Rob Zacny

Episode 307: Roguelikes

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Roguelikes. They're not strategy games, but they're everywhere. Well, parts of them are. Very specific parts, but rarely all of them, at least not enough to make everyone happy. To discuss these finer points, Rob gathers a veritable rogue's gallery of panelists and experts. Tyler Sigmund: game designer and creator of the upcoming Darkest Dungeon. Darren Grey: Roguelike developer and current host of Roguelike Radio, an entire podcast about the genre. Michael Hermes: 3MA audio guy with the ability to bug Rob until we finally do a show about roguelikes. Absent: Troy "I Only Play Minotaurs" Goodfellow. 

 

Listen here.

 

Or here, for Roguelike Radio!

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Really interesting episode.  I think it's interesting that as gaming become more and more popular and "mainstream" we tend to emphasize the more skilled aspects of gaming to distinguish ourselves.  I know that no one was ragging on The Uncharted series or anything like that, but I think it is fascinating that we kind of belittle twitch shooter games, or experience heavy/cinematic games like Uncharted while celebrating more difficult games like the Souls series.

I know next to nothing about Roguelikes but I really enjoyed the episode.  I've heard Xcom described as a roguelike due to its difficulty, permadeath, and randomness.  I think I need to check out more roguelikes as they seem to emphasize decision making and strategy over twitch skills and real time manipulation of controls.

I've been leaning more and more towards turn based games and I think it is because I stink at real time games.  I really like RTS games but I can't keep up with all of the split second decisions.  It becomes overwhelming.  Rather, I enjoy being able to take my time and plan things out rather than have to make those snap reactions.

I also think that I've become a bit of a wimp when it comes to gaming in general.  I have beat the first Dark Souls but nearly went insane in the process.  Now, I would not have the patience to do that.  I enjoy gaming but I don't like playing extra difficult games.  However, I would temper "difficult" with games that are cheap.  Games where failure could be based on something that is out of your control.  That is what is piquing my interest with respect to roguelikes, that the rules, although rigid, are known and that the gameplay can be forecast ahead of time.

Meh, I'm just rambling now.  Good episode!

 

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Curious Expedition is so good! Also it is finally available on Steam.

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Rob: Firstly, I think there's a lot of merit in dipping into the roguelike genre via the tiny mobile roguelikes like Darren's recommendation of Hoplite. I'd point you towards Michael Brough's 868-HACK which has more of a classic roguelike feel and less radical design mechanics wise, with perhaps more long term strategy rather than just tactical depth. This is a burgeoning mini-genre though, with the Nightmare Cooperative, and Diego Cathalifaud's Amber Hall and Arcane Tower (and a new Michael Brough game in development); call them roguiles.

 

However all these games have the intensity (but in smaller packages) that you dislike. For a game which has much more tactical breathing room and variation of pace, I'd urge you to look at Brogue. Brogue is a reimaging of rogue, with beautiful ASCII art (especially in its use of colour) and plays length of a few hours, that is also a masterclass in monster design. Brogue is my go to for 'long time fan, first time player' roguelike recommendations.

 

Secondly, you stumbled through the confusion trap of three seasoned roguelikers to make an excellent point about the loss of accrued items being a powerful part of the roguelikes that deserves further examination. The third leg of the 'roguelike triangle' of permadeath and procedural generation is interesting item interaction and this is traditionally viewed as a combinatorial explosion of possible choices that allow you to use the mechanics of the game to escape the critical situations that the podcast discussed. But equally important, although unstated, is the fact that even in a winning roguelike run, you simply cannot accrue everything - you'll always be playing with a subset of the total possible items in the game.

 

A traditional RPG like Skyrim allows you to become the head of every guild because limiting your choices in a game with extremely limited replayability makes no sense. But in a highly replayable game, part of the replayability comes from the game comes from the fact that you won't be playing with the same items each time - your choices are constrained and so you end up playing in ways that you could not anticipate and therefore in ways that are novel and potentially interesting.

 

A shooter will only limit you by ammo load out so it is easy to get into the same routine for every encounter unless the game designers artificially force you to play in different ways. But in Brogue, the way you fight (or avoid) your first ogre is entirely dependent on the items you have found to date (and where you've chosen to expend your enchant scrolls), which can vary wildly from game to game. So the possible space of possible games is governed not just by what class and race combination you may choose, but by every possible combination of items you could have found on the ground multiplied by the choices in consuming those items to date multiplied again by the items you've been forced to ignore as dictated by the limits of your inventory and the risk/reward ratio of acquiring them.

 

Thirdly, while I am insanely jealous of my co-host appearing on the show, the quality of the discussion suggests that my hastily prepared Bruce Geryk sound board and puns based on obscure 3MA call backs(The Nightmare Coopting a Police Force, anyone?) may have not gone down so well had I successfully gate-crashed the recxording.

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If anyone's not familiar, also mentioned in the show but missed in the show notes was Tales of Maj'Eyal (free on the site, but also available on Steam for a "donation"), aka ToME, aka Tales of Middle Earth.

 

I loved the discussion towards the end about those stupid gotcha moments in NetHack, e.g. falling through a pit trap 3 steps from the entrance, thus putting you 5 levels deep with starting equipment and half health. But also those less stupid instances where a dangerous situation develops and you have to consider running. I think it can be frustrating in story-based games when not accepting a quest means you simply miss out on content, or in the FTL example, literally nothing happens if you don't confront those spiders. Boring. The real question they seem to be asking is "do you want to see this part of the story?" Anyone would be stupid not to say yes to that. In a roguelike, at least the expectation is set that the outcomes are more systems-based and high stakes, rather than "mash A button to reveal predetermined story."

 

My personal favorite Roguelike is Incursion, which is deliberately and specifically designed to be "forgiving" in the sense that a single mistake will not doom you, but every death is the result of several mistakes building on each other. And it lives up to this, most of the time. It also aspires to let you review in your mind the decisions leading up to that situation and what you might have done differently, so you get that feedback and learning. (No "gotcha" moments or "Do It Again, Stupid" gameplay). Also the interface is intuitive and informative, though still keyboard based, and the graphics are lush by text-based standards. Unfortunately the original developer gave up on it, but recently released it for community development so it is being maintained again. Highly recommended. http://www.incursion-roguelike.net/

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Oh, what's the new Michael Brough game?

 

Unannounced as far as I'm aware, but check his twitter feed for screen shots and Frank Lantz raving about it.

 

And for everyone, two Roguelike Radio podcasts relevant to this episode:

 

Episode 25 - Permadeath, wherein we talk to Ben "Far Cry 2 Permadeath Run and Accompanying Visual Novel" Abraham.

Episode 55 - Strategy Games, where we talk to Three Moves Ahead's Troy Goodfellow about the intersection of and differences between roguelikes and strategy games.

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Tales of Maj'Eyal (free on the site, but also available on Steam for a "donation"), aka ToME, aka Tales of Middle Earth.

 

Not sure why everyone keeps calling this game roguelike. It's a horrible roguelike, with horrible design choices, that insists on one-shotting your characters without you being able to prevent it or learn anything from your loss.

Makes for a passable RPG, though. Just not roguelike. At all.

 

My personal favorite Roguelike is Incursion, ***skipped***  Also the interface is intuitive and informative

 

You must be joking. You MUST BE.

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Well, even a terrible roguelike that you don't like, or one that doesn't include certain features you want, might nonetheless fit most people's definition. More useful to simply say what you don't like without trying to insult people's tastes. I'll watch out for that one flaw you mentioned when I try it out, though.

 

As for Incursion's interface, yeah "intuitive" might be overstating it. Rather, I found it easier to learn and use than NetHack's or Stone Soup's.

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I love ToMe and I'm not going to feel ashamed about that. Most roguelikes could do with even a fraction of the creativity that game has.

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Well I had a lot of fun talking to Darren, Tyler, and Rob. I always look forward to getting on the show. (Mostly because if I'm on it's because we're talking about something I really, really like.)

 

I meant to list of a few more games during our recording but completely forgot, so here are a few of my favorites:

 

Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup (of course)

UnReal World - brutal survival in a low fantasy far north environment. The controls take some getting used to, but it's incredibly satisfying.

Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead - zombie survival.

Infra Arcana - Lovecraftian roguelike

Caves of Qud - really interesting post-apocalyptic game with really fun character generation. It should be on Steam soon.

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I think at a certain point all the arguments about nomenclature miss the point a little bit. The only reason we argue about this is because we are so passionate about the games themselves that are bending or breaking these rules. Rogue Legacy is a great game and whether we call it a roguelike or a rogue-lite or whatever is kind of besides the point, if plays off those roguelike mechanics and thus "roguelike" is just a shorthand to help convey the experience.

 

I have recently dived really deep into a roguelike called Nuclear Throne. It is a top down action game but features permadeath, procedural generated levels, and a punishing difficulty. I've got well over 400 hours into and I've only been playing it for about six months.

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One thing that was a real bummer about listening to this episode was all the NetHack bashing. I've been playing that game nearly my whole life, and I've had so many amazing experiences that I've just never seen attempted in any other game.

 

But maybe that's why I'm way more into the "roguelikelikes" or whatever you want to call them over the updated versions of the traditional roguelike. Games like Spelunky look back at the classic games lovingly, and try and figure out ways to use a lot of these mechanics in novel ways, whereas the attitude of the contemporary traditional roguelikes is one where I guess the idea is there was a serious problem with the old roguelikes that need to be fixed.

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What is a good guide for coding your own roguelike for someone who does not know how to code? 

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What is a good guide for coding your own roguelike for someone who does not know how to code? 

 

Python is a great language for getting started on but I would probably recommend getting some basic exercises under your belt. Even a simple video game is still a fairly involved software project, especially for someone just starting out.

 

Having said that, this tutorial is pretty comprehensive for getting a game going using Python and libtcod, a really great library made specifically for roguelikes.

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What I look for in a game is:

 

A strong mechanics focus. If the gameplay isn't good the game isn't good, no matter what else it's doing.

A high level of difficulty. If you can't make me work for it or at least turn off auto pilot I'm already bored.

A very intellectual experience. Make me think.

Choices and consequences that have weight and directly reflect on me. Permadeath is the obvious one. If I die and it's my fault I'm completely fine with that. It need not be a matter or life or death though, just that it must matter what I pick.

Non overcentralized gameplay. Most difficult games rule out the vast majority of options along the way so you always do the same things in the same way. Making it hard, while still providing difficult and meaningful choices as well as multiple potentially successful paths is an extremely difficult balancing act.

 

None of these traits are Roguelike exclusive but the genre does almost always have all of them and other games almost never have any of them, so my interest in the genre is kind of circumstantial. Even so, like the show mentions a lot of modern games hide behind their shiny graphics and copious pictures of women's busts because it's all they have. I'm completely unimpressed by this, right along with games that don't punish me for my mistakes and make me feel like I'm actually doing something.

 

Along the same lines, I won't let major mechanical flaws slide and as Tyler Sigmund will attest if he sees this I've given the Darkest Dungeon team no end of hell about the game being unchallenging even though difficulty is the entire premise of the game from both a mechanical and atmospheric standpoint. I'm not being a dick about it, I love the ideas behind the game, it just constantly grates on me that the current executions do not fulfill those ideas, and that mods are required for what should be the original game experience.

 

One thing that stands out for me about the Roguelike genre though is that games really don't have many means (aside from permadeath of your character) of making your choices have weight. Even ignoring the games where you're presented with outright fake choices, players are generally very detached even in so called immersive games and often take actions that would be fairly classified as sociopathic were they taken against real people. If [insert NPC] dies, the general reaction is usually indifference. This is more a factor of "storytelling" games not understanding they should be SHOWING and not TELLING as that is the most basic element of storytelling, and as a result very few games have memorable characters worth caring about. Well modern ones anyways. Older games were better about this somewhat. Now when a game does understand what storytelling actually is (hi Souls series) it is absolutely fantastic, and definitely supliments the experience. Gameplay is still first as far as I'm concerned, but if a game can get the mechanics right and add in extra stuff? Hell yeah. Because most can't though, I primarily focus on the games that let me transparently assess their quality.

 

One more thing: I think more Roguelike games are made by gamers than any other genre. That means you see far fewer disconnects in emergent gameplay, a greater understanding of what the fans actually want, and a much greater level of community involvement/cohesion (if for no other reason than that a common reaction when getting rekt by difficult games is finding a forum about it and asking for help).

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Is KeeperRL any good? I've been eyeing it on early access.

 

You can play it with ASCII graphics for free, here: http://miki151.itch.io/keeperrl

I'm also very interested but haven't tried it yet. Dwarf Fortress burned me out on in-development buildy games.

 

Areanynamesnottaken, great post. I largely agree. I think there's some parallels in board games, since gameplay is transparent by necessity. (Although many board games are still flawed, and people still buy and play them for other reasons anyway.) I think the ability to play games before investing in them with cash, or in the case of most roguelikes not even asking for cash, helps keep the focus on playability.

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I'm not really a fan of board games as they're entirely dependent on local multiplayer and any game with forced multiplayer is an instant no for me.

 

As for trying games first, I'll be honest with you. I'm a follower of the piracy is the new demo philosophy. Not because piracy is good or right or anything like that, but because so few games are actually good anymore, and because games either don't have you a demo that gives you an accurate sampling of the game or don't have a demo at all, my choices are 1: Buy a game sight unseen (terrible idea, won't do, can't trust most game developers anymore). 2: Try it first for a few hours, buy it if it's actually worth the money. Whenever I do buy a game without proper research I almost always regret that decision and invariably become more jaded about future games, whereas any game that's made it as far as getting my attention enough that I'll try it has at least a 75% chance of being purchased. Both of which are things I've done a number of times. Ultimately, while there are some people that will just steal everything if piracy went away tomorrow I'd quit buying games entirely, as I'd no longer have a reliable means of quality checking them in advance. Yes other methods technically exist. You can't always get teams of 15 streamers playing your game a week early 24/7 and giving away copies for promotional purposes.

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One more thing: I think more Roguelike games are made by gamers than any other genre. That means you see far fewer disconnects in emergent gameplay, a greater understanding of what the fans actually want, and a much greater level of community involvement/cohesion (if for no other reason than that a common reaction when getting rekt by difficult games is finding a forum about it and asking for help).

I'm not sure I agree with this. Very few developers get into game design because they don't love games.

I think the sources of the problems you identify here come from other reasons, such as the lack of financial pressure and the fact Rogue stumbled onto an amazingly resilient game design archetype, that the genre has.

In fact the suggestion you make that game developers are not usually gamers is somewhat dismissive of game developers as a whole.

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You say it as if this is something new.  When was this ever not the case?

 

The average quality was significantly higher in the past. Yes bad games still existed. My screening process consisted of seeing if the game was in a genre that interested me and reading the back of the box and that's about it. Even though said games cost 120 USD in modern money I had no regrets.

 

Now if a modern game asked for 120 I'd laugh in their fucking faces (some actually do, when you count all the DLC as cut content). The only game that might even be close is Bloodborne, but its actual asking price is north of 500 because it's the only reason you'd ever want a PS4 so that's still a no go. Instead I put games through an intense screening process or immediately regret not doing so. If the game wants more than 20 dollars I will most likely never buy it because it can't pass the tests required of it, and most of it is generic mass market drivel anyways.

 

Even among the games that have proven themselves I still regret not waiting as the game industry as a whole punishes those who get excited about games and that's really fucking sad. Case in point, a game came out. I won't name it, but it's the third in the series. I enjoyed the first 2 so I bought it instantly. Turns out there was actually a discount that wasn't working for people that had at least one of the other games and bought the third one quickly. They fixed that within 3 hours, but not retroactively. Only new purchases get the discount. Is the 3 dollar difference a big deal? No. Would I have bought it anyways? Yes. Was I punished for being an excited fan instead of my usual cynical self? Absolutely. And I'll remember that the next time something sounds interesting. Given we're talking about games, anything that actively discourages excitement and other positive emotions is a very serious problem.

 

 

I'm not sure I agree with this. Very few developers get into game design because they don't love games.

I think the sources of the problems you identify here come from other reasons, such as the lack of financial pressure and the fact Rogue stumbled onto an amazingly resilient game design archetype, that the genre has.

In fact the suggestion you make that game developers are not usually gamers is somewhat dismissive of game developers as a whole.

 

You can tell the difference between gamer devs and non gamer devs in one basic way. Emergent gameplay. Does the game function as intended, does it encourage the desired styles of play? If the devs tell you their game works one way, but it actually encourages a very different set of behaviors and does something very different or perhaps even the exact opposite of what it should, that's devs not thinking things through from the player perspective and that's generally because they don't have one. You can practically name ANY non Roguelike game and I'll tell you either I'm not familiar with that game, or begin pointing out specific examples of emergent gameplay based disconnects.

 

As for why a lot of Roguelike devs are gamers, that's more a practical thing. Roguelikes don't require much from a technical standpoint. If you're just some guy, and you want a game made, you should go for the thing with the lowest cost of entry. You don't need artists or a huge budget, you can make one by yourself without learning multiple talent sets.

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You can tell the difference between gamer devs and non gamer devs in one basic way. Emergent gameplay.

This is the theory that you have and it is patently wrong.

Hint: what about a game dev who makes a game without emergent game play and then one with? Did they suddenly become a gamer between the two games?

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