The Esteemed and Learned Council

Of Roguelike Elders appear to have their reviews up of the 7DRL entries. And, if you prefer a tile based version of the same reviews.

[Edit to add: The UI for the reviews is about as bad as the average roguelike. Click on the average score to get reviewer comments.]

Episode 31

The Roguelike Radio team weren't able to get a roguelike developer to interview this week*. So they got a Rogue developer to interview instead...

* One 7DRL doesn't count for the purposes of this joke.

CYA

While we're on a science fiction theme, I've started playing Deus Ex: Human Revolution and, hmmm...

Somewhere in me is a large, thoughtful article about how playing semi-sand box, RPG-lite, side quest focused collect-a-thons one after the other is destroying my ability to enjoy games. I don't want to be a vacuum cleaner who is ordered around from place to place with a GameFAQs article in one hand and the  threat of 'consequences' in a game I can never lose (except by making poorly informed choices in the skill tree). Instead I'll refer you to recent articles by Richard Terrell (part 1, part 2) and Keith Burgun (at Gamasutra), both of whom get too tangled up in the definition problem of what a game is, but whose basic thesis I agree with. Today is not that day.

Instead, I'll talk about the sixty seconds of fun I had in the prologue. This is the first cover based shooter I've played which uses hiding behind cover as the central mechanic (Red Faction: Guerilla doesn't have enough waist high walls to count). It took me a while to grok the mechanic, which primarily came down to getting the key bindings right, which for me is remapping F to jump, space bar to take cover, right-click to aim. But when I did, there was this amazing fluid joyous room-clearing experience I want to repeat. (Perhaps by not ever using that sentence again in the wrong context).

Can you suggest a PC cover based shooter that doesn't have everyone telling me I'm an asshole afterwards?

Canon

You may remember an article I wrote, No Aliens Allowed, where I complained about the state of near future non-apocalyptic video games. I mentioned Dystopia and Shattered Horizons as being two games that have what I want in my science fiction, and Red Faction: Guerilla as the closest possible contender for a third. Conveniently these form a triad of Earth, Moon and Mars - inconveniently, Red Faction: Guerilla is too much GTA in space, and not enough actual consequences of terraforming Mars.

I've since found a worthy Martian replacement: Waking Mars, which gets exactly the feeling of exploring another planet in a way games like VVVVVV and Fuel merely hint at. Ironically, it features aliens; luckily, none of them involve humanoids with attachments on their forehead.

(Moving out to the asteroids, I should really pick Eufloria or Galcon, but ambient, strategy-less strategy games don't seem to do it for me. So instead I'm nominating Angry Birds Space).

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.

]