Time for the postmortem

Björn Ritzl has put together a list of the 7DRL successes and failures here. I've played only one so far (Ido Yehieli, Tom Whetnall and John Cleary's Fuel) - there's a big list to get through.

Wow

This will change how you think about programming (especially the game design example). Gabriel Florit has written an open source version. d3 example. (From the d3 Google Group). [Edit: or you could try this one instead.].

Good luck

To everyone participating in the 7DRL this year. Google Plus page, Facebook page Facebook event, Twitter #7DRL2012, 7drl.org community blog, rec.games.roguelike.development, TIG source thread, Roguelike Radio episodes, Rogue Basin page, Temple of the Roguelike thread. Feel free to contribute other links or discussion.

GDC coverage

If you are not at GDC, the best coverage I've seen this year is by David Sirlin. Day 0, day 1, day 2.

A Conversation with Dan Kline

I had the opportunity to sit down earlier today with Dan Kline, game developer and frequent commenter on this blog, and have a great chat about procedural content generation in games. He's posted it up on his blog: feel free to pop over and have a listen.

Links to up and coming roguelike(-like)s

Below is a collection of links for the roguelikes and roguelike-likes in the latest poll on the basis it is likely you won't have heard of them. I'll be adding additional ones as people suggest them:

• Auro: The Golden Prince
• Borderlands 2
• Cult: Awakening of the Old Ones
• Diablo III
• FTL
• Minicraft 2, or whatever Notch decides to call it (apparently Minitale - guess I missed that press release)
• Mysterious Castle
• Red Rogue
• Spelunky XBLA
• The Archive
• The Occult Chronicles
• Torchlight II
• Unnamed Team Meat Project
• Unnamed Terry Cavanagh Tigjam UK Project
• Wrath of the Lamb

Results for 'Which error handling method do you prefer'; new poll

Thanks to all 59 of you who voted (wow! That's a lot of developers). The results were:

Assert	18 (30%)
Try/Throw/Catch	41 (69%)

For the next poll, which up and coming roguelike (-like) are you the most looking forward to at the moment? I've deliberately picked games which are on the unconventional side; this isn't intended to be a JADE versus the next Incursion poll. Links to the games will be in the next post.

Roguelike Strategy Games

I'm surprised there's not more games that explore the fertile boundaries between roguelikes (which are almost always tactical) and the strategy genre. The latest Three Moves Ahead podcast features Conquest of Elysium 3, which the panel headed by Troy Goodfellow (a well known Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup fan) describe the game as a strategy roguelike in the sense that it is a strategy game firmly embedded in roguelike randomness: not just procedurally generated maps, but the emergent strangeness and unexpected behaviours of the genre we love. 7 Cities of Gold is cited as the closest relative, but I immediately thought of Expedition: The New World which is inspired by the same source, but much more in the roguelike tradition. I guess Pirates would be the other series to be so obviously inspired by these ideas. Strange Worlds of Infinite Space and its sequel hew to the same kind of play, but the playfulness and over-randomness of Weird Worlds means that the strategy element falls away. I'm have a feeling Space Rangers and Space Rangers 2 (despite containing a full RTS sub game) and Space Rangers 2.5 Spore do the same.

Care to suggest others?

[Edit: Ah, irony. From Vic Davis, talking about his new roguelike 3 hours before I made this post:

The Occult Chronicles is a thinking man’s rogue like….. a “strategy rogue like” is the term being bandied about.

]