Little Rogue: A thread about Roguelikes, there will be Rogues, like, innit.
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Since I keep getting obsessed, may as well have a spot for them all.
Jon and Temps discuss it good here:
http://www.kotaku.co.uk/2018/11/02/evolution-of-the-roguelike
Wiki explanation
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_(video_game)
(Had to H/T my fav cafe https://www.broadsheet.com.au/melbourne/cafes/little-rogue)
Maybe list your top 5 all time of the genre....
I may or may not add it all up.
Please talk about any Roguelikes you think have missed the big love. (Dead Cells and Slay the Spire are getting the big love....)
A quick list of all the ones I can think of that get mentioned around here....
Dead Cells
Darkest Dungeon
Slay The Spire
The Binding of Isaac
Below
Invisible inc
FTL
Streets of rogue
Catacomb kids
Spelunky
I know there's more....
Enter the Gungeon is flawed, correct me if I'm wrong.
Rogue legacy also.
Prey mooncrash dlc.
I've just started City of Brass. FPS hack and slash in a PoP world. It seems great.
Trippy: "Death Road to Canada is fun and funny. Superhot: Mind Control Delete is decent, too."
Amongst my steam pile o shame I seem to also have:
Immortal Redneck
Neurovoider
Wizard of Legend
Ruin of the Reckless
What do you want to see from one these games, what's unexplored?
What's up coming, what's been missed.
Holler.I'm still great and you still love it. -
I'd like a non rogue arcade mode added as an extra feature in all roguelikes. I don't think it would take much tinkering and could serve as an undercard of sorts. I don't appreciate the roguelike aspects of these games but I often find myself hankering to play them anyway. I paid £6 for Gungeon on Switch, I would've paid £12 for a straight 15 stage non randomised shooter (or the game I bought with that mode bolted on for those stuck in their ways).
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That's an interesting point actually.
Dead Cells would have made a cool trad action metriod.I'm still great and you still love it. -
FTL was my first foray into the genre, and it was a good introduction. At first I struggled with the idea of the final boss, thought it was a piss take but soon got my head around the need to shape your run with that encounter in mind, not just go for whatever works on the average enemy.
Does Spelunky count? -
It might seem odd having written that article, but there actually aren't many I really like. Shiren and Spelunky still represent the right balance, and even with those it's a love/hate thing.
Most of them, from Gungeon to Dead Cells to Darkest Dungeon, haven't quite done it for me, although I've had good times with them. I'm mostly not keen on the whole grinding for permanent unlocks aspect. Just make everything possible from the start - if it's good enough it'll have replay value without having to manufacture it.
With that in mind, Invisible Inc is the one game that really gets everything right for me, and one which I just enjoy playing repeatedly. There are many reasons it works within the formula so well, but mostly it's just a brilliantly designed game. -
If push came to shove I would've thought Spelunky is still the poster child.
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Is FTL a true rogue-like/lite though?I am a FREE. I am not MAN. A NUMBER. -
Moot_Geeza wrote:I'd like a non rogue arcade mode added as an extra feature in all roguelikes. I don't think it would take much tinkering and could serve as an undercard of sorts. I don't appreciate the roguelike aspects of these games but I often find myself hankering to play them anyway. I paid £6 for Gungeon on Switch, I would've paid £12 for a straight 15 stage non randomised shooter (or the game I bought with that mode bolted on for those stuck in their ways).
They could add a non-rogue mode into it but then it kinda defeats the purpose of the entire genre a tad. -
Moot_Geeza wrote:I'd like a non rogue arcade mode added as an extra feature in all roguelikes. I don't think it would take much tinkering and could serve as an undercard of sorts. I don't appreciate the roguelike aspects of these games but I often find myself hankering to play them anyway. I paid £6 for Gungeon on Switch, I would've paid £12 for a straight 15 stage non randomised shooter (or the game I bought with that mode bolted on for those stuck in their ways).
Honestly I think this line of thinking mischaracterises games development. The idea that it wouldn't take much tinkering is really undermining how much work developers put into games, especially roguelikes and solid arcade games, which take years of dedicated design to work well. Roguelikes tend to hit Early Access these days because small studios need mass testing to quantify difficulty and item curves.
The reason the format is so popular is because it suits chunking content quite well too, you can easily release half of a roguelike in EA and expand on it for a year or so (see Slay the Spire). Arcade games are a bigger investment for small teams because art assets tend to be one and done, getting a decent bed of testers on board is harder and more time consuming, and tight level design takes a lot of time to work on, that's why they tend to favour the kickstarter format over Early Access.
One game in recent memory managed a Roguelike DLC, and that was the Mooncrash expansion for Prey, which was at least a year of development time for a fairly large team working on an admittedly ambitious expansion. There's a reason it doesn't happen more often, cos it isn't just tweaking a few sliders.
I understand you put a caveat on your post with "i'd like..." but there's a reason developers choose to make one or the other rather than half arsing both. -
hylian_elf wrote:Is FTL a true rogue-like/lite though?
Yes, unless you're a weird purist, in which case anything that isn't ASCII and turn based fails the test. -
Streets of Rogue is great, nicely paced with lots of interesting play styles. Really love Catacomb Kids even though I'm useless at it. Death Road to Canada is fun and funny. Superhot: Mind Control Delete is decent, too.
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DS: Not if it doesn't interfere with the main event, it could just be an option beneath main game on the menu. Think of it as a modern Big Head mode, they must've made someone happy. To me roguelikes are modern arcade games, where the core mechanics are super solid but the randomisation adds longevity (or what we used to call Lastability). I'd like a way to play them as a series of fixed stages rather than having to learn the whole shebang inside out.
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Again, it's just a massive misunderstanding of how and why the development process of these games work. It's not just an option, it's a huge amount of work to re-balance everything and either run ProcGen until they spit out well designed levels, design the levels by hand, or just give players shit levels. It's lose/lose.
Any Roguelike worth its salt has randomisation incumbent in its mechanical design. Those that suffer, such as Rogue Legacy and Gungeon, fail to appreciate that. They half-ass it by taking arcade mechanics, polishing them, and failing to do anything meaningful with them, or the procgen level design. -
I'm still great and you still love it.
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What's a rogue like? I'm not kidding. I've heard it loads lately but never figured it out. Is it a game where the end is never in sight and you get as far as you can?"Plus he wore shorts like a total cunt" - Bob
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A more straight ahead SF fps is on my Wishlist.
Destiny 2 flirted with Rogue like in one of the dlcs, didn't it, but it was shit.I'm still great and you still love it. -
@ SG. My understanding is that the main thing is that you die and start at the beginning again. There is a set end.
The replay comes from learning, randomised dungeons and RPGing new powers and buffs as you go.I'm still great and you still love it. -
Timing, innit.I'm still great and you still love it.
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SpaceGazelle wrote:What's a rogue like? I'm not kidding. I've heard it loads lately but never figured it out. Is it a game where the end is never in sight and you get as far as you can?
Permadetath and randomisation of features are the two mane elements that make up a Roguelike, but there are a lot of other factors that might be involved. Turn based, resource management, complexity through emergent and synergistic elements. -
Tempy wrote:either run ProcGen until they spit out well designed levels, design the levels by hand...
The horror.
Didn't the Crackdown demo have a completely different balance to the main game? Different genre obviously, but an example of re-balancing. I'm pretty sure other games have been rejigged for demos too (a 2D Metroidvania on 360 maybe?). I'm not trying to squash the genre, I can see it's a wonderful thing, but as someone who has zero knowledge of the development process I still can't see why it'd be the massive undertaking/unravelling of intent you're describing. Just lock a decent pattern in and call it arcade mode. Or don't, as I'm sure it won't happen, but it's something I'd appreciate as someone who keeps poking his nose over the garden fence. -
What's that one where you wake up on an island and need to not die? I enjoyed that for a while. -
Oh ok. No continues or multiple lives. What's the origin of the term?"Plus he wore shorts like a total cunt" - Bob
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They're primarily made by small devs. Crackdown has MS backing and millions flung at it.
I'm sure they probably could if they wanted to keep dragging on development to the point they may not make a long term profit, but there's multiple rogue fiends out there who'll gobble it up. It doesn't have to hit everyone's sweet spot. -
SpaceGazelle wrote:Oh ok. No continues or multiple lives. What's the origin of the term?
Rogue
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_(video_game) -
And randomisation. Cheers Tempy."Plus he wore shorts like a total cunt" - Bob
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"Rogue"
Like Indiana Jones. It's all clear now."Plus he wore shorts like a total cunt" - Bob -
I've added a wikiwikiwawalinkmedo
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Moot_Geeza wrote:
The horror. Didn't the Crackdown demo have a completely different balance to the main game? Different genre obviously, but an example of re-balancing. I'm pretty sure other games have been rejigged for demos too (a 2D Metroidvania on 360 maybe?). I'm not trying to squash the genre, I can see it's a wonderful thing, but as someone who has zero knowledge of the development process I still can't see why it'd be the massive undertaking/unravelling of intent you're describing. Just lock a decent pattern in and call it arcade mode. Or don't, as I'm sure it won't happen, but it's something I'd appreciate as someone who keeps poking my nose over the garden fence.either run ProcGen until they spit out well designed levels, design the levels by hand...
I'm trying to explain. Games design is hard, people don't just slap stuff together and hope it works. If a dev is spending years trying to make a well designed, finely balanced roguelike that sells well and they can be proud of, where's the time in their dev schedule to design levels that work for a totally different style of game?
Arcade games don't just work because they aren't randomised, they work because time and care is taken to arrange obstacles and enemies and concepts in logical chunks that teach you how to deal with them.
The reason a lot of devs might prefer the proc-gen route is because it's tool based rather than design based, disciplines that are very different. -
WorKid wrote:I've added a wikiwikiwawalinkmedo
Ta."Plus he wore shorts like a total cunt" - Bob
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