To do in San Francisco this weekend: the first-ever roguelike celebration | Hacker News Reader

To do in San Francisco this weekend: the first-ever roguelike celebration

roguelike.club

141 pointsjere69 comments

Aw, thanks for posting this and being excited about it! This is a labor of love organized by my friend Noah with help from a few other friends and me, just for fun since we love playing roguelikes.

We did sell out of tickets; our very graciously donated venue (thanks to Eventbrite) has an attendee limit since it's basically an office rather than a large venue. I hope you all will watch the streams! The talks will also be recorded so you can watch them later.

Thank you for providing streams! This just happens to be the weekend I leave the Bay Area so otherwise I'd be pretty bummed about missing it.

The speaker list on this thing is absolutely mindblowing.

I really wanted to go, but having just gone to a roguelike conference last month and this one being on the opposite coast, I just couldn't swing it. But it will be streamed!

Oh my god! YES.

I wish I knew about this earlier >< And I wish I weren't on call all weekend and working this insane ETL project. Hopefully there's VODs.

Holy hell, there's only a few people missing for it to literally be "all stars". Which makes it unfortunate that there are two tracks! How come IRDC never had this, and I haven't even heard it mentioned in rgrd?

The scope of this thing seems to have surprised everyone.

It appears to be a combination of location (many of the famous attendees live on the west coast I guess) and Noah simply emailing people to come.

As far as rgrd, I usually only step in there around events to ask if anyone is participating and have never gotten any interest from anyone. There were a lot of announcements on reddit.

Propose changing the link to the event page [0]. This "blog post" doesn't add anything.

[0] https://roguelike.club/

To be fair, I've had http://roguelike.club on my to-revisit list for a while and it doesn't obviously mention the twitch stream in big bold letters on the front page so I had missed that option. I'm quite glad to see it.

Streaming for track 1 and track 2:

https://www.twitch.tv/roguelike_con

https://www.twitch.tv/roguelike_con2

The only computer game I play is DCSS. Once got to the vaults as a troll beserker, but I can't get any farther than that. (I know, I know .... slow down, just don't get killed...)

DCSS has such incredible depth, these types of games reward you if you can dedicate the time to them.

It's not a pure roguelike but I've found Nuclear Throne to be fantastic. Nice blend of old school arcade controls and brutal rougelike roots.

I've been trying to get into that, but I'm just not finding it to have the depth of Binding of Isaac. Then again, what does, in twitch-rogues? Maybe I just need to make it past the first sewer level before I give up.

Catacomb Kids might suit you. It has a lot of depth of interaction.

Thanks! I hadn't seen that one yet.

I haven't played it yet (waiting for the full release), but this video about the many, many uses for a small rock sold me on backing Catacomb Kids: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N59tLIvQeJE

A lot of the meta around NT has to do with knowing what weapons work well across stages of the game and are complementary, then balancing ammo requirements with the need to dish out spike damage.

If you haven't made it past the sewer that you've probably seen < 15% of the game. I've particularly found melee weapons(wrench) particularly good at dealing with the sewers.

Have you played Spelunky, the very first roguelikelike? It can be surprisingly deep.

I've found DCSS quite fun. It eliminates most of the busywork of most roguelikes: you don't need to take separate notes, you can search for items and landmarks, you can auto-travel to known areas/levels and auto-explore unseen areas of a level, and the developers have "eliminate tedium" as a specific design goal.

I've managed to win the full game twice, and each of the sprints a few times. Spriggan berserker with piles of stealth and dodging worked really well; a manual of Fighting helped get my HP to reasonable levels. I need to see if I can get a spellcaster through the full game, and I still need to do the extended endgame.

I like sprint mode lately for quick games that take <30 minutes.

...the developers have "eliminate tedium" as a specific design goal.

I think lots of good has come from that. At some point, though, it started to feel like a lot of what the dev team considered tedium I considered fun, and vice versa. (I could of course download the old versions and play locally, but playing online was a lot of the fun.)

I need to see if I can get a spellcaster through the full game

"Pure" spellcasting can be done, but it's unpleasant to play (just from a UI perspective) and usually a suboptimal use of XP (DCSS usually rewards moderate investment in several areas rather than extreme specialization in one.) If you're not imposing that on yourself, then book backgrounds are overrepresented among the better starts in the game.

> At some point, though, it started to feel like a lot of what the dev team considered tedium I considered fun, and vice versa.

What kinds of things got dropped that you liked?

I don't like the hunger clock.

Seconded. It's nothing more than a nuisance, but one has to constantly carve up carcasses just in case, and constantly drop rotten meat. Not fun.

Just to be clear, there are two things going on:

1. Your character gets hungry periodically and needs to be fed. I'll refer to this as the "hunger system"; I don't really have so much of a problem with it, although I wouldn't be sad to see it go either.

2. The amount of food in the game is finite. This is the hunger clock. If you take too much time in any one area, you will starve because there is no more food available; the only way to get more food is to move into a dangerous, uncleared area, and you'll need to spend that food exploring the new area. I'd like to be able to play slowly and carefully if I want to.

There's been a big push to shorten the game, constantly trimming out levels. I think some aspects of that turned out pretty well (I was skeptical of the D to D + Depths transition but ultimately I came around on it) but I actually liked the slightly longer game. The stretches of the game where I can get in a flow state and smash are usually among the more enjoyable.

My impression is that the devs who have been most influential for the last two to three years find that element of the game boring and instead want to put you in more "interesting" situations (e.g. forcing a rune before entering Vaults, increasingly strong new monsters in Depths.) I find that a lot of those things don't meaningfully decrease my chances of winning or force creative new strategies. Instead, they encourage me to do more tedious things like isolating single monsters, stair dancing, etc.

In fairness, I think my opinion on this was probably in the minority among heavy players at the time.

It's such a great game, and there are so many different ways to play. I know how to win a 15 rune game with a Deep Elf Fire Elementalist, but when I try to play as melee it's a totally different game and I can't get very far past Lair.

For those with knowledge of the genre: What are the better, traditional roguelikes that you can recommend? I've only played Elona so far and quite liked it.

ADOM (Ancient Domains of Mystery) is a favorite of mine. I prefer the original CLI version to the Steam version (especially since the original is free). Dwarf Fortress is also very satisfying though it does have a higher learning curve.

Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead is my favorite game of all time.

I'll give a thumbs-up to DDA. It's got problems--I think there's not enough game to it when you get past the baseline stages of survival--but it has a lot of different systems that mostly work together pretty well.

Brogue is very traditional and very thoughtfully designed. It's the author's idea of what Rogue might look like today if development had continued.

https://sites.google.com/site/broguegame/

It's my favourite Roguelike because it's the genre distilled to its essence. Also the short bits of flavour text are very well written.

Brogue is also one of the most visually beautiful roguelikes despite sticking to the old roguelike convention of using individual ascii characters to represent everything in the dungeon. It is really impressive.

I have been playing Nethack (and Slash'EM, a variant) on and off since the 1990s. It's one of the early off-shoots of the original game, Rogue.

I compiled it from source using DJGPP for MS-DOS (which is a GCC port for 32-bit DOS executables) and added my own random humorous messages to various situations in the game. I also made some minor modifications to the game mechanics to fix things that I personally found annoying.

Compiling was in itself a fun endeavor - it took a couple hours to recompile from scratch, as I remember, and of course there was always a surprise or two along the way - invariably due to my own errors.

Both Nethack and Slash'EM are still actively developed, and there are graphical tile interfaces available now, too. The learning curve is a little steep due to the large number of keyboard commands. That seems to be a common feature of many roguelike interfaces.

If you want to check them out, be aware that the console version usually defaults to the safest and most boring set of options - no color or graphics chars - so if you play that one, you might want to set those options first. Or go with one of the many graphical tile versions.

Also, beware: this was more of time sink for me than WoW ever was. YMMV.

Brogue is very similar in spirit to the original. It was excellent game balancing and isn't overly complicated. Compared to many other modern RLs, this one is very approachable and allows one to make progress early.

Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup[1] was how I was introduced to roguelikes. Try starting out playing as a troll monk (trolls can eat raw flesh and won't starve as easily, and they have claws for unarmed combat).

[1] https://crawl.develz.org/

Desktop Dungeons is an excellent one. Gameplay is divided into levels which are designed to be short, and there is a puzzle mode which is tricky but very rewarding. The race/class system is also quite good. Different builds are good on different missions. http://www.desktopdungeons.net/

This thread just reminded me of Cogmind. It's Windows only and I had forgotten about it when I moved to Linux but it's working with Wine so far. It's a really good one. Early access and not free ($24 min) but it's very stable and easily worth the price.

It works mostly fine on mac with wineskin as well

Josh Ge will be speaking at this event. I have been closely following the devlog of his modern RL game Cogmind since the start and I can highly recommend it, as well as the game itself:

http://www.gridsagegames.com/cogmind/

http://www.gridsagegames.com/blog/

If they want CA history, hand's down reach out to Joseph and his Emperor Norton tour -- http://www.emperornortontour.com/index.html

Full of history and comedy.

Nice, I wish I could go!

My username is inspired by my favorite rogue-like growing up, JauntTrooper:Mission Thunderbolt. It was released in 1992.

Here it is, if folks are interested in playing it: http://www.old-games.com/download/3974/jaunttrooper-mission-...

Oh my, the hours we wasted inside of DEC playing that game as it was being developed, which was just called Doom at the time. It's a pity Dave hasn't given it the SDL treatment or updated it for OS X but the rights are probably all screwed up from publishing it for the original Mac back in the early 90's. It was fun because of its wonderful sense of humor and sci-fi storyline, ATMs, radioactive green slime, and all the wonderful warrens (where you could find wonderful things way beyond your current level). It really did have a story and a mystery to be solved. A true classic.

You'd need to post a picture of the Security Authorization Chart for any of us to play that however.

I just checked and Doom is available in the VMS Hobbyist program (http://www.openvmshobbyist.com/downloads.php?cat_id=3), so you should be able to get it to run under SIMH (http://simh.trailing-edge.com/), if you're so inclined. Security Authorization not required here. :-)

Wow, no kidding! You were there when he was building it too? That's so awesome. :) Did he ever make any other games?

The game fills me with such nostalgia. As a kid, I couldn't find a retailer who sold it, so I wrote a letter to Casady & Greene in order to buy a copy. I still remember how excited I was when it arrived.

The Security Authorization Chart should be in the ReadMe file, by the way. :)

No, I think that was his only game. I never completed the game on the Mac, I think it was a little beyond where Doom was on VMS when DEC fell apart. Yes, it was always a good week when a Dave released a new version. Working at DEC was really quite special looking back. More like being in grad school, really.

Direct link in stream to Dwarf Fortress talk

https://www.twitch.tv/roguelike_con/v/89873769?t=278m

Looks like they are sold out as ticket sales are ended. How much were the tickets originally?

$20-$45. $20 was probably the early bird. https://www.eventbrite.com/e/roguelike-celebration-tickets-2...

Direct link in stream to ADOM talk

https://www.twitch.tv/roguelike_con/v/89873769?t=351m

Offtopic, but does anyone have experience with porting NetHack? Back when 3.6.0 was first released I tried updating the Mac tileset port, but only got about "halfway" :(

Holy shit, the developers of Rogue, Thomas Biskup, Tarn Adams, and even the creator of Kingdom of Loathing (for some reason) all in the same place?

So can I not go since tickets are already sold out?

Twitch streams

This is so cool that it almost (but not quite) makes me wish I lived on the west coast.

But coming from the east coast, the west coast is weird.

I'm on the east coast as well (Boston). Although I dislike San Francisco for taking away talent and attention from Boston I wouldn't consider them weird compared to local Cambridgites. You want oddity come to Cambridge MA. To be honest though I love weird.

The major weird thing I don't like about SF is the climate (like why is hot during the wrong times of year).

I didn't say the people were weird. But the climate is unpleasant, and you can drive for miles and still be in the same state. And even "northern" california (I believe SF qualifies) is pretty far south, so it hardly ever snows. And all the landscapes look pretty ordinary, and then you suddenly see a palm tree (although that's more LA than SF).

And I do love Cambridge. Why? Bookstores. Bookstores everywhere. If you're looking for a book, and you can't find it in Cambridge, than you're probably not looking hard enough. And there's the MIT Press bookstore as well: Their CS section houses SICP, EPL, TAPL, The Little Books, and countless other excellent books on one row of shelves. If that's not awesome, I don't know what is.

I know that as a Cambridgeite, you know many more reasons why Cambridge is cool, but frankly, having a lot of bookstores is pretty high on my list of ways that places can be awesome.

And yes, it totally sucks that so much talent is on the other side of the country. Living in the New Haven suburbs, I can say that it's hard to get a good pizza most places. And that's the least of the reasons it sucks.

Totally agree with the landscape (SF) and the bookstores (Cambridge).

I love hobyy/game stores as well (we have one in Waltham as well as many in Cambridge).

I hope they do this as on the east coast some time. I'm a long time ADOM and Crawl player. I really only play rogue like computer games. I would post links to my crawl profile but it is rather embarrassing how much time I have spent playing crawl. I'm sad to miss this event.

I'm embarassed by how much time I haven't spent playing nethack. I mean, I haven't even gotten below about L5. I need to up my game :-).

Eh, when we want snow, we drive to Tahoe. It's just a few hours away from most populated areas in Northern California. I think most Californians think that way. Snow is fun to visit, but we wouldn't want to live there...

> you can drive for miles and still be in the same state ... all the landscapes look pretty ordinary, and then you suddenly see a palm tree

Yeah, CA covers a lot of area.You get the Sierras, the vast central valley, the coastal cities, and the small mountains and rolling hills in the North. LA is in a desert (historically, so even before much of the state turned into a desert recently), so there's definitely a different climate there than the rest of the state.

>I think most Californians think that way. Snow is fun to visit, but we wouldn't want to live there...

We northeasterners think the same way about heat, I suppose.

Fair enough, but that's why we cluster at the coast. Much more temperate. :)

Although, the last few years haven't been as hot, IIRC. Growing up, I remember when we would have multiple periods in the summer where it was in the low 100's for 3-5 days in a row, and that doesn't seem to be happening in recent years (but I could just be remembering outliers).

That said, 100 degrees here isn't the same as 100 degrees there. It's all dry heat here. I would take a dry 100 over a muggy, humid 85 any day (but that's what I grew up with). I've been to the east coast a few times in the summer, and walking out of an air conditioned building into the humidity is still something I distinctly remember more than twenty years later.

Yeah. It hits you like a wave :-D.

And the house I grew up in didn't have AC for 10 years. At all. If we wanted to be cool, our best chance was either the basement, or our neighbor's houses.

I can't help but wonder: What is roguelike?

Not trying to be pedantic:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roguelike

It's games that are like Rogue.

Way too many headlines (and accompanying stores!) on HN that don't bother to explain themselves.

There's enough distinct sets of knowledge and experience that there will always it problems communicating succinctly (a title) and effectively to everyone. In this case, if you visit the link, one of the header menu items is "Roguelikes?" which explains it.

I like how the page doesn't mention the date.

That's just the schedule page - sorry this is confusing! The intro page (https://roguelike.club/) has the date - tomorrow (Saturday), September 17.

angband zandband sangband I died in them all.

Url changed from http://boingboing.net/2016/09/16/to-do-in-san-francisco-this..., which points to this.

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