Is the competition no more 7DRL ?
Michael Dürwald
roguelikes in general.
I see many entries which i never ever would classify as a roguelike but
more to any other genres.
Shouldn't this competition be called 7-Day-Game-Dev? Is the scene
actually getting weaker because of the latest increase in members?
Just as an example: Age of Emires Multiplayer (Kings-Mode): Permadeath,
Tilebased, Random World <- Its a roguelike!
Guess i'm the only one who strongly dislikes all these jump'n'runs,
strategy-games, pacmans, pongs who pretend to be a roguelike?
Krice
wrote:
> Guess i'm the only one who strongly dislikes all these jump'n'runs,
> strategy-games, pacmans, pongs who pretend to be a roguelike?
While 7DRLs are not roguelikes they can in theory work
as practising for bigger projects. I got some new ideas and ways
to do things from my "7DRL" project Teemu. For instance I could
experiment serialization in smaller scale and it proved to be
something I can use in my main project Kaduria.
Besides when people think 7DRLs are roguelikes and concentrate
on them I get less competition for Kaduria! The worst thing
could be someone just releasing something like Kaduria before
I will release it. But with this kind of developing culture
it's not very likely to happen. Kornel, that mad polac, was
my worst fear, but then I think he just dropped roguelikes
and went to commercial programming, I guess?
Jeff Lait
> Once again i'm struggling with myself about the whole competition and
> roguelikes in general.
>
> I see many entries which i never ever would classify as a roguelike but
> more to any other genres.
Well, one of the purposes of the 7DRL is to help define the genre.
You should welcome these genre bending games as a chance to better
understand what a roguelike *is*. It is quite possible that a lot of
7DRLs end up "not a roguelike" - I think I classified all but one of
my previous 7DRLs that way.
It is an important question: Why are these games not roguelikes?
Answering it helps one understand what "roguelike" means.
One of the big problems the roguelike scene had, prior to 7DRL, was
this ossification into a very narrow-minded idea of what a roguelike
should be. 7DRLs provide excellent testbeds for many other game play
ideas to see how they interact (or don't) in a roguelike context.
--
Jeff Lait
(POWDER: http://www.zincland.com/powder)
elig
roguelike theme very well while still being very creative. A lot of
them still used ascii graphics and roguelike combat, as well as
traditional roguelike randomly generated dungeons. Anyway, a roguelike
game is a game that has a randomly generated map, in my opinion.
That's the core requirement, randomly generated content as opposed to
static hand-crafted content. But other things help make a game "more"
roguelike; like being tile based, turn based, or having ascii
graphics. The games that have gone against the "core" requirements of
roguelikes haven't been the ones made during the 7DRL, but the ones
made outside the 7DRL. I've seen several release announcements for
games that: aren't turn based, don't use ascii, don't use randomly
generated maps and aren't even single player. But those releases have
been outside the 7DRL competition.
Ed Kolis
roguelike"; rather, it's a combination of factors that make one game
more roguelike than another... think of what the original Rogue had:
Black & white ASCII graphics (with no lowercase letters)
Random terrain, monsters, and item spawns (sometimes to the point of
being absurdly unfair)
Turn-based, tile-based, and single-player (with global high scores on
multiuser machines)
So perhaps the more closely a game emulates Rogue, the more of a
roguelike it is? But if that's the case, even Crawl is barely a
roguelike... it's got bitmapped graphics, color, and lowercase letters!
I suppose you could say that the definition of "roguelike" changes over
time, much as the definition of other words changes over time - back in
Shakespeare's day, a "girl" was any child, not just a female child!
So I'm not really sure what to conclude here, except that roguelike is
NOT a static definition with one defining aspect... if it's "random
levels" then would you consider Kobo to be a roguelike? Kobo's enemy
bases are procedurally generated, but it's an arcade style game, not a
roguelike! If it's "ASCII graphics" then was Zork a roguelike? If it's
"tile-based" then is Advance Wars a roguelike? ;)
I guess roguelikes are kinda like the free market... as they say "it's
worth what someone will pay for it", a roguelike is... well, whatever
people call a roguelike! ;)
Michael Dürwald
ASCII, Lack of sound and animations and so on were based on technical
reasons not because of gameplay decisions - if computers were fast enough
i would even say original rogue would feature graphics, sound and maybe
realtime gameplay.
I don't complain about roguelikes which are much more up to date, but i
complain about completely different gameplay.
Pender
> I don't complain about roguelikes which are much more up to date, but i
> complain about completely different gameplay.
The universe will be consumed by entropy long before there will be
consensus on where the line should be drawn between completely
different gameplay and merely moderately different gameplay. Happily,
there is no need to man the battlements because there is no scarcity
of resources. Develop and play what YOU think is a roguelike, and the
rest of us will do the same.
Jeff Lait
I agree on graphics and sound. I am skeptical on the realtime
gameplay. Realtime really changes gameplay.
As for the definition of "roguelike", any discussion should start with
the Berlin Interpretation.
http://roguebasin.roguelikedevelopment.org/index.php?title=Berlin_Interpretation
flyingofx
sense... or maybe not at all. I mean it is tile based and death
(well, quitting) is death (I delete the save game on a load and saving
quits) but it is real time and the world is anything but random. Sure
it's a jump'n'run but for my first attempt, I'm really quite happy.
I can understand that some of these game aren't up your alley. But
there are 70 different games in total. Enough to appeal to anyone.
For what it's worth, I had a blast coding this up all week and I'm
going to try to tackle something more ambitious that will be more
roguelike.
Gerry Quinn
edk...@gmail.com says...
> I guess roguelikes are kinda like the free market... as they say "it's
> worth what someone will pay for it", a roguelike is... well, whatever
> people call a roguelike! ;)
Or like pornography:
"I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I
understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ["hard-core
pornography"]; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing
so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in
this case is not that."
? Justice Potter Stewart, concurring opinion in Jacobellis v. Ohio
378 U.S. 184 (1964), regarding possible obscenity in The Lovers.
- Gerry Quinn
David Damerell
>I see many entries which i never ever would classify as a roguelike but
>more to any other genres.
I agree with that.
>Shouldn't this competition be called 7-Day-Game-Dev? Is the scene
>actually getting weaker because of the latest increase in members?
I don't think so, no. There's no less development of roguelikes, just more
development of roguelikelikes. I don't really see it as harmful.
--
David Damerell <dame...@chiark.greenend.org.uk>
And now, a seemingly inexplicable shot of a passing train.
Today is First Brieday, March.
Tomorrow will be First Gouday, March.
Nate
coming to be interested in what a roguelike is. I respect the
qualities of what one might consider the standards for roguelikes and
particularly love these perspective roguelikes as well; however as a
developer I don't have intentions on reinventing the wheel time-after-
time again, rather having fun with what exists and learn more about
development as a whole. Obviously the numbers in the competitions have
increased, as well as the interest in development of the genre as a
whole which proves the popularity of roguelikes and their potential
future. I don't think a couple roguelike-likes would hurt a thing.