The Codex of Roguelikes

[Hobo Elf]

I'm surprised it took them this long. Zionmax lawyers tend to be faster than this.

 

[Fenix]

Yeah, meet the D**m.

https://github.com/ChaosForge/doomrl

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

http://www.gridsagegames.com/blog/2016/12/year-3-cogmind/

...
2017
This is it. 2017 will be a crucial year for Cogmind, because it’s the year we reach 1.0, and the year we’ll finally see what cogmind can do once it reaches a wider audience--will it flop, or will it be able to pay for more roguelike goodness in the future?

I never imagined back in 2013 when starting out (and most certainly not when putting out the initial free version in 2012!) that I’d still be working on Cogmind now, but I’m glad I am because it’s the result of good things! There haven’t been any serious development hiccups, and progress has continued at the expected pace, I just repeatedly pushed back the long-term schedule to fit in more stuff. It’s true that many of these things could have simply waited until after a “1.0″ launch, which is what I’m sure most sane (or financially desperate) developers would do, but even Alpha 1 was a pretty solid game, and there’s been ongoing player support ever since it was released, so I never really saw a need to rush it.

...

 

[Dim]

cogminds an AI right?

 

[ᚱᚨᚷᛖᚠᚢᛈ]

cogmind has got some sweet visuals going for it, didnt feel much like a roguelike when i tried it a long time ago.
feels more like a procedurally generated game that you ought to save and load.

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

http://streetsofrogue.tumblr.com/post/154822287095/alpha-15-online-multiplayer-beta-hath-arrived

Following the most grueling 2.5-month crunch of Streets of Rogue’s entire development / my entire lifetime, 4-player online multiplayer coop is finally, like, a real thing! Kinda!

Let me explain! I don’t consider the current iteration of Multiplayer stable enough to be included with the primary release build. There’s still a lot of bugs to be fixed, and connection issues are semi-rampant with the matchmaking system I have in place right now. Still, it’s functional enough that you should be able to get in there and have some GOOD, CLEAN FUN. That’s right, don’t go on and harass people and such. Edgelording is soooo 2015.

Back to what I was saying - You can play Streets of Rogue multiplayer by downloading the new Development Build of the game. I will be updating this build more frequently (and with less fanfare) than I do the normal alpha updates. The Development Build sends information and error reports up to the cloud where I can make use of it to fix bugs. It’s potentially less stable than the normal builds, and performs slightly worse. But if you want to help with the game’s development, this is what you should be using.

Also of note, Streets of Rogue FINALLY has MUSIC, thanks to the lovely and talented Craig Barnes. You can get the entire soundtrack on his bandcamp site for cheap right now. New tracks will be added throughout the game’s development, and the price might end up higher too, so be sure to get in on this early!

Since multiplayer has been essentially my only focus, there haven’t been many changes to the base game since Alpha 14. But, don’t expect a 2-month wait between builds again – Adding multiplayer support was no joke. Seriously, my brain is mush. Here’s the full changelog:

Big Features
Multiplayer

‘Nuff said. Only available in the Development Build.

Music

It’s really catchy, ‘90s hip-hop and jock jam inspired stuff.

Other Additions and Changes
UI / Controls

• Main Menu button added
  
• Text spacing changed in a few spots to better accommodate translations

Bug Fixes
UI / Controls

• Fix for Accept and Complete buttons not working when clicked
  
• Controller vibration is now functional on Mac and Linux

Playfield Objects

• Fix for generator flashing repeatedly and never exploding (literally dozens of people emailed me about this one, holy crap)

Items

• Fix for weapons not being unequipped after being sold, given away, etc.

Status Effects / Traits / Special Abilities

Fix for Shapeshifter not being able to interact with things after death and resurrection when lighting was set to None

 

[Ent]

Theres currently a bug in caves of qud that causes unstable genome to continually give mutations and it wont be patched out until friday - go have some fun.

 

[anvi]

What would be the best roguelike for me if I loved TOME? I played lots of other roguelikes and didn't like most of them, but TOME is different somehow. I love the combat and the classes. (ps. tome getting a cool new class soon)

 

[Emmanuel2]

What would be the best roguelike for me if I loved TOME? I played lots of other roguelikes and didn't like most of them, but TOME is different somehow. I love the combat and the classes. (ps. tome getting a cool new class soon)

I liked ToME4 enough and these are what I found that would suit a ToME4 fan's taste:

• Poschengband for a heavy overworld-dungeon combat-focused roguelike, a single winning game would last around 40-50 for a veteran chengband or posband player. Maybe 80-100+ for a regular roguelike player. Better than ToME4 IMHO but not alot would play through the end because of the massive game length and how much knowledge you need because it has thrice the number of races and maybe 4 times the number of classes, all of them unique in playstyle unlike ToME4's very vanilla melee/mage/archer/hybrid-of-any-two playstyles. Stats/mechanics are better too.
  
• DCSS for another streamlined roguelike in the vain of ToME4. It's not a bad thing but it does streamlining/accessibility it very, very well where it didn't simplify for masses sake. Most popular as well.
• ToME 2.3.x is a good candidate but the darn thing is hard to find and running on a modern machine.
  
• Caves of Qud for a similar cooldown-based combat system.
  
• Dungeonmans for something very similar to ToME4 but with meta-progression added into the mix. You can turn it off so that it can be considered a true roguelike.
  
• Unless you don't mind grinding, Elona+ has one of the better combat mechanics and gameplay systems out of the roguelikes I've played. It doesn't have permadeath in classic mode but dying past level 5 can be enough to frustrate you because of item drops that could turn into permanent item loss, then you have permanent stat/skill drops, a ton of gold lost, and fame/karma hit.

 

[anvi]

Thanks!

 

[Aholf Ditler]

Pathos in android is a nice roguelike based hardly in nethack

 

[hackncrazy]

Is there any roguelike that doesn't have a massively boring early game?

I've played Nethack, Angband, Brogue and DoomRL.

I liked them all from the mid to end game. But my oh my, how shitty can the early game be?

I mean, for Angband, is like the 20-30 initial floors are filled with absolutely nothing.

Nethack, on the other hand, has a very good mid game but the end game is abysmal.

Brogue and DoomRL are so boring at the beginning that I kind of gave up playing them for a while.

 

[Tito Anic]

Is there any roguelike that doesn't have a massively boring early game?

Adom. Just pick troll barbarian born on Candle and go straight to Unremarkable Cave, get 4-6lvl, find stairs to High Mountain Village, search for altar, get crowned on the way.

p.s. Doom RL is boring at the beginning? You can beat it in 20 min, it is coffee break roguelike.

 

[Emmanuel2]

Is there any roguelike that doesn't have a massively boring early game?

I've played Nethack, Angband, Brogue and DoomRL.

I liked them all from the mid to end game. But my oh my, how shitty can the early game be?

I mean, for Angband, is like the 20-30 initial floors are filled with absolutely nothing.

Nethack, on the other hand, has a very good mid game but the end game is abysmal.

Brogue and DoomRL are so boring at the beginning that I kind of gave up playing them for a while.

Elona+ has the best early game of the roguelikes I've played though it's not for everyone. So many approaches but the best experience is always the first one even with guides.

The Ground Gives Way is a coffeebreak roguelike similar to DoomRL but has great action althroughout the game.

 

[Damned Registrations]

DoomRL early game is also scary as fuck on harder difficulties/with challenges. No excuses for finding easy mode boring.

Adom. Just pick troll barbarian rolled 20 times in a row to get Candle and go straight to Unremarkable Cave, get 4-6lvl, find stairs to High Mountain Village, search for altar, get crowned on the way.

Totally not tedious at all. Also that just makes the early game even easier, really. Still just as boring, just now you don't have to try it a dozen times or scum ID to avoid dying to a trap.

 

[pakoito]

How do I learn Elonna+ best?

 

[Emmanuel2]

How do I learn Elona+ best?

http://elona.wikia.com/wiki/Beginner's_Guide though outdated, still has really useful tips for the early game and most of them are still relevant. The thing I like about this guide is that the author acknowledges game approaches should be different from person to person and that he just provided some rough outlines for those struggling.

Some tips:

• Classes have feats exclusive to them. Thief or Warmage has arguably the best but you won't need to mind them if you're just aiming to finish Act 1 (original Elona vanilla content).

• Races also have exclusive feats but do note that the Golem's immunity to Dim Status is caused by his high amount of Life. That means that all characters can be immune to dim provided that he has ~150 Life (different stat from HP).

• Get Gardening, Cooking and some Alchemy ASAP regardless of class.

• Don't use and avoid the Powergamer's Guide. It's mainly there to exercise tedium and to ruin the experience. You seriously won't need most of those tips to be efficient.

• If you care about the story in your games, use Elona Custom. I don't but the QoL and AI tweaks it provides is pretty good, that and the translation is now perfect. Be mindful of the version you're going to install it on, I think it's only updated for 1.62.2. You won't gain much from the latest version unless you're already in Act 3.

• Use pets. My solo playthrough was hell but it was worth doing because if it's possible with solo, it's sure as hell going to be better with pets. The Little Girl, despite being creepy on your side, has the best stats among the three starters.

• If you're far enough into the game, kill the Big Daddies if you can but don't eat Little Sisters. Their bonuses are really small compared to what you can do when you save them.

 

[Fenix]

I think I should fix my damn desktop PC and continur to play Elona+....

 

[Lord Azlan]

Don't Starve

Bought on a whim on Steam simply because of its 1,300 negative views out of 48,000 reviews.

WTF is going on and how comes I never heard of it before?

I like a bit of Rogue going back to Larn and Hack back in the day. Dungeons of Dredmor has been my recent favourite.

Codex Steam Curator has included a decent sampling such as Invisible Inc. Others such as FTL and Tales of Maj'Eyal are on my TO PLAY LIST.

This one has you stranded on an island where you must survive on a day to day basis.

Keep you health up, your hunger down and insanity low. You mostly do this by collecting and crafting. The game developers seeming like players to learn as you go so there are no manuals or hardly any explanation on what do to.

Died on my first night when it went dark as I hadn't build a camp with fire. Creatures came from the dark and ate me.

Died on my second night when I kept adding logs to the fire and burned the local area down and set fire to myself.

Trapped some rabbits and cooked them.

Chopped down some trees. Mined some rock for stones and gold. Made a spear and killed some spiders. Found some pigs.

Interesting and somewhat disturbing game. It's very tense.

As you survive day to day you can unlock different characters and who knows what else.

 

[Emmanuel2]

Don't Starve

Bought on a whim on Steam simply because of its 1,300 negative views out of 48,000 reviews.

WTF is going on and how comes I never heard of it before?

I like a bit of Rogue going back to Larn and Hack back in the day. Dungeons of Dredmor has been my recent favourite.

Codex Steam Curator has included a decent sampling such as Invisible Inc. Others such as FTL and Tales of Maj'Eyal are on my TO PLAY LIST.

[snipped the playthrough]

Don't Starve is one of those indie darling "roguelikes" (I prefer roguelites) that came into the limelight during the "roguelike renaissance" along with FTL, Binding of Isaac, Rogue Legacy, Neo Scavenger and the more recent Enter the Gungeon. I'm sure that anyone who is interested in playing what the indies are up to has already heard of the game. Don't Starve is a great game and it definitely deserves it's glowing reviews, and am glad that one more person is enjoying it.

The reason why it's never mentioned here, through my skimming of the thread, is because that it's not really a roguelike and, having played it personally, can attest to that.

Below is my thought on the definition of a roguelike for the above's discussion's sake, but since it's not relevant to what you say about or think of the game I'll just spoiler it in the case that nobody wants to read my inane bickering on defining a fairly obscure (but hugely growing popularity as of late) and niche genre. DO NOT CLICK THE SPOILER IF YOU DO NOT WANT TO READ SHIT.

Spoiler

Don't Starve is simply missing most of the core characteristics of roguelikes and to name some: tactical combat, complex mechanics, and turn-based despite having randomization and permadeath or a significant penalty to death. To add to that, it also has the most "un-roguelike" feature of all which is meta-progression. Because of these things, I wouldn't classify nor group the game (along with BoI, EtG, FtL, Rogue Legacy, etc.) with the roguelikes themselves.

However if people were to mention the Berlin Interpretation here as a strict definition of a roguelike, I'd gladly present them to Elona+ and ToME4 as an example as to why not to strictly follow them. These games are classified as 1.) Elona+ being a traditional and hugely weird roguelike and 2.) ToME4 being a major roguelike. The former has no permadeath but applies a significant loss to your character's stats, skills, items, gold, etc. whenever you die in classic difficulty while the latter has meta-progression and little-to-no resource management that is relevant to a standard roguelike experience.

BUT Elona+ has tactical combat, resource management (MP, SP, HP, Hunger, Sleep, Drunkness, Corruption, skill/stat potential decay and stat decay, gold, fame, karma you can also multiply that to how many pets you have), complex mechanics, turn based and lots of randomisation.

ToME 4 on the other hand has tactical combat, resource management in the form of a diablo-like/MMO-ish approach (cooldown, exclusive resource pools, HP), complex mechanics, turn-based and randomisation. I regard ToME4 as the junkfood of the roguelikes for me, it's good but it's not particularly a flavourful and savoring roguelike experience IMHO compared to ADOM, Angband, etc.

Of the same importance is that the game's flow for the player should be determined by the player himself and that the difficulty is to lower as his knowledge of the game (before, in the middle, and to carry over after the playthrough aka meta-knowledge) expands, collection of tricks grows, and preparedness for the/present familiarity with hugely varying scenarios presented to him by the innate random nature of the genre increases, but not with twitch reaction/movement/muscle memory improvement. This can be applied to both of the games above and IMHO is just as much as genre-defining as the other qualities I've mentioned.

So to follow the Berlin Interpretation strictly is to say that these brilliant games, of which the former being my one of my all time favorites along with Poschengband and ADOM, are not roguelikes of which I disagree strongly along with a large number of people.

Also ASCII-only is stupid, people who say otherwise wherein a roguelike isn't really a roguelike because of some stupid graphical option of which varies with TASTE is a fucking moron. I like having the option of choosing between information-dump super serious mode or going for "I like to tune my brainpower down for a while and just look at pictures and identify them through their art immediately" option.

We also need a roguelite thread for things like these. On the flipside, the traditional genre itself is evolving nicely with the recent surge of new, modern roguelikes being bought out with very interesting mechanics and approaches namely UnReal World, Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, ToME4, Caves of Qud, D**mRL, Cogmind, etc. and one that is the most popular which is DCSS despite being a fork but with a massive UI shift and new-player oriented experience.

EDIT: Made some form of warning.

 

[Lord Azlan]

Spoiler

Don't Starve is simply missing most of the core characteristics of roguelikes and to name some: tactical combat, complex mechanics, and turn-based despite having randomization and permadeath or a significant penalty to death. To add to that, it also has the most "un-roguelike" feature of all which is meta-progression. Because of these things, I wouldn't classify nor group the game (along with BoI, EtG, FtL, Rogue Legacy, etc.) with the roguelikes themselves.

However if people were to mention the Berlin Interpretation here as a strict definition of a roguelike, I'd gladly present them to Elona+ and ToME4 as an example as to why not to strictly follow them. These games are classified as 1.) Elona+ being a traditional and hugely weird roguelike and 2.) ToME4 being a major roguelike. The former has no permadeath but applies a significant loss to your character's stats, skills, items, gold, etc. whenever you die in classic difficulty while the latter has meta-progression and little-to-no resource management that is relevant to a standard roguelike experience.

Thanks for the information. Interested to read about the Berlin Interpretation.

I guess most of the rogue like games on Codex Curator are turn based but as you say there are these new breed of games that are random, have some other rogue like elements - but are something else.

I really loved Dungeon of the Endless for a while. I was hooked and had to force myself to stop playing it.

Exploration was sort of turn based as each opening of a door was followed by consequences. Then you had the Tower Defense element.

Your heroes had skills. You could buy and sell items. There was some strategic resources. Heroes could be levelled up.

What sort of game is this?

 

[Emmanuel2]

What sort of game is this?

I have Dungeon of the Endless bought along with its DLCs but never got around to playing it. Maybe I should if someone HAD to stop playing it hahaha.

However, by looking at videos it most certainly is a roguelite IMHO. One of the most important (and possibly one of the most ignored) aspects about roguelikes is that it doesn't pace you to a certain flow, you do it when you want to do it rather than the game rushing you.

Noone wants to divide the already small roguelike community which is probably why the codex's list includes roguelites and it's a lesser known term ever since a huge number of fans of BoI, Spelunky and FtL which are arguably the most popular described their games as roguelikes (rogue legacy was the first to properly call itself as a roguelite but even then it still got neglected, FtL one of the first to coin roguelike-like). So now it's more of a near personal thing just like how RPGs are coined differently from person to person except defining this one doesn't make the person insane. Plus the list is long outdated.

 

[Damned Registrations]

It's pretty arbitrary how to define them anyways. Plenty of people (myself included) would include procedural generation as the most important element. Plenty of roguelikes compromise this aspect though, by putting in special levels that are always the same every time- it's a great way to balance out the RNG gods after all; but it certainly detracts from the core gameplay of adapting to that RNG. No need to work around your inventory if you will always get a bag of holding for example, whereas if it were random, it'd radically change the gameplay between characters who had it and can play packrat vs those who didn't and need to do things differently somehow.

OTOH, while meta progression certainly wasn't part of the original rogue or it's closest followers, it doesn't seem terribly out of place to me, since the meta knowledge was always a huge aspect anyways. Whats the big deal if instead of learning how to price ID scrolls after a few dozen runs I unlock a feature to have shopkeepers ID them for me for a small cost? The only real difference is that you can cheat the former by just reading up on it, which ruins a lot of the fun but frankly feels necessary in most decently complex roguelikes if you want to finish them in less than a decade.

 

[anvi]

I tried Don't Starve today. Really bad game, really boring, and the character is a greedy bastard.

 

[toroid]

Noone wants to divide the already small roguelike community which is probably why the codex's list includes roguelites and it's a lesser known term ever since a huge number of fans of BoI, Spelunky and FtL which are arguably the most popular described their games as roguelikes .. . So now it's more of a near personal thing just like how RPGs are coined differently from person to person ..

I think you'll find that the vast majority of these people who overuse the term "roguelike" when assigning genre neither care nor understand why we use different words to describe different things. They are often just ignorantly parroting a term that has been relegated to marketing buzzword tier by modern indie devs. They are completely unqualified to influence the meaning of niche terminology, even through brute force.