Some long overdue administration

This is only 3 years overdue.

Every vote for the 2013 Ascii Dreams Roguelike of the Year poll is below. As for why I stopped? I kind of forgot about doing it the next year. Which is probably an indication that it stopped being fun to do. I wish someone a little more active in the community had picked up the idea and run with it, but apparently it wasn't important enough for someone else to feel the need to do so.

_____rogue the space	0 (0%)
@Star Wars	0 (0%)
10 Second Roguelike	0 (0%)
3	0 (0%)
3079	0 (0%)
3089	0 (0%)
8.68-HACK	0 (0%)
868-HACK	2 (0%)
86856527	1 (0%)
88 Pages	0 (0%)
A DAY @ THE ZOO	0 (0%)
A False Saint, An Honest Rogue	0 (0%)
Ad Astra Per Aspera	0 (0%)
ADOM	85 (25%)
ADOM II	22 (6%)
Adventure Dungeon	1 (0%)
Adventure Mall	0 (0%)
Akamar	0 (0%)
Alchemy	0 (0%)
AlexandriaRL	0 (0%)
Allure of the Stars	0 (0%)
Alternate Dimension Rogue Like	0 (0%)
Anarchial	0 (0%)
Angry Troll versus Magic Bridge	0 (0%)
Appeasing the God	0 (0%)
Archmaster	0 (0%)
Arcology Escape	0 (0%)
AscentRL	1 (0%)
Asterogue	1 (0%)
Asylum Escape	0 (0%)
Attack The Geth	1 (0%)
Aurora	2 (0%)
Back up	0 (0%)
Bardess	0 (0%)
Beltham's Lair	0 (0%)
Bionic Dues	1 (0%)
Black Mage Goes Rogue	0 (0%)
Bonfire	0 (0%)
Borstal	0 (0%)
Brogue	23 (6%)
Bronze and Faith	0 (0%)
BRS-081	0 (0%)
Bughack	0 (0%)
Bump!	0 (0%)
Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead	55 (16%)
Caverns of Shrug	0 (0%)
Chase Brannick: Space Mechanic	0 (0%)
Chest Quest	0 (0%)
Chicken and Thyme	0 (0%)
Cogs of Cronus	0 (0%)
ColdRL	0 (0%)
Comrade Pixel	0 (0%)
Consuming Shadow	0 (0%)
CoreRL	0 (0%)
Cosmic Commando	1 (0%)
Cosplay Mystery Dungeon	0 (0%)
Cutpurse Castle	0 (0%)
De Sade's Dungeon	0 (0%)
Dead Man Walking	0 (0%)
Delusions of Grandeur	0 (0%)
Delver	2 (0%)
Depths of Tuzua	0 (0%)
Desktop Dungeons	7 (2%)
Diablo, the Roguelike	4 (1%)
	Disc RL
Disc RL	0 (0%)
Distant Echoes of Ancient Lies	0 (0%)
DiveDive	0 (0%)
Don't Starve	4 (1%)
Doom, the Roguelike	24 (7%)
Double Rogue	0 (0%)
Down The Brain	0 (0%)
Dragon's Lair	0 (0%)
Dragons Hoard	0 (0%)
Dragonslayer	0 (0%)
Drakefire Chasm	1 (0%)
Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup	37 (11%)
Dungeon Dashers	1 (0%)
Dungeon Fray	0 (0%)
Dungeon Ho!	0 (0%)
Dungeon of the Endless	0 (0%)
Dungeon Penetrator	0 (0%)
Dungeon X: Flesh Wounds	0 (0%)
Dungeon-Themed Starvation Simulator	0 (0%)
Dungeonmans	7 (2%)
Dungeons of Dredmor	13 (3%)
Dungeons of Kong	0 (0%)
Dying Embers	0 (0%)
DynaHack	1 (0%)
Eldritch	2 (0%)
Elite RL	0 (0%)
Elona+	11 (3%)
Ending	0 (0%)
Enter the Roguelike Dimension (EtRD)	0 (0%)
Epilogue	1 (0%)
Equin: The Lantern	0 (0%)
Eternal Cave	0 (0%)
EXCELent Rogue	0 (0%)
fabu	0 (0%)
Faith in RL	0 (0%)
Famaze	0 (0%)
Fame	1 (0%)
Fancy Skulls	1 (0%)
Farm rl	0 (0%)
FHRL	0 (0%)
Firestorm City	0 (0%)
Fishtryoshka	0 (0%)
Fisticuffmanship	0 (0%)
FlatlineRL	0 (0%)
Fleeing the Fray	0 (0%)
Forays into Norrendrin	3 (0%)
Friendly Meddling	0 (0%)
FunhouseRL	0 (0%)
Gatecrashers	0 (0%)
Gelatinous	0 (0%)
Goblin Men	0 (0%)
GUTS	0 (0%)
Hack, Slash, Loot	2 (0%)
Han Yolo and the Mysterious Planet	0 (0%)
Hark!	0 (0%)
Herculeum	0 (0%)
Heroes of Loot	0 (0%)
Hoplite	3 (0%)
hproguelike	0 (0%)
HumFullRL	0 (0%)
Hunted	0 (0%)
Hush Little One	0 (0%)
Hydra Slayer	1 (0%)
HyperRogue	2 (0%)
Illuminascii	0 (0%)
Incavead: infinite cave adventure	3 (0%)
Infection	0 (0%)
Infra Arcana	6 (1%)
Inside Out	0 (0%)
Interloper	0 (0%)
Into the Labyrinth	0 (0%)
It Did Not End Well	0 (0%)
Kali's Ladder	1 (0%)
KeeperRL	1 (0%)
Kerkerkruip	1 (0%)
Khu-Phu-Ka	0 (0%)
KlingonRL	0 (0%)
Kollum: The Pressure Valve	0 (0%)
Krater	0 (0%)
Kukulima	0 (0%)
Legend of Dungeon	4 (1%)
Liberation of Yama	0 (0%)
Like a Rogue	0 (0%)
Live as Long as Possible	0 (0%)
Lost Crypts	0 (0%)
Lost Labyrinth	1 (0%)
Lurk Under Wires	0 (0%)
MacRL	0 (0%)
Magic Fountain	0 (0%)
Malachite Dreams	0 (0%)
Man in a Maze	0 (0%)
Mazmorra	0 (0%)
MGRL	0 (0%)
MidBoss	0 (0%)
MidsomerRL	0 (0%)
MLP RL	0 (0%)
mmoRL	0 (0%)
Mosaic	0 (0%)
Moving@	0 (0%)
MovingETA v0.07	0 (0%)
Mysterious Castle	1 (0%)
MythosRL	0 (0%)
Nebulaic Toaster	0 (0%)
NEOScavenger	2 (0%)
Nightmare Tyrant	0 (0%)
NinjaRL	0 (0%)
Not the Robots	0 (0%)
Now Hiring: Zookeepers	0 (0%)
Noxico	2 (0%)
NPPAngband	4 (1%)
NPPMoria	2 (0%)
Nuclear Throne	0 (0%)
Nya Quest	0 (0%)
Nyanko	0 (0%)
Occult Chronicles	0 (0%)
One Way Heroics	3 (0%)
Paranautical Activity	1 (0%)
Peli	0 (0%)
Pitman	0 (0%)
Pixel Dungeon	6 (1%)
Pixel Piracy	2 (0%)
PonyRL	2 (0%)
Possession: Escape from the Nether Regions	1 (0%)
Post Future Vagabond	0 (0%)
Prehistorical Bean Climber	0 (0%)
PRIME	2 (0%)
Prospector	3 (0%)
Pugnacious Wizards	0 (0%)
Pugnacious Wizards 2	0 (0%)
PurpRL	0 (0%)
Quadropus Rampage	0 (0%)
QuickHack	1 (0%)
Rasatala	1 (0%)
Red Rogue	3 (0%)
Return to the Dungeons of Doom	0 (0%)
Rillaung	0 (0%)
Risk of Rain	7 (2%)
Rodney	0 (0%)
rogue (7DRL)	0 (0%)
Rogue Break	0 (0%)
Rogue City Scavenger	1 (0%)
Rogue Coder	0 (0%)
Rogue Dream	0 (0%)
Rogue Effect	0 (0%)
Rogue Fleet	0 (0%)
Rogue in the Void	0 (0%)
Rogue Legacy	15 (4%)
Rogue Shooter	0 (0%)
Rogue Valley	0 (0%)
Rogue's Eye	0 (0%)
Rogue's Labyrinth	0 (0%)
Rogue's Souls	0 (0%)
Rogue's Tale	2 (0%)
Rogue3D	0 (0%)
Roguelike Runner	0 (0%)
RogueMek	0 (0%)
Room Rogue	0 (0%)
RRRSAncientBlade	0 (0%)
RuneMaster	0 (0%)
Ruoeg, a minimalist roguelike	0 (0%)
SanitasRL	0 (0%)
Scrounger	0 (0%)
Seduction Quest	0 (0%)
segfault	0 (0%)
Seven Days in Space	0 (0%)
ShadowsofHumanity	0 (0%)
Sil	7 (2%)
Skool Eskape	0 (0%)
SkullDorado	0 (0%)
Slaughter	0 (0%)
Smashing Bad	0 (0%)
So Many Jagged Shards	0 (0%)
Sorcery Saga: The Curse of the Great Curry God	0 (0%)
Spelunky HD	11 (3%)
Splitter	0 (0%)
Starship Rex	0 (0%)
Steam Marines	5 (1%)
Stink Warrior	0 (0%)
Sunk Coast	0 (0%)
SurviveRL	0 (0%)
SurvivorRL	0 (0%)
Swift Swurd	0 (0%)
Sword of the Stars: The Pit	5 (1%)
T.H.A.D. - 7DRL edition	0 (0%)
T.o.M.E. 4	139 (41%)
T@XI	0 (0%)
Teleglitch	5 (1%)
Tetrogue	0 (0%)
The Artifact	0 (0%)
The Aurora Wager	0 (0%)
The Case of the Girl and the Red Dress	0 (0%)
The Conception	0 (0%)
The Fourth Wall	0 (0%)
The Guided Fate Paradox	0 (0%)
The Hunger Games	0 (0%)
The Land	2 (0%)
The Monastery Garden	0 (0%)
The Power of Dreams	0 (0%)
The Reset Button	0 (0%)
The Royal Wedding	0 (0%)
The Veins of the Earth	1 (0%)
The Wizard's Lair	0 (0%)
TomeNET	2 (0%)
Tower of Guns	2 (0%)
Triangle Wizard	5 (1%)
Ultima Ratio Regnum	6 (1%)
UnBrogue	1 (0%)
Underhall	0 (0%)
Unhappy Devil	0 (0%)
Unnamed RL	0 (0%)
UnReal World	22 (6%)
Uushubud	0 (0%)
Versus Time	0 (0%)
Voyage to Farland	2 (0%)
Warp Core Breach	0 (0%)
Wayward	8 (2%)
WazHack	6 (1%)
Web Raid Mobile	0 (0%)
Weeping Angels	0 (0%)
Witchaven the Roguelike	1 (0%)
X@COM	3 (0%)
Zero-Player Game	0 (0%)
ZomgRL	0 (0%)
Zoo Base	0 (0%)

An open letter to anyone in media who wants to discuss the origin of the term 'roguelikes'

Firstly I'd like to thank you in your discussion of what is a roguelike of neatly avoiding trying to describe what a roguelike is and isn't. Within the roguelike community, this topic elicits frequent and heated debate.

The thing most people don't realise about the origin of the term roguelike is that it arose because Rogue was and is still a really good game: in fact an exemplary example of the genre. If you haven't had a chance to play it, I would strongly encourage you to try it. It's available for free in any browser at the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/msdos_Rogue_1983

The reason we now see so many games using the term roguelike is largely due to the popularity of the roguelike platformer Spelunky (released 2008), but also due to the roguelike community re-invogorating itself in the mid 2000s by starting one of the first ever game jams in 2005: the annual 7 day roguelike (7DRL) challenge where people attempt to write a roguelike in 168 hours. (Spelunky designer Derek Yu also did the tile design for DoomRL which is arguably the first ever 7DRL).

"Coffee break" roguelikes like DoomRL made the genre far more accessible, and popular 7DRL games like 868-HACK and Hoplite have made the transition to mobile platforms and much wider audiences. The community also organises annual now regional International Roguelike Developer Conferences (IRDCs) and the first ever Roguelike Celebration for players of roguelikes September 17 this year.


This is almost entirely done on a voluntary basis for games which are largely given away for free, source code included, driven by our shared love of a genre which in all probability wouldn't exist were it not for the original game Rogue.

GM-less RPGs

One of the key challenges of the High Frontier RPG is making the game GM-less. At first this was almost included as a throwaway line with the thinking that it'd play just like a cooperative legacy board game like Pandemic: Legacy and those are really easy to make, right :)

But what I hadn't initially envisioned as being an issue and what is increasingly becoming apparent is aside from scene setting, conflict resolution, rules arbitration and flavour - functions that the High Frontier RPG has answers for, the Game Master has another function which is far less easy to solve: maintaining the game state.

What I mean by this, is the information that is preserved when the game is packed up and put away at the end of the game session. Legacy board games solve this by recording the game state using the game components: you open packets, write on the board, tear cards up and so on, which ordinarily would be considered big problems with board games and are the 'controversial' part of a legacy game, but in reality provide this function transparently and intuitively without anyone having to write anything down.

The Game Master does this for RPGs: he's the storage engine of the game, the hard drive if you will to which any changes to the game supplements are recorded. But it's not the storage function that is important - because the player's have memories as well - so much as the integrity of this storage function: the game master is the final arbiter of truth in the game universe and what he or she remembers to be true is the ultimate truth modulo a player making a compelling argument otherwise.

I could of course just make one player perform the 'secretary' function, but to me this feels like the bad parts of being a game master without any of the fun stuff. Instead I've made a set of assumptions that may or may not be true for any individual game:
1. Information that is publicly shared to all the players is going to be remembered by the majority. This is a massive side step of the issue, but I'm going to develop some work sheets that'll help here - essentially a mission log, to allow players to record some of the random results so that the play events can be reconstructed. This mission log can be filled in by anyone, and should hopefully be easy to maintain.
2. Information that is secret, is secret but verifiable.

Secrets are going to be the really tricky part of the game. A lot of what constitutes secrets in most games are going to be replaced by random tables. Unlike virtually every other RPG on the market (sans Microscope), High Frontier RPG does not have a fixed game world - the game world dynamically evolves from the real world today into something unknown. So the fact that say the New Attica Secessionists are the result of, for instance, a massively multiplayer alternate reality game spiralling out of control, is a random number that is rolled on a table at the time you could potentially figure this piece of information out.

But there are important secrets that are going to be part of the game. The three secrets that players will actually care about are:

1. The psychological profile of the character.
2. Whether a piece of equipment or person or faction that we're relying on is actually reliable (defect cards) and to a lesser extent, upcoming events (although events could just be replaced by a random card drawn without too much loss).
3. For any published game scenario (one is planned so far): The origin and intentions of the scenario threat.

To encode all of this information, I'm going to use packets of playing cards.

Psychological profiles are encoded by turning two 1d6 rolls into two cards. Since crews have four players, there's a straight forward mapping of crew position to suit. And the encoding scheme is simply going to be the first card is the lowest roll, second card is the sum of the lowest plus highest roll. This is a incredibly weak cryptographic system, but I'm using this as an advantage in that showing another player one of your psychological profile cards is an incredibly important thing. More importantly, at the moment once your psychological profile is created, you don't get to hold the cards - they're dealt out to other crew members. And to verify this, the rest of the unused psychological profile cards are sealed back into the profile deck and signed by all players so if someone is accused of cheating, we can check the profile deck to see which cards are missing from each suit.

Defect cards are associated with individual ship components, or parts of the High Frontier playing board. That's the big downside with defects - you have to have the High Frontier playing board, and you probably have to leave it set up somewhere between play sessions. Tracking defects are the weakest part of the game, easily manipulated and prone to cheating, which is why they are optional, but they are a very cool idea originally used in the Leaving Earth board game and I hope people find them interesting enough to respect the rules governing them.

The origin and intentions cards for the game scenario has only just come up as I've started designing High Frontier RPG: Titan. I originally envisioned this as a solar system wide conflict simulator for people really into their military sci fi to play ultra-realistic space battles and campaigns. However at the same time I wanted to add a bit of mystery by having the actual nature of the big bad be randomly determined, and as it turns out, only two of the six planned origin stories are straight forward kill the bad guys - two of them are figure out the bad guys, and two of them are 'I didn't realise we were playing an RPG adaptation of Naked Lunch/Edge of Tomorrow/Thirteenth Floor'.

This is a bold experiment, and if it doesn't work, I have a backup plan to allow a game master to run the game with all of the above resources available to them. But I'd like to see this 'in the wild', not just in controlled play tests to see whether it works and whether players can adapt to the challenge.

A Short Essay on Why I St-advocated Person of Interest to Rob Zacny on Twitter

For background, listen to the Idle Weekend Podcast at https://www.idlethumbs.net/forums/topic/10935-idle-weekend-may-27-2016-weve-been-playing/ from about the 30 minute mark. I'll be posting this on the Idle Thumbs forums as well.

So let’s talk Person of Interest. (Mild spoilers warning: I talk about thematic concerns, and divulge some character arc conclusions in general terms. More important warning: I make a lot of unsupported generalizations in this essay. I don’t necessarily want you to agree or disagree with them – I’m more trying to paint a picture of where my head space is at).

I grew up a nerd, in a time where being a nerd was an isolating experience. I didn’t feel particularly isolated – there were plenty of people to play Dungeons & Dragons at school with, and I was onto the nascent Internet pretty early on, as my Dad ran a BBS for the local Commodore 64 user group. But I always had this sense of “otherness” – that what I was doing wasn’t part of the mainstream culture – but you could easily attribute this feeling of otherness to the process of being a child, then a teenager.

It became clear to me as an adult, that there was a transformative social experiment going on with our lives facilitated by the twin new technologies of financial derivatives (for maths majors) and the Internet (for everyone else) – in short, the nerds were taking over. And with the advent of Facebook , it was equally clear to everyone else that the nerds had won. We were now the mainstream cultural force – modulo something about sports – and the last ten years has seen a complete takeover of film, and transformation of vast areas of television and literature. There’s another essay or even a book to be written about this (if there hasn’t been already), but let’s just say that “nerds now own narrative” and leave it at that for the moment.

How does this relate to Person of Interest? Because as Jonathan Nolan and Greg Nolan have said this season the ultimate bad guys in PoI are Mark Zuckerburg and Isaac Asimov. That is to say, they are us.

(If you don’t believe me, there’s a speech that Harold Finch makes at the end of the first episode of Season 2 where he lays his cards on the table of why he designed the machine the way he did. And it’s clear that the thing that actually terrifies him the most is himself. I just wish they hadn’t miscast the actor who plays Greer who comes across too Emperor Palpatine to make the counter-case effectively (although I loved his scene in the Fifth Element which is one of my top 5 sci fi scenes ever (man I need to re-watch the Fifth Element, it’s the sci fi Big Trouble in Little China))).

But at the same time, Person of Interest is written for us. Mr Robot is the only other show on television that cares about the technology of computers as much as we think we do: Person of Interest has about as realistic cryptography, AI and hacking as makes sense to show on television, and if you start rolling your eyes at something particularly outlandish (especially in season 5), it is likely that you are wrong and the PoI writer’s room has been doing more research than you have. One of the real pleasures of watching Person of Interest in near real time is that they are often as close to or ahead of the bleeding edge technology concerns of the day than the mainstream media (my favorite is the buffer overflow exploit in If-Then-Else although there is an interrogation scene the next episode which under 30s will appreciate much more than I can). Person of Interest predicted Edward Snowden, not the other way around.

The most unrealistic thing that Person of Interest portrays is the public actually caring about a massive state run surveillance program. And that’s where I think Person of Interest loses the nerd narrative: it cares about heroes in a way that we have been taught to distrust. It celebrates flawed individuals who genuinely want to redeem themselves – whereas we celebrate stories without heroes (Breaking Bad), or with selfish heroes who are more concerned with discovering who they are (Mr Robot).

Person of Interest cares about redemption so much that up until season 4, every “big bad” also redeems themselves. And not just in the last minute quip or sacrificial act that PoI does so well, but in having a reason for doing what they are doing, and being ‘right’ about their reasons. Season 4 and 5’s biggest misstep is losing sight of this: there are at least 3 villains in these seasons who deserve a flashback story but don’t get it, which is doubly annoying in that 2 of them are thematic shadows of other characters rather than fully developed characters in their own right. If you have difficulty getting any of the season 4 villains, look around and try to figure out what else in the story their relationships are analogous to.

That explains my love of the show in general terms and why I think we as nerds should be watching – what it doesn’t explain is why I was stalking/advocating (to explain the portmanteau) Rob Zacny about it.

That’s a much more specific issue about how we as a community talk to each other – or whether we even exist as a community any more. To go back to back to the idea of “the nerds have won” – I don’t think that many of us feel like we’ve actually achieved this. Sure, we’ve bent culture to our will, but all that seems to have created is a huge sense of entitlement. What is missing from nerd-dom, and where I think we’ve damaged society and why we still feel isolated, is our general lack of civic engagement. I’m not talking about political engagement, but our roots in the wider community – volunteer work, club and community group membership, local political engagement. Criticize sports culture all you want but at the very least it forces you to be a team player. Because we’ve helped weaken the social bonds around us, we’ve helped the Baby Boomers get away with the lowest financial contribution to society of any modern generation, and those 10 years older than me drive women out of information technology, where they used to be the majority.

The Internet has enabled some engagement, but over the last 10 years, this has gone from the transformative experience I was incredibly fortunate enough to be a part of, to the fractured cliques we see now. Most of this blame lies with mainstream media and advertising, which successfully killed blogging as a viable platform, and left podcasting as one of the few great places left to have a meaningful conversation with a wider audience, because you can’t metric the medium.

Ten years ago, I wouldn’t have tried to get someone else to watch Person of Interest over social media. I would have written a blog post similar to this essay, and relied on an aggregator site like Slashdot to pick it up and amplify it. These days, I could slowly build an audience by podcasting (don’t get me started on how Patreon breaks things) and I know it’s possible because I’ve done so. But I’ve also discovered that it’s very difficult to get your audience to follow you – I’ve gone from game modder, to board game modder to hopefully boardgame and RPG designer, and most of the audience I’ve built are still only happy if I talk about roguelikes. So instead, I’ve gone to someone I hugely respect, and begged them to get them to experience and then talk about this thing I love from their slightly taller soap box.

And I’ll be more than happy to do so again.

High Frontier RPG temporarily on hold

I'm temporarily removed all access to the High Frontier RPG Google doc I've been working in, in direct response to http://latining.tumblr.com/post/141567276944/tabletop-gaming-has-a-white-male-terrorism-problem

The current design includes rules for a number of difficult topics which I think the RPG is unavoidably going to raise. I was hoping the RPG community would be mature enough to handle these appropriately, but based on the experiences of the writer of the referenced article, I no longer think that is the case and instead any attempts I make to reify the types of topics that naturally arise when a 4 person crew is sent on a 10 year mission without any other human contact will have a negative outcome.

This article has so badly shaken me, I'm now second guessing the efforts I'm making to put a little more detail in classic TV tropes such as a multi-ethnic crew.

To people who've been waiting to play test this, I would like to apologize. I'm going to have a long think about whether or not I want to continue any efforts with this design and then how to approach or censor the topics I want to handle.

Dear friends

Much like you, I have spent much of my life obsessed with the idea of the savory muffin - a food with a name that invokes so much possibility [1] but which inevitably ends in a dry oniony disappointment [2]. For several years now, I've been exploring the possibility of meat muffins but I've never been able to find what I've been looking for [3]

Until now.

A local cafe, hidden in an industrial zone near my daughter's ballet class, serves a risotto and chorizo timbale baked in a muffin tray and wrapped in baking paper [4]. I assumed that the word timbale completely described this heavenly dish, but a quick Google search reveals that there is an incredible world of shaped baked pasta and risottos that I was previous unaware of.

I worry constantly that I'll die not knowing everything, and a discovery of this significance this late in life lends credence to my fears.

[1] See also: Corn bread.
[2] There's never enough cheese inside the muffin to be worth mentioning. Occasionally there's enough on top.
[3] Potato top pies are the closest flavour analog I can find.
[4] They also do an amazing prosciutto, egg and caramelized onion cheese cake with the prosciutto forming the base of the cake.

UnBrogue Correspondence

"I just want to offer my thanks for making the variant of Brogue, UnBrogue.
Brogue itself pales in comparison to UnBrogue. Brogue, to me, has become no longer enjoyable.

The addition of the items with their new powers makes for a variety of new situations, the sacrificial altars make for a good tradeoff, and the shields, even when cursed, make for an entertaining run with deflections and defense.

I've also made it further in UnBrogue than I have in any other roguelike, to floor 22 (jumping through to floor 23 made it crash, for some reason), but even that run alone made for an interesting set of stories - After a particularly grueling fight against a Lich, having lost levels in my leather armour (-6 due to acids) I turned down a corridor to see a Dragon. Each of its blasts of fire were deflected by my tower shield, and I slew it with a +8 Cleaver.

All to the tune of Elegia by New Order, it made for a fairly intense few moments.

Or that time I was held by a Bog Monster and beaten and thrown darts at by Centaurs until I died, while China Girl by David Bowie played made for an entertaining end to a character.

Long story short, it's a game that has rekindled my interest in games.

Also, I used to follow your blog, ASCII Dreams for quite a bit, but due to other circumstances haven't been keeping up with it too much.

Thanks again for the game."

-- An UnBrogue player

"Firstly: thanks for the great email.

Secondly: apologies for any or all crashes and bugs.

Thirdly: I hope I really haven't broken Brogue for you. UnBrogue was designed in part as a crazy palate cleanser for people playing Brogue. But I don't have the time to maintain it at the quality level Brogue is at, so I'd hate to take you away from a high quality game for a largely experimental mod.

I'm glad you're enjoying yourself so much though."

-- An UnBrogue developer

Unangband 0.6.4c released

It looks like I'm just going to have to bite the bullet and acknowledge I'm unable to compile Unangband for OS/X. If anyone is running an old enough version of OS/X to include the Quickdraw library headers, I'd love to host a compiled version of this release.

### Bug Fixes ###

- Allow monsters to use their ranged attacks (Fix thanks to Alexis Scheuer).

- Fix monster toughness descriptions (Fix thanks to Alexis Scheuer).

- Prevent Witchblooms spell description crashing the game.

- Allow Saruman to appear in ruined Hobbiton (Fix thanks to gold dragon).

- Prevent friendly uniques from being invulnerable to enemy attacks (Reported by Ashkir).

 You can download the release over at the Unangband home page.

Review: Dungeon Hacks and One Week Dungeons

There’s a subgenre of science writing – books like the Hacker Crackdown and the Newtonian Casino – which I dove into during my early twenties, which told the human stories of the development of the Internet and the communities that grew in and around it. In print form, there would usually be an insert of coloured photos of white, bearded, earnest, awkward looking men – because tragically by the mid 80s computer scientists are almost always white and male - in brown corduroy flairs and tucked in yellow buttoned breast pocket shirts standing around a computer or in a computer lab, alongside the computer hardware itself; reading the same stories on the World Wide Web you’d navigate through man pages, and pre-Geocities website designs to marvel at the crazy lengths early programmers would go to to exploit the hardware and operating systems of the time.

Dungeon Hacks falls into this same subgenre, and while it is a capital-I Important writing about the history of the development of roguelikes, it is never vital. David Craddock tells the stories of the creation of many foundational works of the genre, but he fails to bridge the gap between games over twenty years old - for which he has sourced a broad range of developer interviews and pieced together a highly readable story - and how these weird infinities coax their players to dedicate years, even decades to mastering them.

Mr. Craddock’s research is impressive, and he has taken full advantage of the willingness of roguelike developers to talk about their games to record numerous anecdotes as well as documenting the important relationship between Rogue and the Unix curses terminal. Unfortunately Dungeon Hacks doesn't make the case for why someone outside the roguelike community should care about this history, simply pointing to procedural generation and permadeath as if these explain all the elements which elevated this ghetto genre to indie darlings.

By placing the developers on a pedestal, Dungeon Hacks understates the contributions of the wider community of players and fans who freely give their time and energy towards the games – the communities formed around Hack and the Angband development team being two notable exceptions. To take one example, John Harris, whose words the book concludes with, is labelled as a historian. This misstates John’s importance to the genre: he is a historian insofar as any enthusiastic amateur who spends years writing about a topic as a labour of love is a historian, but he is not a historian in the sense that he has not received any academic recognition or financial compensation for the work he does.

If you are at all interested in the roguelike genre you need to buy Dungeon Hacks for insight into the early days of roguelike development. But sadly, that's the limit of my recommendation: it is not a cross-over work that will explain the genre's deep appeal to the outsider, and I am perhaps unfairly judging it on this criteria.

Where Dungeon Hacks is scholarly and historically focused, its companion volume One Week Dungeons is journalistic (in the literal sense that it forms a week’s diary of eight would be developers) and dramatic. Originally written as a coda to Dungeon Hacks, it has the vitality and relevance that Dungeon Hacks lacks, as it documents the frustrations and successes of these idealistic attempts to write a complete roguelike from scratch in 168 hours. Each developer’s tale is deeply personal, satisfying and thrilling, and the story of Joseph Bradshaw forms its unexpected human heart.

Dungeon Hacks and One Week Dungeon are both available from Press Start Press. I was provided early drafts of both books and complementary copies as a part of this review.

http://www.press-start-press.com/dungeon-hacks.html

http://www.press-start-press.com/one-week-dungeons.html

High Frontier Kickstarter complete

The High Frontier 3rd edition kickstarter has finished, with a final tally of 2,244 backers pledging USD $180,942 to get a copy of the game.

This means I'm going to be published with a board game developer credit for the 3rd edition of High Frontier Interstellar, a solitaire game which re-uses most of the High Frontier components, which funded as a $36,000 stretch goal.

It is fair to say the Kickstarter campaign funding exceeded anyone's expectations. It is also generated a lot of only over a beer stories, as I was heavily involved both in front of and behind the scenes as self-elected community manager. If you're in Sydney, feel free to buy me a beer some time :)

I'll continue blogging just as soon as I get some time to do so. There's some follow up work to the campaign that I'm busy on.