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madjackmcmad posted:Oh sweet, 13 new posts in the Rogulike Thread... oh. We're discussing what a Roguelike is or isn't again. The only people who hate discussing what a roguelike is are people who insist that platformers and fps games can be roguelikes. 
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Dec 2, 2013 19:59
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German Joey posted:The only people who hate discussing what a roguelike is are people who insist that platformers and fps games can be roguelikes. You're wrong! I hate the discussion because it drags on for pages and never ends well. No one is happier, nobody changes their opinion, and less people are talking about cool niche games that they found because they saw this blog from this guy who has a friend who's cousin is a big Python nerd and he spent all of last semester at GT writing a game about exploring the ruins of a Mesopotamian bakery-temple, with procedurally generated leavening techniques and grain based religions.
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Dec 2, 2013 20:27
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madjackmcmad posted:a game about exploring the ruins of a Mesopotamian bakery-temple, with procedurally generated leavening techniques and grain based religions. That sounds sick as hell. I don't post in this thread but I read it and by god I'll weigh in on it. To me, "roguelike" is a good shorthand for "procedurally generated" so it can certainly encompass platformers or any other thing. I can certainly see where "roguelike" should mean "games like Rogue" to some people though. The broader meaning of the word would probably be better as "rogue-inspired" but that sounds dumb.
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Dec 2, 2013 20:43
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madjackmcmad posted:A game about exploring the ruins of a Mesopotamian bakery-temple, with procedurally generated leavening techniques and grain based religions.
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Dec 2, 2013 20:46
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madjackmcmad posted:You're wrong! If it happens, it happens. People like to discuss things I don't like sometimes as well.
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Dec 2, 2013 21:03
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doctorfrog posted:If it happens, it happens. People like to discuss things I don't like sometimes as well. I'm only complaining because those particular arguments are ever fruitless. Yet now we are having a discussion about not having certain discussions, which means the monster is actually me, and I have gazed too long into the abyss.
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Dec 2, 2013 21:09
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I kind of like the what is a roguelike discussion if only because it leads people to bring up edge cases I hadn't heard of before. The OP is pretty well what I consider important, though. Also if anyone wants to write some blurbs about their favorite games, I'm still updating it, albeit sloooowly and I don't think I've touched it in like 2 weeks. I'm off for a big stretch in December though, so will have more time to update it then.
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Dec 2, 2013 22:29
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So on a completely different subject, what is the longest and most involved roguelike any of you've ever played?
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Dec 2, 2013 22:54
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Edwhirl posted:So on a completely different subject, what is the longest and most involved roguelike any of you've ever played? Life.
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Dec 2, 2013 22:59
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Desert bus. It has permadeath!
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Dec 2, 2013 23:02
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my dad posted:Life. Life sucks, it takes way too much work to level up perks and the currency system is such a grind. Also one game takes way too long.
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Dec 2, 2013 23:05
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Life is the only game where you can get goatse mugs, though. There's that.
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Dec 2, 2013 23:09
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AnonSpore posted:Life sucks, it takes way too much work to level up perks and the currency system is such a grind. Also one game takes way too long. I picked up some LSD and became disinterested in my character, and even the notion of having a character in the first place. I've been drifting since.
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Dec 2, 2013 23:13
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Edwhirl posted:So on a completely different subject, what is the longest and most involved roguelike any of you've ever played? The longest single game I've had was a 15 rune crawl win (or possibly a game that ended in a zig). A dozen hours? I'm not sure of the exact time anymore.
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Dec 2, 2013 23:16
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nutranurse posted:Life is the only game where you can get goatse mugs, though. There's that. I'm pretty sure those are in Elona too...
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Dec 3, 2013 00:01
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Edwhirl posted:So on a completely different subject, what is the longest and most involved roguelike any of you've ever played? Objective time I'm not quite sure but what felt longest was an adom archmage wish engine. It made me never want to play the game again. I don't even remember if I bothered to win that run.
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Dec 3, 2013 01:08
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What's the deal with Towerclimb? Is it any good? Coming out soon? The website just says 'on steam sometime soon' Does Risk of Rain support controllers natively? I picked up Rogue Legacy so I'm looking for some other actiony rogueish games. I have a lot of problems with RLs basic gameflow and Spelunky pisses me off, so I'd like to check out some others.
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Dec 3, 2013 02:05
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victrix posted:Does Risk of Rain support controllers natively? It does! And it's super fun, you should totally treat yourself to it. Issacian in that your run is determined early on by the sort of items you get, and that you unlock new items through just playing the game. I've been a little frustrated in some of my earlier runs where I'd play for what I felt was a long time and end up unlocking nothing, but you can avoid that if you want by looking up the goals in the menu and aiming for them. Risk of Rain is also very smart about how they present information. Powerups that have charges, conditions, or meters just create little effects around you that are easy to parse and immediately tell you what's going on. There's little that compares to getting your 20th or so item and just feeling like the god of fight.
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Dec 3, 2013 02:10
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I'm going to be a voice of dissent and say that Risk of Rain felt really tedious to play because every single enemy is a huge bulletsponge that takes a too many shots to kill and there's dozens and dozens of them per level. Compared to, say, Spelunky or Rogue Legacy where many things die in 1-3 hits it was just slow and unfun.
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Dec 3, 2013 03:01
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I can see someone thinking that if they only played the demo since monster hp scaled way too goddamn fast but that got turned way down for the full version. 10 minutes into the demo and enemies have as much health as a loving hour into the full release. You also might have been spending too much time on a level, there's little reason to spend more than 6-8 minutes on one unless you're an enforcer or something. I guess commando might give you the wrong impression since his whole deal is piss weak attacks at the speed of sound.
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Dec 3, 2013 03:18
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victrix posted:What's the deal with Towerclimb? Is it any good? Coming out soon? The website just says 'on steam sometime soon' Towerclimb is one of the most atmospheric and best audio designed games I've ever played. I also think its graphics are quite charming, although I understand that's more divisive. It's hard as balls, although that's pretty par the course for rogue-ish platformers, but I was more frustrated by the keyboard controls, which are pretty finicky. Some of the techniques and items can be very difficult to use properly, although that may just be my clumsy fingers. Anyway I think it's on Steam Greenlight at the moment, I don't have high hopes for it getting through that way. It's also on the Davioware website for five or ten dollars. e: looks like I'm wrong, you're right, it's actually getting a Steam release. That's nice.
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Dec 3, 2013 03:34
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My friend ended up with a Risk of Rain char so powerful that when he hit the boss, he dealt so much damage the game crashed e. quote:In my last game, I became an unkillable horrifying murder god thanks to the insane combination of powers I got... to the extent that the game crashed when I was fighting the last boss, because I think I did too much damage from too many sources too quickly. Corridor fucked around with this message at 04:01 on Dec 3, 2013 |
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Dec 3, 2013 03:58
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madjackmcmad posted:It does! And it's super fun, you should totally treat yourself to it. Issacian in that your run is determined early on by the sort of items you get, and that you unlock new items through just playing the game. I've been a little frustrated in some of my earlier runs where I'd play for what I felt was a long time and end up unlocking nothing, but you can avoid that if you want by looking up the goals in the menu and aiming for them. I just got Risk of Rain, and I've got to say that the controller support seems wonky. It could just be because I've got a Logitech 310 instead of an 360 controller, but I've got it set up to xinput and it's doing stuff like not letting me start the game without using a mouse. Other than that it works well though. This game is a lot of fun.
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Dec 3, 2013 04:12
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EDIT: Wow I responded in the wrong thread. Stupid SALR giving me rope to hang myself with.
Jeffrey of YOSPOS fucked around with this message at 16:13 on Dec 3, 2013 |
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Dec 3, 2013 04:15
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My fundamental gripe with the 'random' dungeons (and I share this same, quite unpopular view about diablo like games) is that 'random' isn't any more inherently interesting than well designed arenas. The vast majority of roguelike dungeons are forgettable, and quite uninteresting. I remember the fixed vaults/areas or even semi-fixed patterns more than I do the endless procession of hall/door/room. Another thing is that roguelikes (usually) have other tools to introduce randomness. When monsters/items/the player/the environment can all be tinkered with, the physical layout doesn't necessarily need to be entirely (or at all) randomly generated to retain interest. Some argue there's the exploration aspect, I argue that 'moving towards fog of war' isn't particularly compelling exploration to begin with. And a minor but neat point, fixed areas create more of a shared communal experience - plenty of people can talk about memorable encounter X or balls hard area Y when it's the same (or very similar), but randomly generated clumps o rooms aren't memorable or interesting enough to be remarkable. Somewhere between a fixed Doom level, a boring rear end Angband level, and a psuedo random Nethack/Crawl level, there's a happy place to be I think.
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Dec 3, 2013 04:47
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To me, pseudo random is the way to go. Small set pieces that can be put together to create a whole that will never really be repeated. The map can either be entirely generated this way, or it can be mostly random but with significant set piece content. Crawl's maps are memorable, but that's largely because of how much non-random content is in the game, in the form of vaults. Spelunky is another good example of this. It looks handmade, because it pretty much is handmade. Rogue Legacy, and Binding of Isaac, are bad examples of this. Once you play enough, you see not just a similar dungeon, but literally the exact same dungeon. That's a problem to me. As for auto-explore, I love it. I want the feeling of a grand adventure, but I also want to focus on tactically interesting challenges. Auto explore does that for me. You could just make the maps smaller, but I think you really lose the sense of scope if you do that.
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Dec 3, 2013 04:52
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victrix posted:My fundamental gripe with the 'random' dungeons (and I share this same, quite unpopular view about diablo like games) is that 'random' isn't any more inherently interesting than well designed arenas. This gets into my whole deal with exploration. The thing that randomness does in a game's level generation is really just allow for constant exploration--it's different every time, so you're always discovering new content. The thing is, meaningful exploration is actually a pretty active process--it isn't actually based around not knowing what's behind a door as much as it is around trying to predict what'll be there. It's a constant act of imagining what you might find next, preparing for it, and then seeing if your guesses were correct or not. It has to walk a line with this. If it's too random then all anticipation is meaningless and you just mindlessly wander forward and take whatever the game throws at you. That said, if you know that level 6 is the ice level and level 7 is always the lava level there's really not any exploration there, either--there's no guessing, only knowledge. Even trickier, the game should have some way of rewarding you for reacting to your guesses--by being able to say 'this looks like somewhere a secret door should be' you should be able to find helpful stuff that you wouldn't have been able to find if you were just autoexploring. I'm not sure I've played a roguelike that really nailed this for me yet--I feel like there's too much of an emphasis on the map and not enough of one on the map flow and how nearby rooms affect each other. Old-school style D&D dungeon crawls just drip this type of exploration, where finding a spider nest with some mummified goblin corpses stuck in it lets you know that this part of the dungeon is probably going to have goblins in it. I think there's a lot of room for roguelikes to tap into that, even if they'll never be able to quite as organically as a human mind can.
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Dec 3, 2013 05:05
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I think some smart weighted procedural generation and fixed designs linked together could work wonders. It's ok if the 'surprise' of an area is spoiled once you've seen it once if the context of that area is different every game. Completely random allows for no preparation and no anticipation, completely static allows for no variation of approach and 'solvable' situations (and note that a lot of the best nethack/adom/crawl players use the fact that there are fixed or semi fixed areas that they can intentionally plan around to consistently progress farther each time, rather than simply taking what the game gives you and brute forcing your way through it). Brogue is a game that I hate the randomness in, the entire early game feels incredibly capricious. You can do fixed seed games (somewhat analogous to RLs dungeon fixing, but I find RL has a lot less variability in the moment to moment gameplay than Brogue), though of course that has other problems. Angband was a game where the randomness bored me, it was (for a good chunk of its lifespan) halls and rooms, and the smartest strategy was farming for vaults at specific depths to loot specific gear, which was about as fun as farming in wow or diablo (which is fun to some people! just not me). In general I agree though, semi fixed and lots of hand crafted areas are the best balance I've seen. Heck, it's even ok if the game does have some areas that are explicitly random (something like the abyss in crawl or the infinite dungeon in adom) if you want to go mash letters in those places. The random dungeon levels in Crawl I always found pretty uninteresting, much like the random CoC levels in adom. A game that can constantly be updated with new areas at a minimal dev cost works best, or you wind up with a Diablo 3 situation where the semi randomness is 'used up' comparatively quickly due to the asset/time cost of creating new encounters/areas/etc. There's still plenty of stuff I've rarely or never seen in Crawl, D3 I'm not touching again till the expac.
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Dec 3, 2013 05:40
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I've had that issue with NetHack too. Even though I love that game, honestly the bulk of the levels in it are just plain boring because they're just a bunch of more or less empty rooms with squiggly hallways connecting them. The fact that Crawl has an auto-explore button is nice, but it seems like a better solution would be to just find a way to make the exploration itself more interesting rather than just automate it (note: "better" solution doesn't mean "easier". I realize what I've described is actually really hard to do right). I think Spelunky does a pretty good job of using random generation to make things interesting. The levels are all kind of same-y, but there's this moment to moment risk of exploration from traps that makes you always wary about moving forward, because everyone has had that one time where they just said gently caress it and sprinted through a level, only to blunder into an arrow trap that bounces them on to some spikes. The interesting thing is that there really aren't that many different traps, but because of the way is designed that's not that big a deal - the point isn't to surprise you with something you've never seen before, it's that the few traps there are never become trivialized, so you're always worried about them. That really gets to that "anticipation" aspect you mentioned, where it's more about trying to manage threats you generally understand, rather than having to blunder through something you've never seen before.
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Dec 3, 2013 05:48
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My favorite aspect of roguelikes is discovery, whether it be of a unique boss or a unique item. I like discovering a cool artifact, like in DoomRL when my dual-pistol character found the Grammton Cleric pistols. That was neat as hell. I think Angband goes a little overboard, hmph, another legendary sword adourned with silmaril's, pass, it only has +10 speed! The longest single session I ever had was Crawl, almost my first and only win, something like 18 hours on a KoBe. I also crave novelty so I get bored of games fairly quickly when they stop surprising me. Games like Risk of Rain/Spelunky/Binding of Isaac's main draw is the sheer difference of each run based on my 'luck' and what I find. Also those are roguelike, but Risk of Rain is not as roguelike, but Rogue Legacy is not very roguelike at all. The criteria for this qualification is long and largely arbitrary.
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Dec 3, 2013 07:15
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I kinda lose my faith in randomness when the best and most interesting maps/challenges in Crawl are the big vaults designed by a human.
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Dec 3, 2013 10:14
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Randomness is terrible in general and roguelikes as a genre are far too given to using it as a crutch, but map design and enemy placement is one of the few areas where I feel like it's really beneficial.  Random initial conditions with non-random solutions is the best combination of factors for replayability. Vaults and prefab challenges might be more interesting the first time you encounter them, but then again, the two methods aren't totally exclusive either. Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 10:25 on Dec 3, 2013 |
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Dec 3, 2013 10:23
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I still wish there was a Wizard Lab branch based off of the mini one that can rarely spawn. Have it still keep the wide variety of types that it can use as far as the general theme/whatever, but make it into a more fleshed out area. Those things were always cool.
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Dec 3, 2013 10:28
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netcat posted:I kinda lose my faith in randomness when the best and most interesting maps/challenges in Crawl are the big vaults designed by a human. Should be noted that almost all of crawl's vaults are also heavily randomized. Placement and distribution of monsters, dungeon features, and even the vault layout itself gets randomized. You can even get vaults that place more vaults inside them (this is essentially how most of the "dungeon sprint" maps are built). There's still a predefined map which it's structured around, but the RNG plays a vital role too. Technically, even the random dungeon layouts are defined as "vaults", and range from being very random, to having a lot of "human-made" elements included. Or in some cases (eg in Zot) it produces weird geometrical levels which look manmade but aren't.
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Dec 3, 2013 13:08
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I think you were responding to a post in the dmans thread, not here.EvilMike posted:Should be noted that almost all of crawl's vaults are also heavily randomized. Placement and distribution of monsters, dungeon features, and even the vault layout itself gets randomized. You can even get vaults that place more vaults inside them (this is essentially how most of the "dungeon sprint" maps are built). There's still a predefined map which it's structured around, but the RNG plays a vital role too. Knowing the shape of a room, the physical layout, is different from knowing who or what will be inside. Take Hell's Arena in DoomRL. You know the shape, and you know what's inside. You know you can run backwards from Pinkies with relative safety because the worst you'll see is another Pinkie (from afar, because the room has plenty of LOS) or a Cacodemon. But if it had randomized monster types, well you know what the room looks like and you know where you can run, but you *don't* know if you're going to run into something truly lovely. In the case of Hell's Arena, that would be poor design, because that level is aimed at lowbie characters. But imagine running into that same level later, where your weapon loadout is more mature and the enemy pool to draw from is much wider. It's a different experience.
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Dec 3, 2013 15:12
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Anyone playing the early access action-roguelike Nuclear Throne? http://store.steampowered.com/app/242680 It is pretty fun and the devs stream some of their development during the week so the players get a lot of input into what goes into the game. It is early access though, although the most recent update added a fair bit including a katana wielding chicken mutant.
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Dec 4, 2013 02:47
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SO here's something if you like roguelikes and oldschool fps games. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVPXV99Dhqw
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Dec 4, 2013 06:00
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Geokinesis posted:Anyone playing the early access action-roguelike Nuclear Throne? gently caress I've already spent too much money on games the last month
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Dec 4, 2013 07:03
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I'm not gonna argue over whether a thing is a roguelike or not, but to branch off of the earlier "random hallways are boring" discussion, FPS or overhead bullet hell arenas are sorta not my thing either. I was just playing Spelunky, kind of trying to be mindful of the whole "random maps are boring" thing, and sure, some pieces of Spelunky's generated maps are not that interesting to me anymore. But on the whole, they still are interesting, challenging, and fun to navigate. Some of why that is, has been the fact that they're at least partly hand-made instead of robotically random, as previously discussed. But the other part (and here is what is missing from those shooters perhaps) is the item/environment/trap interactions. Visually, Spelunky is also gorgeous and varying, which helps with the novelty. And there are some decent mysteries to go after, which so far I've remained mostly spoiler free on. (Just discovered Worm today!) FPS's, overhead bullet hell arenas, or even Spelunky-likes that go for the roguelike approach seem, at least to me, to go with the random hallways, random enemies, random fanfare powerups, a splash of Internet Humor 2.0, and more or less stop there. So far, for me that hasn't been enough, because darn it, they're just not that much fun. I love Vlambeer's playful art and approach to making games, but Nuclear Throne looks incredibly tedious.
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Dec 4, 2013 07:42
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The issue with creating a 'traditional' roguelike with the types of interactions Spelunky has as core gameplay is extremely difficult for a few reasons, not least because you're (usually) dealing with turn based grid (or hex? haven't seen any) mechanics, and those tend to be fairly uninteresting in general. When you go for hardcoded interactions, you end up with something like Nethack, which grows ludicrously bloated and insanely unfriendly to newbies due to frequently illogical or extremely unintuitive mechanics (granted, a lot of them are 20-30 year old jokes at this point, so that's part of it for nh). Brogue is, I think, a good attempt at having more emergent gameplay with a sort of puzzly approach to dungeon delving in general - combat isn't always (or even usually) the best approach to most situations, and stealth, magic, tools, companions, or running away in various combinations can get you through most encounters. Dungeonmans is actually making a decent attempt at trying to make grid based combat somewhat interesting from what I've seen, with a lot of positional and multi-grid targeted abilities (both player and enemy). Tome4 has that sort of combat variability in spades, but something about that game just didn't do it for me. The combat felt too disposable, if that makes any sense. Encounter fatigue I think. One of the reasons Spelunky is so successful isn't just the (relatively) always fresh encounters due to the interactions between various objects and traps, it's also the tightness of the pacing - it's a short game, overall, so it doesn't overstay its welcome, and that also lets each encounter have more meaning. I'd like to see more roguelikes trying for brevity over bloat, I think a good clean extensible core could be a lot of fun if designed right. Consider something like DoomRL, which was very simple to begin with, and slowly gained more items/complexity over time. A solid core combat engine and a host of items and item/monster/class interactions that are interesting (and explained, for fucks sake) could be awesome. Basically take something like Nethack level item complexity, but instead of burying all the interactions in obscurity and the insanely annoying identify minigame, have a shorter list of items and interactions that are clearly explained, and let the player experiment with the way those items interact with the world each game. A major issue with roguelikes (and, broadly speaking, games in general) is that for a lot of them, the only 'language' we have to speak to them is 'kill, kill faster, kill harder'. There's nothing wrong with that at all, but when you give the player tools to interact with the world in other ways, the players 'vocabulary' expands and you often get interesting emergent gameplay. Done well, it's also fairly well balanced and enjoyable. Done poorly and, well, look at any feature bloated rl that is interesting conceptually but just not fun to play.
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Dec 4, 2013 09:27
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