Rogue-Like

The GIF here is basically all I got done for day 2 of 7DRL 2022. It doesn’t look like much, but it’s something. Also, by the “Berlin Interpretation”, is my game even going to *be *a “Roguelike”? To GET to that GIF, I had to do a LOT of coding. I loved the tileset I found, but each tile was in its own file, and each tile was 256x512 pixels, which was way larger than the 64x64 I’d used for the “outside” room and for the OG tile system I’d written before I decided to move to Tiled for creating rooms. ...

Ludomotion’s sequel to 2017’s “Unexplored” roguelike dungeon crawler brings 3D procedural generation to the overworld in a clever little legacy roguelike with some interesting quirks. After Townscaper blew me away with its quaint procedural town-building meditative piece, I followed its author on Twitter. Stålberg’s standing with the procedural generation community leads to all sorts of different niches, including that belonging to Ludomotion’s “Unexplored 2: The Wayfarer’s Legacy”. The demo was briefly available on Steam a little while back, and I immediately fell in love. The demo expired, but I went looking and found that the game is currently in early access on the Epic store. I don’t really need another gaming portal in my life or on my hard drive, but I wanted to play the game, and so I did what I had to do and spent some time with it. ...

I’m not one to jump on bandwagons, but with approximately 150% of the people I follow on Twitter jumping into the New World, I really just had to find out what all the fuss was about. Character Creation I was very much impressed with New World’s character creation. While the look of your character doesn’t have the fine tuning one has come to expect from triple-A titles, the large number of classes (called “Backgrounds” in New World) available is fairly impressive. Combined with the significant number of “Starsigns” that grant additional abilities or boost those of your class, there’s 108 different background/starsign combinations available. You will likely never meet someone with an identical build to your own. ...

I looked at all the RPGs I’ve played this year, trying to pick the one of them all that would be the best of the year. Several stood out, but I couldn’t pick just one. I guess if there were a game that I felt worth spending hours of my life playing, that proved its quality, maybe? Outer Wilds (PS4; finished January 26) This indie game about a hapless astronaut who is trying to stop their sun from exploding in (looks at watch) 24 minutes made a huge splash when it came out last year for all the right reasons. The clockwork solar system our astronaut lives in is full of puzzles everywhere you look. The lore is amazing. The physics are on point. And every 24 minutes, the sun explodes and you start from the beginning again, but you still have retained all you learned. ...

There’s been many efforts to define exactly what a “rogue-like” game is. Permadeath is definitely one. A different map every time you play is another. Having to discover each time what the magic items you discover do, that’s one. Descending into a deep dungeon, grabbing a quest item and making it back to the surface in one go, definitely. Rogue came out of a thriving ecosystem of similar dungeon-exploration games from the late 70s and early 80s. Its simple, quick gameplay was perfect for quick gaming sessions between classes, which is how I first encountered it at the University of New Hampshire back in the day. Universities, back then, were the fertile breeding ground for the progenitors of many computer game genres that we still play today. It was a wonderful time. ...

I’ve been buying a lot of casual games to pass the time when I don’t have a lot of time to play. Bunches of puzzle games. Some programming games. Some action games (and more on those later). But the one casual game that had that perfect blend of drop-in playability and finely tuned difficulty was one I didn’t even see coming: Chocobo’s Mystery Dungeon: Every Buddy. CMDEB for the PS4 is a remake of an old Wii game called Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo’s Dungeon, itself an entry in a long line of entry level dungeon crawlers featuring Final Fantasy and Pokemon characters. ...

I don’t know anyone who has ever played any Final Fantasy game and didn’t say to themselves, “Well, why can’t I play as the Chocobo???2???” I think you can split Final Fantasy players between those who want to play as Chocobos, and those who want to play as Moogles. I don’t think there’s many people in that second category. They’d be monsters. Kupo. “But,” those Choco-philiacs would mutter, “I’d really miss playing those different jobs, like White Mage and Black Mage and Red Mage and Blue Mage and Green M…” let me stop you right there, because in Chocobo’s Mystery Dungeon, you can absolutely do all these things. ...

The thing about “rogue-likes” is, they aren’t for everyone. Let’s face it – you will probably never, ever win a real rogue-like, no matter how long you play. The only question is, how far will you get before you die, lose everything, and have to start over from the very beginning? It’s about the heroic struggle, not the happy ending. ...