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

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.

]

If you are an indie developer

And your next project is not a roguelike, please leave a comment here.

Not the key

This opinion piece on the Zelda series elegantly summarises why I don't think a 'procedural Zelda' will ever be interesting.

Interview with David Ploog

If you're at all interested in game design, you should listen to David Ploog (former lead designer of Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup) get interviewed by the Roguelike Radio team.

To do list

You might note that my to do list is progressing very slowly - at least the public face of that list (Unangband development, blogging) has virtually stalled. I've got two very good reasons, plus I'm back working full time with a long commute.

I've mentioned previously that my OS X laptop was running Tiger. No longer, I've upgraded to Leopard - anything newer felt a little risky.

Given the amount of software I now have access to, it feels like a new machine. So I've taken advantage of being able to run Steam natively, and started playing some games in the comfort of the living room.

As a result: I've beaten Mom's Heart in the Binding of Isaac. The Book of Shadows and Virus together feels like cheating - even more so when I had every stat at maximum. Isaac, however, is one of those games which you need at least one ability which fulfils that requirement in order to get anywhere.

Unfortunately, you won't be able to follow my progress, as the OS X version of Isaac doesn't support achievements. This is probably a good thing, as I may be taking advantage of the slow down running it on older hardware ... [Edit: Apparently I can transfer the save file over to Windows to get the achievements. Hmm...]

Next on the list is fixing a bug which has made the current Angband competition featuring Unangband a lot less interesting than it should be.

Fast Pathfinding via Symmetry Breaking

This paper at AI Game Dev has immediate and natural application to roguelikes, and uses a number of techniques I've not seen discussed elsewhere. The headline quote is 'up to 30 times improvement on A*'.

I can see RSR being extended for Dijkstra maps, by storing the map cost at each rectangle corner, instead of every grid, and interpolating if required. (Paging Pender).

Diablo III pull quote

We want to drop a ton of items, but to really pull off a sense of excitement when finding a great item, there needs to be non-optimal items, both for your class, and in general.

Another Angband variant

Sil attempts to move the game closer to the source material.

Action roguelike watch 2012

The latest developer to jump on the 'I want to be popular and make a lot of money developing a roguelike' bandwagon is one Notch.

Fighting words

I may have started something.

Because there are not enough lists of that sort of thing

This stuff is gold for procedural generation.

IndieGames.com top ten

IndieGames.com has released their list of top ten independent games for the year. Dungeons of Dredmor is in 6th place. The Binding of Isaac is in 2nd place.

Congratulations to the developers of both roguelikes.

His year in roguelikes

For those of you undecided about which roguelike to vote for, you may want to see Adam Smith's recommendations over at Rock Paper Shotgun.