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

I consider overall, while some of the QoL stuff is good, the changes and additions to the series in this entry are a net negative. Especially night time.
Many other Shirens/Mystery Dungeons play better than this.
That said, I still love Shiren, even this one, and I’ll still be getting it again on Steam.

Day/night cycles were added in the previous one, and I love the risk/reward of them, the way they make you use a bunch of the lower items you would just not bother picking up, and how you can mostly just skip them if you are really scared. I’m a masochist and I can’t get enough of that Monster Level up jingle.
A lot of dungeons don’t feature the mechanic if it’s not to one’s taste, too.
5 is hands down the best in the series since Asuka to me, and there is not even a close contest with that one. Even the soundtrack is the the best. What an amazing game, and I can’t wait to finally play the Vita extras.

The dungeon variety is a good point. There’s just so much to do in 5, and a lot of options for how you spend your time or set goals. I need to give the OST another listen, I don’t remember any of them being particularly striking to me. But I tend to play Shiren as a podcast game.
For the record, my favorite is Genso Wanderer.

Holy cats does Barony pwn noobs. Thanks for the free pwning, Epic.

Approaching Infinity released on Steam a bit early and is 10% off for the first week.

Anyone buying this again? Steam keys for owners of the Shrapnel version may come only after the early access* period is ended, in maybe 6 months.

*note the game is not traditional early access, it was a complete game for an age but the dev wants to add some modern usability features and expand the content.

A few folks:

I totally double dipped.

You know, I checked that dedicated thread and everything but was so excited I somehow missed all the recent posts… :D
SMH!

I never actually got around to playing Approaching Infinity, but I figured I’d chip the guy a few bucks for doing more work on it and getting it on Steam etc. And maybe now I’ll actually spend some time with it.

https://twitter.com/roguelike_cel/status/1291731236994646016?s=20

About this Event

Roguelike games have been part of gaming culture for over 30 years and they have a deep and special place in our hearts. Over the last five years hundreds of roguelike fans got together to celebrate these games and their rich history and now we’re ready to do it again - this time virtually! We loved getting together and celebrating - so this year we’re holding a two day conference to get as many roguelike fans as we can into one virtual place.

To make things feel particularly rogue-y, we’re hosting this year’s conference in our own custom game chat space. For the first time ever, all you’ll need to attend Roguelike Celebration is a web browser!

If you didn’t attend last year’s event you can read all about it here: Roguelike Celebration - Event 2019

The conference will take place on October 3 and 4 virtually. All talks will be live-streamed on Twitch; a ticket gets you additional access to our custom social space and all of the other conference activities such as unconferencing, the arcade, and more.

We’re still finalizing the schedule, but this year’s speakers include:

  • Eli Delventhal - Help Me Steal the Mona Lisa
  • Todd Furmanski - Mysty Roguelikes, or: Using First Person Point-and-Click Paradigms with Realtime Graphics and Simulation
  • Tyriq A Plummer - YASDery Loves Company: Multiplayer in Traditional Roguelikes
  • Julian Day - Poetry at the Edge of Roguelikes: Writing Around Iterative Media
  • Lee Tusman - One-Dimensional Dungeons (alternate title: Lower Dimensional Dungeons)
  • Caelyn Sandel - Teaching the Fun of Losing
  • Cat Manning - How To Build A Character System That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Turns Later (with apologies to PKD)
  • Andrea Roberts - Designing a Roguelike for People Who’ve Never Played Roguelikes
  • Lisa Brown - Why do I even like roguelikes? An exploration of player motivation
  • Herbert Wolverson - Procedural Map Generation Techniques
  • Darren Grey - What Is A Rogue Like?
  • Gabriel Koenig - Good Mutation/Bad Mutation: Player Agency in Procedural Generation
  • Aaron A. Reed - Cadences, Lacunae, and Subcutaneans: Ten Years of Procedural Novels
  • Ivy Melinda - A flower in the garden: cultivating a community for Caves of Qud
  • Andrew Aversa - The End of Permadeath
  • Phillip Daigle - Rogue’s Gate: Feeling Around in the Dark
  • Kate Compton - Making Polite Programming Languages: How to Design a Generative Language without a Programming Language Degree
  • Andrew Stuart - My 30 year quest to find a lost Roguelike
  • Xalavier Nelson Jr. - Procedural Generation for Dogs
  • Mark Gritter - Procedurally Generating Economies with Graph Grammars (and Math)
  • Tanya X. Short - A Procedure for Changing Culture
  • Nicholas Feinberg - ??learndb’s silliest corners
  • Julian K. Jarboe - Procedural Audio/Sound Design for Roguelikes
  • Younès Rabii - There’s a Skull in my Garden
  • Adrian Herbez - Make a thing to make a thing: a primer on 3d-printable Procedural Content in the Browser
  • Clarissa Littler - (roughly) a hundred days of poetry in partnership
  • Max Kreminski - Synthesizing Story Sifters
  • Rosalind Miles Chapman - Hungry Rogues: The evolution of roguelike hunger mechanics
  • Albert Ford - Vision Visualized
  • Dustin Freeman - Procedurally Generating Technology Trees
  • Josh Grams - Turn-based Space Flight?
  • droqen - The roguelike spirit without procedural generation
  • And more to come!

Besides the streamed talks, we’ll have a number of interactive performances, a game showcase for people to play and share their favorite games, time for ‘unconferences’ for smaller presentations and workshops, and a bunch of fun creative content crafted just for the conference!

Ultima Ratio Regum still lives.

Well, what a week! The headline is: absolutely everything is now done except for one bug and one technical issue. It is striking and extremely pleasing how much I’ve been able to get done in this past week of really focusing on URR. The list of remaining bugs has just evaporated: and as such, here’s a list of everything that got fixed this week:

Monday:

  • Fixed issues with insults sometimes generating incorrectly for people from non-feudal civilizations.
  • Worked on greetings and farewell, which are now working correctly in all cases, and identified an issue with compliments sometimes causing a crash (in the case of “Strong Compliments”) which needs to be fixed.
  • Monasteries can no longer spawn on mountains, because doing so resulted in a monastery that was half-buried in the size of a mountain, and half of its doors were presumably buried deep in the cliff face.
  • A few buildings that behaved strangely when you visited at night, and then returned in the day, no longer behave strangely.
  • Monasteries sometimes didn’t spawn at all – this should have been resolved, and all nations with a monastic religious policy should indeed get monasteries in their territories.

Tuesday:

  • The doors to docks in towns can no longer generate in water sometimes; you are always guaranteed an area of dry land around the dock to stand on.
  • Removed guards from inside mints and inside banks because there is a long-term persistent issue here (see previous blog posts), the cause of which I just cannot find at the moment. As such, given that the priority is release: these guards just no longer spawn, and I’ll add them back in later.
  • Resolved an issue with merchants sometimes not being able to identify a home in a town, and getting stuck in a door-searching loop, desperately trying to find somewhere to sleep after a day of hard, draining… merching.

Wednesday:

  • Monasteries will appear on the “city view” when moving around the world, if they are close enough to a city to fit into the grid. (They were previously invisible on this view).
  • Ice and water generation around a dock has been improved, and should now guarantee a path from the dock to the rest of the town.
  • Handled comments from people who belong to one of a random set of religions (e.g. in a state with a liberal religious policy) or people who belong to no fixed religion – they now respond correctly in all cases when asked about their spiritual beliefs.

Thursday:

  • Crowds in banks which were too large to find enough chairs to sit on have now been partially exterminated to ensure the bank can continue to serve its existing (and highly valued) customers.
  • Extensively tested the now-guard-free interiors of banks and mints, and confirmed that they consistently generate correctly and cause no strange bugs.
  • Realised monasteries could still, technically, spawn on a volcano, and promptly removed that possibility.
  • Confirmed that docks work with all possible variations of town → city, city → town, city → city, town → town, and with saving/loading in-between actions, and with movement or no movement between dock uses. This should all be sorted now.

Friday:

  • Resolved the issue with compliments (and, as it turned out, insults as well) by correctly getting them to be called when an NPC, or the player, needs to utter one.
  • Fixed an issue with desert fortresses that the player repeatedly stepped in and out of at different times of way, causing merchants to behave strangely.
  • Fixed the generation of a number of insults and compliments where strange grammar was involved.
  • Fixed a small number of sentence generations keeping the placeholder words, such as “[complimentstart]”, rather than putting the correct words in their place.
  • Resolved an issue where words would not capitalise correctly after certain sentence-ending puncutation marks.

As such, there is now only ONE THING on my bug list! Just one! It might, however, be a big one I’m increasingly finding some troubling memory leak stuff going on – for instance, loading a world which is only 70mb (in the Windows folder) consumes 400mb+ of my computer’s memory. Loading and then reloading also causes memory leak, to the point where doing it too much results in the game crashing because it just doesn’t have the memory to hold what it’s trying to hold. Clearly there is some serious duplication of saving and loading and so forth going on here, and this is what I need to hunt down. I have no idea how long this will take – maybe it’ll be as trivial and inserting a “delete” function somewhere once you’ve saved the world and it should no longer be held in the game’s memory, but maybe it won’t be. These sorts of “technical” bug-fixes are always the ones I struggle with the most, too, so I’m not looking forward to it.

Desktop Dungeons Extreme Edition (fan mod) had another recent update:

So is Rogue like itself enough to be considered a Roguelike?

The original Rogue will be coming to Steam on October 20th.

For Rogue aficionados, you may wish to know that this particular version is Epyx Rogue v1.49 for the IBM PC.

Wow, that’s great. Someone in the programming shop where I worked gave me an IBM DOS color version of Rogue in the mid 80s. I’m not sure if it was PC Rogue or Epyx Rogue. In any case, I was immediately hooked and played it obsessively. I’ve been a big roguelike fan ever since. I may have to get this.

Is that the same Epyx as Epyx Summer Games (etc) on the C64? I loved those games as a kid.

Somewhat against type, RPS ran a “have you played” about Hoplite. I have indeed played it, but not having thought about it for a couple of years at least I reinstalled. What a tight little game this is, so perfect for phones. A rarity in the mobile space, too, for being around almost seven years and still running!

I think the Epyx release was the one I played on the Amiga. I played a ton of that back in the day.

I don’t think anyone mentioned, but this released to v1 and is 20% off (though only showing 10% in the embed below for some reason)

It’s also on Switch. Worth a buy?

I haven’t played it recently, but I sure thought what I played of it before was impressive. One question would be content. That was pretty limited before. Haven’t kept up with what has been added.

One thing that puts me off a bit is apparently there is no suspend function, you have to restart at the beginning of a floor if you need to quit out.

Not really an issue on the Switch version I guess, since the system itself suspends.