Runner up for Ascii Dreams Roguelike of the Year 2011: Dungeons of Dredmor

The eyebrows have it.

Dungeons of Dredmor has proven beyond any shadow of a doubt that it is possible to release a commercially successful roguelike in 2011. At the time development on this game started it must have felt like a leap of faith, but the humour and character-filled visual design of the game have proven to be not just a successful gateway drug to other roguelikes, but hugely popular in its own right.

For many hardened roguelike players, Dredmor feels like a roguelike, simplified, and this has proven to be a divisive issue, but that view ignores the smart decisions behind the unique skill system, which encourages you to tweak your character build every time you see the 'Congratulations. You have died.' game over screen. It also ignores the fact that a simpler roguelike is exactly what is needed to bring the pleasures of the genre to a wider audience, and that Dredmor gets the user interface right in a way that many seemingly complicated roguelikes have been unable to do.

And then there is the continued post-release support, and the fact the game is priced so ridiculously low, that make it hard not to recommend you go out and buy it.

You can get Dungeons of Dredmor on Steam (PC + OSX) or Desura (PC + Linux), read the developers blog and visit the forums.

Winner of Ascii Dreams Roguelike of the Year 2011: T.o.M.E. 4

Last year's winner has returned.

T.o.M.E. 4 has fended off commercial roguelikes (Dungeons of Dredmor), previous winners (Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup) and new entrants (JADE) to win roguelike of the year for the second consecutive year, becoming at the same time the first roguelike to win more than once. Congratulations to DarkGod and his team for making such a great game and the T.o.M.E. 4 community for rallying around it.

With an incredible number of releases this year, it now features a beautiful tile set designed by Shockbolt, one of the most advanced user interfaces of any roguelike and a friendly community welcoming to new players.

Roguelike Radio will be featuring T.o.M.E. 4 for the first episode in 2012.

You can download ToME here and visit the forums and read the wiki here.

A small example of why programmers can't do UI design

The quiver is a user interface feature in later versions of Angband which allows you to carry multiple stacks of ammunition more easily, without having to dedicate one inventory slot to each different type of ammunition. As a part of this, it automatically assigns a number key to each stack, so you can select the first stack by pressing 0, the second stack by pressing 1 and so on...

Wait a sec.

The first stack by pressing 0?

Well, as it turns out, the quiver was designed by programmers, not UI designers. The problem here is that the character encoding used is ASCII, which assigns character codes for the numeric keys from 0 to 9, not from 1 to 0. So the elegant programming solution is to figure out the character code by subtracting the value for 0 from the actual number typed in to determine which number is used. This 'elegant' solution puts 0 first. Not only that, but for various reasons (e.g. array indexes) programmers are used to counting from 0.

This is despite the fact that every single person involved in the design of the quiver, the various reimplementations across multiple variants, and pretty much every single person who has played using the quiver has the number keys running across the top of their keyboard in the order 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 0.

Holidays

If you're going to release a new version of your game, don't do it just before you go on holiday.

I've seen at least 2 roguelikes fall into this trap this year...

(Oh, and Merry Xmas).

Fighting words

I may have started something.

I've switched to moderated comments for the moment

Due to incessant comments about how awesome Dungeon of Dredmor is.

Seriously, you should stop praising the game that much.

(Oh, and the Binding of Isaac fan boys. Just crazy.)

Because there are not enough lists of that sort of thing

This stuff is gold for procedural generation.

Help wanted (svn2git)

berlios.de is shutting down at the end of the year, which means I need to migrate to alternative hosting like github.

Unfortunately, I don't have a computer with an OS capable of running git* (I've got Vista, and OSX 10.4), which means I can't run svn2git to convert the repository across. So I was wondering if anyone wants to volunteer to do the conversion to save me having to spend a day or two downloading then building a virtual Linux box then going through the package shuffle. From my brief understanding of git, I believe I can then clone your git repository (put it on github) and make the clone the 'official' version.

Warning: Unangband's SVN repository is 'quite large'. The Github online SVN conversion tool notes that the conversion process may time out for large repositories. When I've attempted to use this tool, it appears to take too long (at least an hour) simply trying to get the list of subversion authors.

* I'm using egit which is the Eclipse implementation running on top of jgit. If anyone has done a jgit based svn2git conversion, please let me know.

[Edit: Thanks for the quick responses. I've got someone running an svn2git conversion now...]

IndieGames.com top ten

IndieGames.com has released their list of top ten independent games for the year. Dungeons of Dredmor is in 6th place. The Binding of Isaac is in 2nd place.

Congratulations to the developers of both roguelikes.

His year in roguelikes

For those of you undecided about which roguelike to vote for, you may want to see Adam Smith's recommendations over at Rock Paper Shotgun.

Request for votes: Ascii Dreams Roguelike of the Year 2011

185 roguelikes have qualified this year: that's a different roguelike being released less than every two days, and yet again, another record number (116 last year).

How did the roguelikes qualify?

The list was taken from the roguelike releases announced on the Rogue Basin news section between December 16th 2010 and December 12th 2011 and from the list of Actively Developing Roguelikes maintained by Michał Bieliński. From this year, I'll also be including any roguelike which has been discussed on Roguelike Radio and released this year, but otherwise wasn't included in the above list. I've done this to include two notable games (Dungeons of Dredmor and the Binding of Isaac), which would not otherwise have qualified.

What about 'x'?

Make sure you announced your roguelike on Rogue Basin for next year.

What about the 7 day roguelikes?

I decided to exclude any 7 day roguelikes that weren't announced separately. However, most of them were on Michał Bieliński's list.

What's the prize?

Pride. And a sexy logo - if you want one. You can see the winning 2007 logo on the Dwarf Fortress links page. Other winners are free to request them, but haven't done so. Logo designs for this year are welcome.

Having a competition is a dumb idea/offensive/stupid when you can't police the results.

Yep. Doesn't stop it being fun. You can vote for multiple different roguelikes. The idea here is that you will be encouraged to go out and download a roguelike that other people consider interesting, not that there is any kind of real competition element involved.

Occult Chronicles roguelike

You may remember from a recent episode of Roguelike Radio that I speculated that Vic Davies of Forgotten Lore was working on a roguelike but his next game, Occult Chronicles, wasn't that game. It turns out I was wrong. It is.