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madjackmcmad
May 27, 2008

Look, I'm startin' to believe some of the stuff the cult guy's been saying, it's starting to make a lot of sense.

victrix posted:

Also to be clear that wasn't a knock on Dmans
Not at all. I just like talkin' bout dungeons.

victrix posted:

Nothing else comes close to the number of crazy ways you can interact with items, monsters, and the world as Nethack.
In general the 'gotchas' in Nethack are poo poo design imo, as the majority of them are 'once you know this, you're safe, before that, you die and get to restart!'
In most roguelikes, the vast majority of complexity comes from combat mechanics, interactivity is usually way lower on the list, if present at all.
I like the idea of secrets in our roguelikes, but I like them best when discovering them makes your gameplay better. The opposite are secrets that you have to know about to even progress. ADOM has a button dedicated to wiping mud off your face, that's such a gotcha the first time you need to do it. I know that's touted as realism, but the reality is if there was mud on your face you'd wipe it off by instincy, unless you were some mad crazy kata fighter with an iron will.

victrix posted:

When combat is the only 'language' you have to speak to the game, there's less 'dialogue' you can have with the world - and you're straining the limits of creativity to come up with new and interesting ways to make 3x3 grid combat and letterbumping engaging.
It's true. I'm trying to raise that bar with Dungeonmans but at the core it's a game about crushing monsters and taking their stuff, it lacks the broad collection of world interactions you see in Nethack.

icantfindaname posted:

The complex interactions. First of all I think people exaggerate how much of a problem the need for spoilers is. It's definitely not the game's biggest problem, probably not even in the top three or so. The problem really lies in the necessity for the player to use the really boring and tedious interactions to survive. I certainly never had the patience to survive as tourist or even as wizard, because it involved writing elbereth every 100 loving turns which takes hours of real world time, and using darts and whatever lovely daggers you find lying around to attack with for a significant part of the game, etc, etc. They would be fun and interesting mechanics if you didn't have to heavily abuse them to actually beat the game. Most of the interactions in the game aren't this, though, they're just fun and interesting to varying degrees, although some not as much as others.

Beyond that the fact that the game has a sort of story and unique levels that don't consist of boring maze and don't fit some pattern of 'here's the undead branch, here's the sewers branch, here's the spiders branch, here's the hell branch, etc'. The castle, medusa's lair, the elemental planes, the dwarven mines, sokoban, the quest; The fact that I can list so many off the top of my head without having played it in a long time says something. But then again there's gehennom which is terrible.

Nethack is really incredible because it has, at the same time, some of the best game design I've ever seen, and some really really bad game design along with it, possibly in equal parts. I've always been of the opinion that a game consistently as good as nethack's good half would be basically a Michelangelo level masterpiece. I don't want to praise the game too much, but it does seem to be cool to hate in a hipster-y fashion, and lots of the critics of the game seem to think its interactions are dwarf fortress adventure style "you hurt your left tendon and now have a -3% accuracy penalty with crossbows only", when it's actually not like that at all. The variety is variety in environment and story, and how the player interacts with it, not in random number stats.
This is awesome, please write about roguelikes all the time.

Nethack is brilliant. The parts of it that don't hold up so well are outshined by really cool parts everyone keeps coming back to. That whole "the devs thought of everything!" aspect was so critical to the game. Nethack strove to create something as flexible and real as what you'd get sitting around a tabletop, or playing the most detailed text adventures. The game was a pioneer, and while you can certainly argue that certain aspects of it aren't fun anymore, it's hard to outright call any of it bad. It was a product of its time.

icantfindaname posted:

Basically games like ToME and Dredmor feel sort of dead inside, even though they deliver that experience at a consistent level of quality, and the reason for this is that they don't have the same meaningful interactions between the player and the story and game world. I don't think it's an invalid approach to making a game, but I don't think they do it very well. I think Dungeon Crawl does the 'homogenous dungeon crawler' approach better, with a better balance between variety and consistency. I'm not impressed by Dredmor's sense of humor, and ToME feels like really boring lord of the rings fanfiction.

Brogue goes another direction entirely and throws out the lore, environmental variety and character building dress-up game and goes just for tactical depth, and it does it very very well IMO. You can focus on allies, stealth, environment manipulation, magic, or melee, and all of these work equally well and you aren't forced to choose any one beyond what you get as item drops.
If you can/want to run games on Windows, I encourage you try Dungeonmans if you haven't already. http://www.dungeonmans.com/?page_id=290 Not because it's going to be the answer to all your game desires, but rather the opposite. It's on the spectrum of roguelike style that you appear to not like, and I would benefit from the extra critical eye.

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Harminoff
Oct 24, 2005

👽
So this is a thing, if you want to chat/spectate people playing roguelike games.

http://rogueshell.com/

Currently has

Adom
Brogue
Cataclysm
Crawl
Gearhead
Nethack
Omega_rpg
Rogue
Slashem
Tome
Wump

DalaranJ
Apr 15, 2008

Yosuke will now die for you.

madjackmcmad posted:

What are the core things you'd carry forward if you were bringing Nethack into the glistening neon future?

Nethack's reputation is so large in the roguelike community that it's sort of hard for me to say "here's a thing that was only great in Nethack!". Almost everything I liked about Nethack has been improved on by other games, so much so that it's hard for me to not look back on it with disdain. (Also it turns out that I wasn't really into that sort of roguelike, a fact that I didn't discover for about a decade.)

I would say that I liked the 'quest' instance where the game generated some stuff that was specifically geared to your class. Also for hilarious decision points a scroll of genocide is hard to beat.

Edit:

madjackmcmad posted:

It was a product of its time.

Basically this.

TOOT BOOT
May 25, 2010

Roguelike of the year poll is up for this year, ToME has a substantial lead already and will probably win yet again.

Jordan7hm
Feb 17, 2011




Lipstick Apathy

TOOT BOOT posted:

Roguelike of the year poll is up for this year, ToME has a substantial lead already and will probably win yet again.

Pretty much no doubt about it.

DarkGod included a message about the poll in his Christmas / year end email, so... yeah.

I chose to vote for every RL I played this year that wasn't shite. My actual favorite this year would be either Spelunky or Desktop Dungeons.

Johnny Joestar
Oct 21, 2010

Don't shoot him?

...
...



Has DoomRL ever won? Because, drat, it really should.

Jordan7hm
Feb 17, 2011




Lipstick Apathy

Harminoff posted:

So this is a thing, if you want to chat/spectate people playing roguelike games.

http://rogueshell.com/

This is a closed beta so if you're interested, you've got to sign up.

Also yeah DoomRL won in 2009.

doctorfrog
Mar 14, 2007

Great.

Is it that ToME is "the best," the most popular, or are they just better at driving traffic to the poll? (Me: Spelunky, every year since 2008.)

victrix
Oct 30, 2007


madjackmcmad posted:

I like the idea of secrets in our roguelikes, but I like them best when discovering them makes your gameplay better. The opposite are secrets that you have to know about to even progress. ADOM has a button dedicated to wiping mud off your face, that's such a gotcha the first time you need to do it. I know that's touted as realism, but the reality is if there was mud on your face you'd wipe it off by instincy, unless you were some mad crazy kata fighter with an iron will.

I kind of think 'secrets' as a gameplay tool are dead, or at least undead. The internet has killed them. I'm also not convinced they're worth the design time compared to the time that a new player spends enjoying (or hating) them.

Rather than obfuscated game mechanics or true hidden 'gotchas', I think a broad and deep pool of gameplay possibilities is just a better way to design games period, roguelikes included. And I don't strictly mean 'more' - games that have interesting encounter permutations from a handful of well designed enemies/weapons/tools/levels often have very long legs indeed.

I can't think of many cases where I kicked the bucket due to something I hadn't seen before made me particularly happy, but I always enjoy the moments where I stop completely and sit and think about my options for awhile - and Nethack specifically was pretty rad about usually having any number of possible solutions for a given situation. Granted, there was usually an obvious one, but still, the increased number of possibilities would create unusual situations when your options were more limited (usually in the early/midgame, but even lategame problems could occur with specific mixes of enemies and the wrong kit).

And again, this isn't a criticism of something that's more purely hack and slash like Crawl (or even, say, Diablo 3), simply an observation that in roguelikes, I like having the extra options.

Curiously both Tome and Brogue do a pretty good job of having an insane variety of combat options (Tome) or situational answers (Brogue), but I don't really enjoy either game.

Come to think of it, spellcasting in Crawl is one area where that game gives you lots more tactical toys to play with, but I dislike the hoops you have to jump through to reach the mid/lategame with a caster to actually play with those toys extensively. I hate Crawl earlygame, and I really hate it as a caster.

I also think roguelikes (and games, again) are a bit lazy in terms of enemy design. Levels are partly to blame for this.

What's the difference between a level 1 Orc and a level 50 Ogre in terms of gameplay? Unless the Ogre does some sort of unique attack or movement, not a lot. Yet a lot of roguelikes (and games in general) will spend the time to add in 'more content' that is functionally the same in terms of gameplay. How many trash mobs in mmos do nothing more than walk up to the party and hit people? And they get how much time from artists, animators, and designers?

Angband is/was the king of all 'holy poo poo I'm cleaving through a mountain of boring letters oops I died to something actually dangerous while I was asleep on an arrow key', but a lot of roguelikes are guilty of having 50 different melee foos and 20 different ranged foos with only a handful of creatures with unusual abilities.

There's definitely room for popcorn enemies to bracket more unusual encounters (if for no other reason than to avoid paralyzing the player with constant complex encounters), but it's an area I'd like to see more work done with. Brogue is pretty good at this, with many different unique enemies with unique abilities, as are some others.

And realism is a terrible word in gaming discussion, almost as badly abused as poor 'balance' :v:

Any time either word comes up, odds are it's shorthand for a much more complicated thought that the person writing can't be bothered to expand (or doesn't even know how to!).

In the case of 'keys that do one thing' I'd just call them bad design period.

Playing One Way Heroics after mucking with a few Nethack source ports recently was refreshing. You can literally play it with the numpad and nothing else, and it's great. It could benefit from a few extra hotkeys to assign abilities, but otherwise, there's very little I'd touch about its UI.

quote:

It's true. I'm trying to raise that bar with Dungeonmans but at the core it's a game about crushing monsters and taking their stuff, it lacks the broad collection of world interactions you see in Nethack.

There's nothing wrong with that. Many of the best games that I have played and continue to play are done with a singular focus on refining a handful of core mechanics. Not that sprawling messy nonsense can't be a ton of fun (people like DF, right? :v:).

And the kind of interactivity I'm talking about is hard. If it was easy, more games would do it. It's even harder in 3d games with graphical assets that need to be created for every eventuality.

Doesn't mean I don't want more of it :haw:

(I also think its one of the reasons that Minecraft/Terraria/Starbound are so wildly popular - freeform interactions, randomization, creativity, all in one package)

Jordan7hm
Feb 17, 2011




Lipstick Apathy

doctorfrog posted:

Is it that ToME is "the best," the most popular, or are they just better at driving traffic to the poll? (Me: Spelunky, every year since 2008.)

It's probably the only very polished, popular roguelike that also has a built-in chat and messaging system and an active developer who wants to win the poll. Until that stops being the case ToME has an extremely high chance to win every year.

Harminoff
Oct 24, 2005

👽
Didn't it have (and might this year?) a welcome message when you started the game to go vote?

andrew smash
Jun 26, 2006

smooth soul

Harminoff posted:

Didn't it have (and might this year?) a welcome message when you started the game to go vote?

Yeah the MOTD linked to the poll last year, it caused some hubbub

Jeffrey of YOSPOS
Dec 22, 2005

GET LOSE, YOU CAN'T COMPARE WITH MY POWERS
Sending out mail about it is pretty similar, if no other "big game" does that then it's a huge advantage.

Johnny Joestar
Oct 21, 2010

Don't shoot him?

...
...



That almost seems...a little too unfair? Especially considering the pool of choices in general.

dis astranagant
Dec 14, 2006

It's a dumb popularity contest that lets you stuff the ballot as much as you want. The guy running it freely admits that no one should take it seriously in any way.

andrew smash
Jun 26, 2006

smooth soul

dis astranagant posted:

It's a dumb popularity contest that lets you stuff the ballot as much as you want. The guy running it freely admits that no one should take it seriously in any way.

Didn't he have a bit of a meltdown about it in the last thread?

TooMuchAbstraction
Oct 14, 2012

I spent four years making
Waves of Steel
Hell yes I'm going to turn my avatar into an ad for it.
Fun Shoe

victrix posted:

I kind of think 'secrets' as a gameplay tool are dead, or at least undead. The internet has killed them. I'm also not convinced they're worth the design time compared to the time that a new player spends enjoying (or hating) them.

It depends, really. I mean, take a game like Knytt Underground. There's tons of secrets in that game, because it's an exploration-based game with a colossal map. And sure, you could follow a guide to find everything, but that's kind of missing the point of playing the game. In other words, secrets can still be in games as a reward for the player who is detail-minded and does some experimentation.

I do think that secrets-that-give-gameplay-advantages are a pretty dead concept though, since anyone who wants to optimize their gameplay is going to feel some degree of impetus to spoil themselves just so they can figure out how to play the game "properly". At least for games where coordination is not required (i.e. non-real-time games). Metroid bomb-jumping and other skilled techniques are going to be around for ages, and developers should feel free to build challenges and hidden areas around making use of them.

hito
Feb 13, 2012

Thank you, kids. By giving us this lift you're giving a lift to every law-abiding citizen in the world.

victrix posted:

Rather than obfuscated game mechanics or true hidden 'gotchas', I think a broad and deep pool of gameplay possibilities is just a better way to design games period, roguelikes included. And I don't strictly mean 'more' - games that have interesting encounter permutations from a handful of well designed enemies/weapons/tools/levels often have very long legs indeed.

Have you played Hydra Slayer?

EAT THE EGGS RICOLA
May 29, 2008

Hoplite Is a super awesome Android tactical not-really-roguelike game too that everyone should give a shot.

Corridor
Oct 19, 2006

TooMuchAbstraction posted:

It depends, really. I mean, take a game like Knytt Underground. There's tons of secrets in that game, because it's an exploration-based game with a colossal map. And sure, you could follow a guide to find everything, but that's kind of missing the point of playing the game. In other words, secrets can still be in games as a reward for the player who is detail-minded and does some experimentation.

Shame all the characters in that game are so loving ugly I can't stand looking at them long enough to play

Corridor
Oct 19, 2006

Jordan7hm posted:

Dunno, post your steam ID.

http://steamcommunity.com/id/thoroughly

Mirthless
Mar 27, 2011

by the sex ghost

andrew smash posted:

Yeah the MOTD linked to the poll last year, it caused some hubbub

Most people didn't seem to give a gently caress except the guy running the poll, who almost revoked ToME's right to participate. There was some allegations that the guy running the poll was rooting for ADOM to win as he overlooked ADOM doing almost the same thing by mass-mailing it's indiegogo supporters asking them to vote in the poll. At the time I felt like it was a ridiculous double standard, but darkgod was pretty apologetic about it all things considered, and when you look at how the issue was approached I really don't think he had to be.

I think as long as they continue to allow previous winners to participate ToME continues to deserve to win. It's one of the most highly polished games in the genre and is getting regular content updates. The game is way better than it was last year, or the year before. But, for what it's worth, I don't think ToME should be eligible anymore, or any previous winner, or any deprecated/inactive/storied game for that matter. I would rather see the poll become a showcase of recent indie roguelike games and run as a year-to-year poll featuring only the new games. Instead we have a huge list where only 3 or 4 games get any attention each year, and it's always the same 3 or 4 games. Sure, there's a lot of stinker roguelikes that come out from year to year, but there's also a lot of hidden gems and they're missing an opportunity for exposure because it's way too easy for Darkgod or Thomas Biskup or Chaosforge to use their huge networks to insure they win or top-10 in the poll year after year.

Mirthless fucked around with this message at 07:12 on Dec 18, 2013

Superschaf
May 20, 2010

Corridor posted:

Shame all the characters in that game are so loving ugly I can't stand looking at them long enough to play

Just play the original Knytt, or Knytt Stories. They are still amazingly beautiful games.

Corridor
Oct 19, 2006

Superschaf posted:

Just play the original Knytt, or Knytt Stories. They are still amazingly beautiful games.

I did, and that one where you are a morph ball. I just dunno why they didn't stick with tiny cute kitties over some uglyass MSpaint creeps. Like did the dev's girl/boyfriend design them so he was obliged to put them in, or what? The rest of KU looks fine.

Superschaf
May 20, 2010

Yeah I agree. The character designs really suffered when Nifflas moved to higher resolution art. NightSky works because it's just a ball. :shrug:

100 HOGS AGREE
Oct 13, 2007
Grimey Drawer
I dunno if I won some award several years in a row I'd probably just bow out gracefully and let someone else get the meaningless spotlight for a change.

ExiledTinkerer
Nov 4, 2009
Considering that Tome just recently made it onto Steam, it is even less of a wonder that DG and folks hope for it to also do well this year as yet another feather on the cap to draw some well-earned attention to the game.

I'd like to see the poll mutate into more of an interactive pantheon of sorts---previous winners collaborating with the pollster/in general in a sinister cabal to shine an extra hopeful light on projects in the mass that they think would make fine company/respect their hustling about. Ideally, the poll can be another prong of the attack to build momentum in the entire Roguelike shake of it alongside a lark same as the 7DRL compos and the ARRP.

If people like to think that DG's voting drive is extra dark magic, well, turn that around to a "DG's Choice" or "Toady's Choice" made about as public through it and that should indeed help to drive some folks into new and promising projects.

Ignatius M. Meen
May 26, 2011

Hello yes I heard there was a lovely trainwreck here and...

Bringing something completely different up for a change, it seems Prospector has a new website and has been recently updated. I recall trying it a while back but didn't do very well at it, pretty cool idea though (getting rich by exploring space, trading with/shooting aliens and so on) and I'm gonna give it another roll.

turn it up TURN ME ON
Mar 19, 2012

In the Grim Darkness of the Future, there is only war.

...and delicious ice cream.
Did I miss where someone shared the link to the poll in question? I'm curious.

Naar
Aug 19, 2003

The Time of the Eye is now
Fun Shoe
It's here: http://roguelikedeveloper.blogspot.com/2013/12/request-for-votes-ascii-dreams.html

turn it up TURN ME ON
Mar 19, 2012

In the Grim Darkness of the Future, there is only war.

...and delicious ice cream.

Thanks! Holy cow, there are a TON of roguelikes I haven't played. I wonder how many are fake.

Mirthless
Mar 27, 2011

by the sex ghost

ExiledTinkerer posted:

Considering that Tome just recently made it onto Steam, it is even less of a wonder that DG and folks hope for it to also do well this year as yet another feather on the cap to draw some well-earned attention to the game.

Yeah, and last year it was driving attention to get people to vote for it on greenlight. Next year it will be to promote the Orc campaign. I think it's unreasonable to expect darkgod to bow out of the competition when he's made a legitimate career out of developing and promoting his game. If the operator of the poll and the community want him to stop winning the rules need to change and the poll needs to be taken more seriously by it's maintainer. The award itself keeps getting pitched as "silly fun" by the maintainer and a lot of people in the community, but outside the community winning "the roguelike of the year award" multiple years in a row gets mentioned constantly when referring to ToME when the game gets brought up. (And Dwarf Fortress, for that matter, when it won the award) The award has some prestige to it. I think it's time for the person running the competition to either get serious about it or pass the torch to somebody who will.

victrix
Oct 30, 2007


This is the same contest that doesn't even have links to the roguelikes in question. It's a pretty dumb page all around.

Levitate
Sep 30, 2005

randy newman voice

YOU'VE GOT A LAFRENIÈRE IN ME
Ok, giving Sil a shot, any general guidelines or things I should be aware of?

TooMuchAbstraction
Oct 14, 2012

I spent four years making
Waves of Steel
Hell yes I'm going to turn my avatar into an ad for it.
Fun Shoe

Levitate posted:

Ok, giving Sil a shot, any general guidelines or things I should be aware of?

You might want to read uPen's not-quite-complete LP of it, which covers what is apparently one of the easier ways to play the game (and thus presumably a good way to learn the ropes). That is, a stealthy archer.

Arcturas
Mar 30, 2011

My big takeaway learning Sil is that you should run away from almost everything unless there's sweet loot in the room. This may not actually be the best way to play, but it seems to work for me so far.

uPen
Jan 25, 2010

Zu Rodina!

TooMuchAbstraction posted:

You might want to read uPen's not-quite-complete LP of it, which covers what is apparently one of the easier ways to play the game (and thus presumably a good way to learn the ropes). That is, a stealthy archer.

I should probably finish that huh, the save is sitting at the start of the ascent because I dislike the ascent so much I've put it off for weeks. :negative:

BetterLekNextTime
Jul 22, 2008

It's all a matter of perspective...
Grimey Drawer
That and get the gently caress away from the stairs as soon as you get to a new level, because nothing kills you quicker than fighting something and having 3 orc warriors come up behind you. There's no Phase Door in Sil, and getting surrounded makes it easier for monsters to hit you.

I can't remember the archer build, but most other builds benefit from dumping most of your early points into melee and evasion.

Oh, and do the tutorial- it's pretty helpful. The manual isn't that long either and will help explain (a bit) things like the effect of weapon weight on your attacks.

Levitate
Sep 30, 2005

randy newman voice

YOU'VE GOT A LAFRENIÈRE IN ME
Yeah I did the tutorial and read the manual some. Just not sure how much to invest in what skills and attributes but yeah I guess starting off you can't go too wrong dumping a lot into melee and evasion

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deadly_pudding
May 13, 2009

who the fuck is scraeming
"LOG OFF" at my house.
show yourself, coward.
i will never log off
I glanced back and didn't see it mentioned-

Spelunky HD is like $3.50 on Xbox Live Arcade (360) right now, due to their Countdown to New 2014 sale. I'ma probably pick that up tonight.

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