven by those introduced through roguelites. The ability to make a living on roguelike games is a really big deal, and in spite of that we still have Angband and DCSS under active and sustainable development. The newly released Angband 4.0 may also start a new wave of variants with its better structured code.

The whole "new wave" of roguelikelikes I don't care much for myself, beyond what design lessons they can teach us and what players they drive our way. Much more important is that the genre has been resilient and is finding new strengths. This is a very good time to be a roguelike fan!

[jim]

What a great thread! I've missed this place. And I feel vindicated that FINALLY other people are admitting that DoD kinda sucked.

[mushroom patch]

Man, I'd forgotten about this thread. And this guy... smh

Had a long, point by point response to this nonsense about video game music and voice actors, but fuck it. Here's what I have to say about the stance and attitude voiced by Holstety:

For roguelikes and other, let me say, "craft" video games to flourish, we need a more sophisticated consumer. More sophisticated artistically and critically, in their ability to appreciate works for what they are without a catalog in the back of a printed instruction book informing them that recordings of the game's sound track performed by the Kyoto Chamber Orchestra or w/e are available for $59.95, plushies of cute monsters from the game etc. More sophisticated economically in their understanding that good work doesn't come free and that 20 USD isn't actually a lot of money. More sophisticated in their awareness that buying a game is not just about the particulars of that game, but also the work that would follow it, not just by the same author but by all others who might contribute to the genre.

And to clear just one thing up:

You'd be a fool not to value your time. You're free to call consumers cheap for not buying your roguelikes and rail against AAA for being shlocky shit, but the truth is, you've chosen a TERRIBLE market to try and monetize and people will always pay for something they desire. Good luck trying to bend a market habituated to free games towards paid games while creating content that offers very little new, at a price point you're likely just making up on the spot without any frame of reference. You might be able to live off it, and maybe one day I'll write a post that's shorter than a children's book.

To be clear, I don't think AAAs are schlocky shit. There have even been a few I liked. I do think a lot of "new wave" "roguelikes" are schlock though as I've described upthread. There is no contradiction in saying that new, interesting work showing genuine continuity with the genre should be funded by roguelike fans and saying exploitative trash you see in app shops and steam should be shunned.

[Aleksanderus]

I don't like the new "roguelikes".
I'm not saying that they're bad but they're just not roguelikes.
And also I've noticed that roguelikes are beginning to be paid and I don't like where this is going
I will just tell you an example: You're searching for some good roguelike and you have found a paid roguelike on steam (becouse this is the source of that disease) so you bought it and you play it for a while and... The game is really bad and you are raging that you spent 20$ on it.
And after that event you again search for a roguelike and again you found one but this time it's free so you download it and the game was bad too so you just delete it and no rage becouse the game was free.
Situation like that happened to me when I bought dungeons of Dredmor and I didn't like it and the money was lost forever.

[jcd748]

If people, like me, don't want to see the concept of a roguelike continue to be appropriated as the shortest path between between getting a BA in computer science and having a game on the market, new, exemplary work has to appear and new voices must appear with it to oppose the current establishment.

We've had decades for this to happen.  Do you really expect a champion to arise from within the proletariat to shake off the shackles of the establishment any time soon?

Nope. To some extent, it's an economic problem. There's no money in making actual roguelike games, yet the skills that go into making good ones can be put to profitable use elsewhere. Anyone who produces anything good is therefore likely to disappear within a few years. Meanwhile, the one guy who views it as a sort of religious vocation but still produces good stuff doesn't even call his game a roguelike.

On some level, it's probably necessary to find an economically viable model that can still produce the genuine roguelike article, as opposed to dumbed down, heavily commercialized schlock for steam. I think this has to involve a return to multiuser systems and a move away from the DOS shareware catalogue model.

I just wanted to say that I agree wholeheartedly with what you've posted.  I've been working on my own game for four years now, a few hours a week.  Progress is slow, but it comes.  I'm tired of boring, unambitious, cutesy little games, so I've been working on a large, ridiculous, unbalanced roguelike of my own.  It's curses only, free to download, MIT licensed, and hopefully easily moddable, angband-style, once it's actually fun.  It's got elves and dragons and all the stuff that other roguelike devs think are boring and cliche, despite the fact that everyone seems to play dcss, tome, and similar games.

Mostly I'm tired of looking at the announcements page and seeing $ after $ after $, all sorts of games released for Steam with no source and ugh.

Most of what I love about the genre has been leeched out by the countless little games that exist to get greenlit.  I'm tired of this, and I hope my own game will stand as an example against that.  I'm never going to make any money off it, and that's fine, because I want to make something interesting and deep and beautiful instead.

[Holsety]

I'm never going to make any money off it, and that's fine, because I want to make something interesting and deep and beautiful instead.

Include a donation link/reference somewhere? You'll probably still never make any money off it, but who knows.

[jcd748]

I'm never going to make any money off it, and that's fine, because I want to make something interesting and deep and beautiful instead.

Include a donation link/reference somewhere? You'll probably still never make any money off it, but who knows.

Realistically, I think I get around 100 downloads/month.  Rough estimates based on my HTTP traffic.  I don't have a huge audience.  And realistically, I'm happy plugging away, slowly making something big and rough around the edges.  I would think long and hard about putting up a "Donate" link as with one in place, I would feel less able to work on whatever I wanted at the moment.

[Kyzrati]

While it's true you wouldn't get much in donations (evidence from other devs doing this points to possibly accumulating donations in the hundreds of dollars over time), in terms of your own feeling, note that from what I've seen donations of this sort (from the donator's point of view) are not intended as "here's money to keep you developing" or "hope you do XYZ next," and are instead as a reward for time they've already spent with the game and gotten a lot of enjoyment out of it. In other words, more a way to say thank you rather than support future features.

But if that feeling would affect you regardless and you don't need it anyway, no sense in bothering. Sometimes interested players are really keen to effectively "buy you a meal/drink/whatever" remotely, though

[jcd748]

While it's true you wouldn't get much in donations (evidence from other devs doing this points to possibly accumulating donations in the hundreds of dollars over time), in terms of your own feeling, note that from what I've seen donations of this sort (from the donator's point of view) are not intended as "here's money to keep you developing" or "hope you do XYZ next," and are instead as a reward for time they've already spent with the game and gotten a lot of enjoyment out of it. In other words, more a way to say thank you rather than support future features.

But if that feeling would affect you regardless and you don't need it anyway, no sense in bothering. Sometimes interested players are really keen to effectively "buy you a meal/drink/whatever" remotely, though

I guess.  I mean, I donated a lot of money to ADOM via Indiegogo, not because I wanted the rewards, but because TB created the most influential game I've ever played, and a hundred bucks is nothing when we're talking many hundred hours of my life - so many nights watching the sweet glow of the ascii on my old all-in-one 486.  Maybe it's something I'll do later, but it feels really hard to justify right now, when  my game is honestly in a very alpha-ish state.

Honestly, having a reported win has been the biggest thrill for me so far.  Not just that some people have downloaded it and given it a whirl, which in itself is pretty amazjng, but that people have actually kept playing and fighting through and reporting all the bugs they've found.

Have you put up a similar button for Cogmind or any of your other projects?

[destroythecore]

Caves of Qud and Ultima Ratio Regum have been pushing things forward quite a bit. I barely play classics aside from Dungeon Crawl.

[Kyzrati]

Have you put up a similar button for Cogmind or any of your other projects?

Nope. Donations to individuals are illegal here. PayPal isn't allowed to provide that service--a big chunk of their business here was shut down years ago, and another chunk just this year, because they are unregulated and not a proper financial institution.

This is part of the reason that I decided to forge ahead and get the core of the game to a fun state first, to a point where I'd feel comfortable charging for it under an EA model.

If I could ask for donations, I would've done that long ago. (But honestly, I wouldn't feel safe doing it with any serious amount of money because PayPal is totally untrustworthy, and there's little to no recourse if and when they decide to screw you, which they have a history of doing. Nowadays there are more options beyond PayPal, too, though not operating where I live.)

Regarding donation amounts, I've seen and heard numbers from multiple other devs over the years.

[Krice]

What new wave? I haven't seen roguelik.. oh, wait, Nethack 3.6.0 was released. So that's one. What else? ADOM of course, but.. it sucks.

[Avagart]

ADOM sucks? Hell no. Maybe development (and background of dev process) of ADOM sucks, but game 'as it'?

As 'new wave of roguelike games' I understand 'this lots of new games called roguelikes because is more roguelike-like than roguelike like^n'.

[Krice]

ADOM sucks? Hell no.

It's like a unneccessarily bloated Nethack clone without any original ideas, but slightly worse than Nethack (which also isn't that good game).

[akeley]

From the Kaduria wiki entry:

"game was originally much like NetHack."