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

nethack, adom, Lostx Dungeon II

So wow, Shiren has a lot of training to go through.

Chocobo!


So yeah, the game is still as good as it used to be and the graphical overhaul is very nice, especially the new menus. I love it.

The game is not quite as much of a pushover as I remember it being, as losing inventory items on death is pretty punishing. Still nothing too hard, tough, as you always keep your experience levels.

They ditched the minigames and the trading card game, but those weren’t that good anyway. Better focus on what you do best, eh?

What you get instead are four new classes, a bunch of new dungeons, including an infinite one… and the eponymous NPC buddies. Buddies aren’t the godawful allies from Shiren on Wii: their turns don’t take too much time, they don’t have inventories to manage and if they die they come right back on the next floor. Buddies are basically one extra spell for your chosen class, as they allow you to round out your abilities with something you might be missing.

There’s also a hard mode, where enemies are tougher and you lose your equipped items on death (it’s a very big deal). So if you want the “true” masochistic experience, you can!

Just an FYI - those are totally optional. Eventually I filled my inventory up and couldn’t even carry the stuff they were giving me, and I hadn’t even set foot in a dungeon. Then when I did, a lot of that stuff was covered for me a second time. My advice, and what I’m going to do, is come back after I put some more time into the game, when my inventory is looking a little slim from a few repeated deaths, and learn some advanced concepts while also filling up my inventory again.

@Woodlance I’m actually looking to pick this up after I wrap FF9 (should be today), which I’m also playing on the Switch. I’m super, super excited about it - the only reason I put a pin in Shiren is I realized losing so much time into it that it’s going to be perfect to take on a long plane ride I have coming up (plus maybe I’ll dive into a second play of Final Fantasy Tactics on the Vita while I’m at it). So I’m saving Shiren, but to scratch that itch, I’ll pick up CMD. Thanks for the impressions, it helps me pick it up with confidence.

Yeah, I thought I HAD to do the training, because the dungeon entrance was cut off. Glad that wasn’t the case because my inventory was bursting.

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.