[HN Gopher] A history of roguelike games
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A history of roguelike games
Author : aww_dang
Score : 107 points
Date : 2020-03-20 12:01 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| cpeterso wrote:
| No mention of NetHack?
| philsnow wrote:
| Nethack definitely has a place in the history of roguelikes,
| but for people reading this HN thread, please don't play it as
| your first roguelike.
|
| It was not only my first roguelike but also the first C
| codebase that I ever played around in. I was blown away in the
| 90s installing Linux as a teenager and it coming with GCC built
| in. I owe the dev team for getting me really interested in
| computers as more than a consumer of games.
|
| But, it's creaky and idiosyncratic and has a lot of sharp edges
| that people who have been playing it for decades are quick to
| forgive, but if you're coming to the genre from, well, anything
| else, you're going to get put off, hard.
| autarch wrote:
| Try Ctrl-F? It does mention NetHack quite a bit.
| moomin wrote:
| Or try Page 2..,
| pfarnsworth wrote:
| I've been playing Hack/Nethack since 1982-ish. My friend got it
| for his IBM PC, and we were both addicted. The only reason why I
| kept asking for a computer for my parents was so that I could
| play Hack. I was the one who figured out that the Amulet of
| Yendor was underneath a boulder on level 26. My friend, however,
| one-upped me. At some point, his version of Hack was corrupted,
| so every time he read a scroll of identify, the game would crash.
| So he had to go through the entire game without reading a scroll
| or using rings. He was able to make it through the entire game
| and finish it, which I admit is an impressive feat.
|
| I've been playing Nethack since, although I haven't played it in
| the last few years because of work and kids. There was a time in
| Nethack where it wasn't as complicated, but once they added all
| the deeper features, I've never completed the game and ascended.
| The game is now so deep and so complicated that I couldn't solve
| it without reading the cheats, and even following those, and even
| saving my games and redoing them, I've never gotten to the point
| where I could ascend. I'm really good at surviving the lower
| levels and stealing from shops, but I've never been able to
| figure out how to ascend. At some point, I should reattempt this
| now that I'm locked down for 2 months.
| mihaifm wrote:
| It can certainly be completed without spoilers, but it requires
| a bit of trial and error. I managed to ascend after 2-3 months
| of intense play...and a lot of dying. I think part of the joy
| of playing nethack is discovering how things work, so highly
| recommend not to read any spoilers. The best way to learn the
| mechanics is to install the game locally and play in explore
| mode. The game offers a lot of alternate ways to do stuff
| (because of conducts), but if you don't care about conducts
| characters tend to become a bit too powerful towards the end
| game. It's all a matter of surviving the early game, where you
| don't have resistances, skills etc. and where most people give
| up.
| schoen wrote:
| You can learn a lot from watching other people play on
| nethack.alt.org -- sometimes realizing important stuff that you
| didn't know before.
| phs318u wrote:
| I was in a similar boat but finally mustered the commitment to
| mount a serious ascension attempt that spanned a couple of
| months part time (playing iNethack on the phone helped). It was
| SO enjoyable despite being killed by the High Priest of Moloch
| on level 45.
|
| My daughters (21 & 23) have inherited this addiction though the
| prefer the isometric Vultures's Eye.
|
| First encountered Nethack in 1988. Only ever ascended once in
| the early days. It's definitely gotten harder over the years.
| But maybe that's just my attention to detail deteriorating.
| sdenton4 wrote:
| I looooove Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. There was a five-year period
| or so where it was about the only game I played. (Things got
| worse when I discovered that there are two-week tournaments that
| are essentially a war on productivity... How many times and in
| how many different ways can you beat the game in a two-week
| period? Your team is depending on you! Down with sleep!)
|
| Their design philosophy is fantastic:
| https://github.com/crawl/crawl/blob/master/crawl-ref/docs/cr...
|
| The core concept is that all choices should be /meaningful/. 'No-
| brainers' are ruthlessly pruned away, or given interesting side
| effects that could be situationally useful or terrible. And also,
| avoid anything that looks like grinding. These people speak my
| language...
| nyolfen wrote:
| if you're homebound and enjoy exploring game systems, you could
| do worse than diving into a few rl's
| jim_and_derrick wrote:
| So I am a gamer for sure, spent tons of time playing all the
| dark souls, bloodborne, sekiro over the past 4 or 5 years.
| After souls i was left wanting, a void in my game life so to
| speak. Monster Hunter World captured my attention for a good
| while. Then i found roguelikes and specifically Darkest
| Dungeon.
|
| I had seen people playing on twitch, it looked cool. Turn
| based, RPG, permadeath, difficult. All up my alley. Jumped into
| it and got my butt whooped for a while but then it clicked. And
| BOOM i was off, many months later and hundreds of hours later i
| was done with Darkest Dungeon.
|
| Since then, Slay the Spire baby. Wow that game owns hard. about
| 300 hours here. It's a deck-building (card game) turn based
| rogue-like. Recommend it to all!
| mcphilip wrote:
| If you're in the mood for some more punishing difficulty
| that's still fast paced, definitely give Spelunky HD a try!
| It's a classic for a reason.
|
| I finally started playing it recently and am hooked. I'm
| still working on the zero gold run achievement --- it's so
| frustrating making it to the caves and stepping on gold
| buried behind the snow foreground :( I'm determined to finish
| it before the lockdown is over, though.
| gundmc wrote:
| Slay the Spire is fantastic. The day they release their
| Android port is the day my productivity hits an all time low.
| eterm wrote:
| Calling it a deck builder is misleading and I think puts off
| people who might otherwise enjoy it.
|
| Sure, the abilities are card-shaped and there are drawing
| mechanics, but it doesn't really play like a deck-builder at
| all.
|
| I think the main differentiator for me, and where I thin Slay
| the Spire sets it apart from normal deck builders, is that
| the enemies you're fighting aren't playing by the same rules.
| The enemies don't have cards, or decks or similar abilities.
|
| Because of this, the enemies can be really thematic and
| varied and have interesting mechanics and don't need to be
| balanced around playing by the same rules as the player.
|
| As a consequence it doesn't feel like a deck builder to me,
| the abilities just happen to be card-shaped.
|
| Add in the relics which are one of the more important parts
| of the run, and really the skills involved aren't at all like
| other deck building games.
|
| But yes, huge recommendation from me too, definitely the best
| rogue-lite game in years. (~450 hours played for me, and
| probably twice that watching it on twich).
| gambiting wrote:
| I played it for about 5 hours and I just don't have any
| motivation to keep going. The trickle of new cards is super
| slow and I don't really feel like much depends on my skill
| at all. But I also have friends who rave about it, so maybe
| it's an acquired taste thing.
| chongli wrote:
| It's a very challenging game that exercises different
| muscles than other games, especially if you've never
| played a deckbuilder before. One of the hardest things to
| get used to is the fact that skipping a card reward is
| often the best play. The key insight is that every card
| taken decreases the probability of drawing all of the
| other cards in your deck.
|
| Another tricky aspect to the game is that any given card
| may be great in one deck and terrible in another, to the
| point where taking it makes your deck worse. Strong
| players (such as jorbs, whom you can find on twitch) tend
| to lean very heavily on the card remove feature in order
| to get rid of bad cards.
|
| There is definitely a luck component to the game but
| skilled players are pushing that boundary every day.
| Winning streaks on ascension 20 (the hardest difficulty
| level) are possible and always growing.
| ppseafield wrote:
| Indeed the first couple hours seem a bit tedious. I will
| say that the Ascension difficulty mechanic makes the game
| quite challenging at higher levels but scales quite well.
| And skill is definitely required to be successful in
| upper levels.
| jim_and_derrick wrote:
| Fair enough. I'm not a big card game guy so i understand
| where you are coming from!
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| Ragnarok deserves more than one paragraph. Among many of it's
| great features was the one I personally loved most: sometimes you
| could meet a ghost of your past self, complete with all your
| inventory. Sometimes I even made this my strategy, dying as lots
| of scribes (weakest class at start, who carried a highly prized
| and rare item, a quill), then starting as blacksmith, which was
| easiest to survive in early stages. Quill was essential to win:
| you could always switch class to scribe after some level to write
| scrolls, but finding a quill was extremely hard.
| pfarrell wrote:
| I've been playing iNethack on my phone (Uses 3.4.3). I ran into
| a ghost of myself last night. I was in a 1 square dead end
| tunnel with no digging tools and out of food. I thought I was
| going to starve to death before it finally moved. Really
| starting to have fun with it, but can barely make it 12 levels
| down :).
| moomin wrote:
| So back at University a friend of mine had NetHack (3.0) and
| a lot of us played in it. I had a game where I simultaneously
| had the incredible luck to have my dog get polymorphed into a
| Xorn and then the bad luck to leave a bones file.
|
| Quite a lot of people got wiped out by a pet Xorn.
| schoen wrote:
| NetHack also has this, but most of the ghost's inventory will
| be cursed. :-)
| every wrote:
| As luck would have it, I've spent much of the afternoon working
| on my orc rogue in nethack 3.7.0 via ssh on hardfought.org. Being
| elderly and self-sequestered has its rewards...
| dmbaggett wrote:
| If you're looking for a fresh roguelike rabbit hole, check out
| Cogmind. It's PC only but takes RL in an interesting new
| direction. (Not affiliated with it other than begin somewhat
| addicted.)
| pyridines wrote:
| The development blog https://www.gridsagegames.com/blog/ is a
| fascinating look into the design of the game that goes back
| years.
| abhorrence wrote:
| It works fairly well via wine on Mac and Linux.
| jsilence wrote:
| Enjoyed the article very much, but missed Caves of Qud.
| moomin wrote:
| Yeah, I haven't played it myself but it's unquestionably a
| significant entry in the genre.
| platz wrote:
| The roguelike game mechanic is fantastic, but it really needs to
| break out of the fantasy theme in a big way.
| [deleted]
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| FTL did this, but once you figure out the mechanics, game
| becomes way to easy.
| raidicy wrote:
| Another game by the same devs worth looking at is "Into The
| Breach". Really great rogue like that's akin to SRPG's but
| distilled. Often times battles end up being more crisis
| management and you have decide what you're willing to loose
| to win the stage.
| lawn wrote:
| You might be the first I've seen that describes FTL as too
| easy.
|
| But as someone who's done just about everything in that game
| I see where you're coming from.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| Yeah, FTL has several different ways to build a killer-ship
| that can destroy any opposition in seconds, including final
| boss mothership, so if you survive first few jumps, you're
| basically guaranteed to win. And that is a bit boring.
|
| In the end I have gravitated towards my personal favorite
| style of play, building a vicious boarding squad comprised
| of mantis or those rock dudes, that still required a
| constant danger of losing some crewmembers, but yielded
| more scrap in return after victory.
| gaogao wrote:
| As mentioned else where in the comments, Caves of Qud is a
| fantastic post-apocalyptic roguelike.
| LoSboccacc wrote:
| an important aspect of rogues is the interaction with the
| world, using a fantasy background allows to take a lot of
| shortcuts in world building, imagine you join the game the
| first time and you have to select a role, you kinda know what
| to expect from an elf range or a dwarf thief, but if the world
| is original content, say like rogue trader, most of the initial
| choices are arbitrary and disorienting on the first few games
| and can impact negatively on the perception of the game system
| platz wrote:
| better or worse, item identification (i.e. deliberate
| information hiding) has been a core feature of roguelikes
| autarch wrote:
| Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead (https://cataclysmdda.org/) is ab
| open source post-apocalyptic near future scifi roguelike. The
| best way to play it is with a launcher:
|
| Windows GUI launcher - https://github.com/remyroy/CDDA-Game-
| Launcher/releases
|
| Linux/Docker CLI launcher -
| https://github.com/houseabsolute/catalauncher/releases
|
| The Linux one is mine and could in theory work on macOS too.
| Patches are welcome.
| prutschman wrote:
| The complete vehicle customization possibilities were what
| drew me to it, but it's incredibly full of great stuff over-
| all.
|
| I've also found the developers very friendly and welcoming to
| new contributors.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Cataclysm: DDA does a great job at being a semi-realistic 21th
| century zombie apocalypse. Vehicles, guns, prepping, martial
| arts, ridiculous amounts of crafting; it has it all. It's best
| in genre, IMO.
|
| Cogmind was mentioned elsewhere; robots, guns and commercial-
| level polish.
|
| (Personally, I'm working on a gun-oriented RL in my spare time,
| but it's going pretty slow ATM.)
| kamikaze675 wrote:
| For a modern pixel roguelike, check out OneBit Adventure on
| mobile
| toupeira wrote:
| Also the Open Source Pixel Dungeon and its many mods.
| floatboth wrote:
| > Out of the two-dozen-or-so NetHack variants, the most notable
| are probably SLASH'EM/SLASH'EM Extended and UnNetHack
|
| Congratulations Amy, slex has been noted by Ars Technica now :D
| tpurves wrote:
| #evilhack is one of the newest variants and has me hooked right
| now. You can find it on the hardfought server. It's harder
| though and better for anyone who's already managed to win the
| vanilla version of nethack (which only took me about 12 years
| lol)
| allan_s wrote:
| Funny I'm trying to make a rogue-like game with my son these last
| days. Anyone has experienced using the C library `notcurses`, or
| some demo project ? (the library seems to be made to on purpose
| break curses API compatibility for the sake of sanity)
| simonh wrote:
| I don't know how keen you are on using C, but there's an
| excellent open Roguelike library for Python, with a whole
| community round it. The subreddit is pretty active..
|
| http://www.roguebasin.com/index.php?title=Complete_Roguelike...
| allan_s wrote:
| thanks for the link I didn't know about this project. However
| here it's specifically a project to learn C :) but your link
| is still full a useful information (notably their dungeon
| generation algorithm )
| oweiler wrote:
| While more of a twin stick shooter, Enter The Gungeon deserved
| being mentioned here. I've spent the last 4 months with that game
| and it's still fun. I has a huge number of weapons, actives,
| passives, synergies which can be combined in crazy ways (some
| break the game deliberatly). Almost no run plays like the other.
| cheald wrote:
| I think ETG is technically a "roguelite", but yes, it's a
| wonderful entry. Binding of Isaac is another, but it's so dark
| and disturbing that it puts many people off - which is a bit of
| a shame, because mechanically, it's spectacular. Dead Cells,
| Nuclear Throne, Crypt of the Necrodancer (and its sister game,
| Cadence of Hyrule), Risk of Rain, and Wizard of Legend are some
| of my recent similar favorites, too.
|
| Slay the Spire is often also called a roguelike, and if it gets
| its teeth into you, watch out. Steam says I have 350 hours
| logged in it and I still enjoy the heck out of it.
| jhallenworld wrote:
| I enjoyed urogue (ultra-rogue I think) as shipped with SCO Xenix.
| I had previous experience with nethack, but urogue was frankly
| easier.
|
| I think it's this:
| https://github.com/RoguelikeRestorationProject/urogue1.03
| danbolt wrote:
| Each year Roguebasin hosts the 7DRL challenge where people look
| to create a finished roguelike in seven days. I participated this
| year and found it a pretty thoughtful meditation on the genre.
|
| https://7drl.com/
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