What is your current favorite Roguelike? [Or all things roguelike]

Rogue Empire is on sale on Steam. Don’t know much about it, but it looks roughly comparable to ToME.

New blog entry from the Ultima Ratio Regum guy. He’s still bug squashing for his next big update.

https://www.markrjohnsongames.com/2019/03/30/ultima-ratio-regum-0-8-finale-update-iii/

Is there an all things blobber thread?

I saw Zanki Zero on the store. It looks promising, but it’s probably more of a blobber than anything. But if your entire party of short-lived clones can apparently get wiped out and it’s got town building as metaprogression, that means it’s sort of close to a roguelite? Anyway…

It’s anime as all hell, but it looks very unique. And it’s apparently more of a Danganronpa whodunnit visual novel in disguise than a dungeon crawler? Odd.

I’ve fooled around with Rogue Empire a bit, although I haven’t touched it since it got out of EA. Take everything I say with necessary accouterments.

It’s decent, but it had some jank. The auto exploring wasn’t quite as smooth as I’m used to (ToME being one of the best at this, but many other RLs do it fantastically). This is much more important to me in my advancing years as I’ve had a bit of wrist trouble here and there and even with the steps I have taken to mitigate it. It was something weird like you wouldn’t go to the next stairs once a level was cleared, so you had to manually move. Or you’d get stuck on doors you didn’t have keys for in auto explore, as I am now remembering. You can kick them down but it’s a little obnoxious. Another small but missing touch: in ToME when you select a targeted spell it usually puts the target cursor on the nearest enemy and then you can adjust from there. RE doesn’t do that, sadly. I seem to recall a few other lacking UI niceities.

Character advancement isn’t on ToME’s level. The store page calling it “using a trading card game like system” us being a bit hokey. At every level up you get some stats and make a choice of 1 of 4 additional bonuses. But at certain predfined level ups, you get to make a choice from iirc 3 (or more, depending on previous choices) options which are presented like cards. But that’s the only resemblence. The options can do things like give new abilities (based on class), or enhance existing abilities, enhance stats, etc. The stat enhancements from this second pool of choices are much larger, to make them more tempting. But there’s no deck building or selecting active cards to put in play or anything like that.

There’s a meta layer. Depending on settings when you start a new game (like difficulty and there are a few other things) you can gain soul essence during your journeys. this essence can be spent on permanent upgrades that affect all characters. But the upgrades are expensive and low increment, so it takes time to get significant bonuses out of it (I haven’t hit that point).

It’s solid, and not expensive, but I don’t think it’s amazing.

https://www.markrjohnsongames.com/2019/04/25/ultima-ratio-regum-0-8-finale-update-iv/

Nice to see Mark Johnson continues to chug along with Ultima Ratio Regum.

– You can now properly talk to non-religious NPCs from all kinds of civilizations about their beliefs, and none of those conversations cause the game to crash. Individuals from “free religion” civilizations can also intelligently give different answers depending on their preferences.
– Priests no longer always spawn (for some reason) on the same tile as the altar within their religious building, thereby making it hard to find the altar unless you know the priest is standing on top of it.
– Prisoners can now properly tell you that they are prisoners when asked about their “job”.
– Prisoners can tell you everything about their past crimes, their sentence, when (if ever) they expect to get out, and so forth, without ever trying to generate a sentence they can’t figure out.
– Jailers no longer crash the game when you ask them about whether any particularly important or interesting prisoners are interred at their jail.
– Jailers no longer sometimes just decide they fancy a career change, wander out of the jail they are in charge of, and immediately crash the game because they have no idea what to do once they get outside.
– Entering a building which will (in a potential 0.9) house a regional representative in a democratic nation no longer crashes the game from time to time.
– Mints and Banks no longer sometimes crash the game when you enter them at night (I think?).
– Fixed a few more double-word issues (yep, I hadn’t actually caught all of these last time, but now I think I have… again).
– Handled a bug which made world generation, in extremely rare cases, get stuck in an infinite loop of trying to generate certain aspects of a civilization’s culture.
– Found an extremley rare issue where sometimes an NPC can sometimes find themselves off the road in a city district and fail to figure out what to do or how to get back onto the road. I’m not entirely clear what causes this issue and I’ve only encoutered it once, and this was just because the NPC in question was screaming in the debug log while I was playing. As such, I’ve added in a new bit of “catch-all” code at the end of NPCs deciding where to walk next, which – if they somehow find themselves in that situation – will encourage them to walk back onto a road and resume normal behaviour. I also inserted a catch-all after that which states if finding their way back is also for some reason impossible, then once the player leaves their line-of-sight, they will just despawn.
– Handled a few more buildings where it is possible for furniture to spawn in such a way that someone sitting on a chair, for example, can block a door and then all the people who in the building can no longer find their way out. For any 0.9 I will definitely implement a more general solution here allowing NPCs leaving or entering a building to walk “through” someone sat in a chair, but this solution will do for the time being, and should deal with the issue.
– Removed a handful of special NPCs who were being generated at world generation but not spawned in the world; this shouldn’t have caused any issues (famous last words), but it’s better to be safe than sorry for the time being.

Hahah, I love weird patch notes. Those should have a topic of their own!

In the same spirit as @Clay’s post in March about the seven-day game jam, I present r/roguelikedev’s summer of roguelike development:

I’m going to do it as an excuse/opportunity to learn Rust, I think.

Awesome, thanks for pointing that out!

That’s a great idea. Rust is a great language that I can see exploding in use/popularity in a very short amount of time.

Read about this on RPS, and it sounds neat. Think I’m gonna let it cook for a bit before buying in, though. There is a demo which I have downloaded but not yet played.

Yay, a new Ultima Ratio Regum update!

Choice notes:

– Asking certain NPCs for their perspectives on religious heresy no longer leads to a crash if they don’t really care about it.
– NPCs now properly tell you what is special about their armour (which is to say, nothing, because I haven’t coded that yet).
– Handled an issue in religious districts with some random NPCs, at night, not really knowing how best to worship in the religious building they have selected.

Really looking forward to this update.

This looks bizarre. You play a Fallen God and the game has a features list that includes Fishing and Crafting.

If I’m going to tear the veil between reality to take revenge on a mankind that no longer believes in me, you damn well better be sure I’m going to go fishing at some point, and that needs to be modeled in the game.

Maybe if I actually looked into the game a bit it would make sense, but on paper it seems like features such as “Amass new followers, and use them to bring the world to heel” might be one I’d rather see than “Fishing!”.

I mean, you’re taking revenge, but you’re doing it on your own time. Ain’t nobody gonna tell you how to do you when you’re a forgotten dream god.

Well, if you’re a fallen god, you might get hungry sometimes.

Also, ancient Greek deities used to assume mortal form and do random stuff. Turn into cows, pick up chicks, etc.

If you are running around conquering the world presumably you stop to take dumps sometimes. I don’t think Total War has ever included that as a game feature or ever abstracted digging latrine trenches.

My point being, I think the designer of this game has a very different fantasy of what a game about being a fallen god should be. Mine would be using the tiny shred of power you have left to gather you followers whose belief you feed off and grow more powerful, yada yada. But I mean, some guys want a fishing simulator in there too I guess. YMMV, but it is just not the direction I would have chosen to go in, given the games premise. It just feels so small. I’m a newly incarnated fallen god, time to punch some trees for some wood so i can build my crafting table!

I dare you to remember at least two more things that Greek deities did when they assumed mortal form.

Anyway I too think that crafting and similar things are not heroic at all. And survival mechanics only make sense when it makes sense thematically. Like Fallout New Vegas is better game than Fallout 4 but its survival mechanics were added just because, while in Fallout 4 they make sense both thematically and mechanically.

Another problem with crafting specifically is either you make is a centerpiece of your game or it’s useless. It’s a mechanic that usually requires a lot of fiddling, e.g. getting a lot of components, recipies, looking for workbenches or something. It will probably take as much time as, say, exploring an additional area or two and will give you a sword that is 5% better than what you can find by doing heroic stuff. If it’s 20% stronger then what you can find (so that your efforts are rewarded accordingly) then crafting becomes central mechanic, because why wouldn’t you do it. And then it’s wrong choice to not do crafting and you become a blacksmith instead of a hero.

The only crafting system I can tolerate is where you have a small number of basic elements you care about. So that you have materials of varying rarity and still have a joy of finding a rare material and then deciding what to do with it. Even Fallout 4 is too complex for its own good in that regard, I say. And something like Witcher 3 or Divinity Original Sin 1 have incredibly complex crafting systems that are inevitably balanced by the fact that they’re either useless or easily sidestepped.

Sorry about the rant.

Turn into chicks, pick up cows.

Turn into shaft of golden light, pick up chicks
Turn into swan, pick up chicks

Ok, I guess the first one isn’t really ‘mortal’.

Greek deities weren’t woke, film at 11