Comment by philsnow
13 years ago
> Open-sourced computer games seem to fall down this path more easily, since everyone and her little dog too has ideas about features to add to games.
I just listened to an episode of Roguelike Radio from the mid-30s (maybe the one with Red Rogue or Thomas Biskup) and Andrew / Keith (IIRC) go on and on about how all the "major" roguelikes are just accretions of features.
This rings very true to me; I grew up playing Nethack [0], and Slash (and then Slash'Em) just got silly with all the things they were adding. Light sabers ? In my roguelike ? Come on, fhgwgads. Nethack at least has a mysterious Dev Team who ostensibly are the guardians of quality... but they _did_ bring Sokoban back from Slash'EM into vanilla.
[0] since Nethack was my first roguelike, I didn't realize until lately just how crappy it is in many ways, most notably that it's very difficult to win before you've figured out all the sources of instadeath (whether you've figured them out by spoilers (written or source-diving) or through (really frickin hard-won) experience).
Try POWDER. It's made practically by one person, and it's very well designed (inspired by Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup). It also has hands down the best writing in any roguelike. God system in particular is unique, all 5 or so gods evaluate your behavior at the same time. Gods like different actions, and whatever you do you will piss off some gods and delight others. It requires some spoilers to understand, but is very fun once you do. POWDER's implementation of Xom is intriguing - he's mentally unstable and changes his preferences every 1000 turns, first he wants you to act like a warrior, second he gets annoyed when you strike a monster in melee. Or even kill anything personally when he impersonates Pax...
But I digress. POWDER feels very much a designed roguelike, not something that evolved.
Try brogue, it's a breath of fresh air.
I <3 the crap out of brogue; I'm currently playing through some roguelikes that I've never looked at before [0], and I keep coming back to brogue.
In particular, brogue's food clock is excellent in that if I forget about it too long and go back to my natural "explore everywhere, kill everything" tendency, the food clock _will_ kill me.
[0] something that jumped out at me is just how much modern roguelike development is windows-first (or even windows-only), and how much of it is distributed primarily as runnable binaries vs source. I had to bend way over backwards to get PrincessRL running: I ended up installing a 32-bit ubuntu userspace virtualbox instance so that mono could run the prepackaged binary.