Wednesday, 16 January 2008

Results for 'What features must a game have to be a roguelike?'; new poll

Of all the polls I've run, this has probably been the most interesting in terms of results. 136 people voted with the following choices.

80x24 screen
6 (4%)
Ascii instead of graphics
32 (23%)
Character advancement
68 (50%)
Character generation system
40 (29%)
Classes or skills
40 (29%)
Fantasy setting
8 (5%)
Hit points
30 (22%)
Keyboard based
44 (32%)
Line of sight
37 (27%)
Lots of enemies
45 (33%)
Lots of items
47 (34%)
Overhead view
53 (38%)
Permadeath
77 (56%)
Randomly generated levels
102 (75%)
Shopping
14 (10%)
Single @ to control
41 (30%)
Single dungeon with multiple floors
5 (3%)
Single player
38 (27%)
Turn based combat
77 (56%)
Unknown items / identify system
48 (35%)
Using items in unusual ways
42 (30%)
Other
15 (11%)

Now I don't think any of the above 'must' exist in a game for it to be a roguelike - I'm a big believer in prototype theory. But there's definitive clusters of essential (randomly generated levels), nearly essential (turn based combat, permadeath), and relatively important features that make interesting reading.

Let's focus on the 'character generation system' for the next two polls. Surprisingly, this is not a critical feature for roguelikes.

First the fun question: 'Choose a class'
at

3 comments:

  1. Unknown16 January 2008 at 19:30

    Missing option for the 'Choose a class' poll:

    Press '*' for a random class.

    Dario

    ReplyDelete
  2. Andrew Doull17 January 2008 at 11:29

    My apologies for not getting the Press '*' for a random class code written. It'll be a 1.0 release item - I'm running this game in version 0.9 at the moment.

    Of course, given the scoring system in this game is deterministic, having someone randomly select the highest score would miss the point of the game.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Valdelisle21 January 2008 at 21:39

    @dario: +1, I always take the random option, regardless of the game! (Press Tab for Stone Soup)

    ReplyDelete