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Comment by anotheryou | Hacker News Reader

Fun in challenges should certainly be added.

I guess you could bend finishing a super mario level in to "achievements" but it's really more about the challenge.

Games could even be random generated without any level progression, it's just that random generated levels are not as good in creating interesting and non-repetitive challenges.

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> it's just that random generated levels are not as good in creating interesting and non-repetitive challenges.

i see this sentiment and similar echoed a lot and the issue i take with it is that there are degrees to everything. Just like there are good and bad hand designed games, there is the same spectrum of procedural games

there are many games that do this extremely well but they are mostly not very well known indie efforts. Off the top of my head:

* Dungeon of the Endless

* Invisible Inc

* Downwell

* Rogue Legacy

* Spelunky

* Teleglitch

Yes, there are certainly quite a few exeptions, some doing a mix like downwell: predefined enemy/block types progressing stage to stage and random level arangement.

I just wanted to make my point that it doesn't need to have progressing levels for the basic thrill. I really like clever human-designed levels though :) Much more surprising and less optimization, more quick grasping and adaption required.

Excellent list.

There's a very big and important difference between "random" and "procedurally generated". Most great roguelikes (or roguelike-likes?) have strong procedural elements in their level generation, but certainly randomness is an important input.

I'll add brogue since I am a roguelike traditionalist. :)

'FTL: Faster Than Light' too.

Completely disagree. In fact I hate Rogue Legacy and all 'rogue types' because they think randomness = interesting.

Anecdotally, I really enjoyed Rogue Legacy and objectively, it was an extremely successful game that has a high rating both from professional reviewers and community reviews [https://www.google.com/search?q=Rogue+legacy&oq=Rogue+legacy]. Unless you were there or know people who were, saying something like, "because they think..." will not go far at ycombinator (from what I've seen).

I don't write my comments to appease people here, if they don't like them then so be it, that isn't a goal of mine.

Rogue-like games plague the Steam store [1], though there will always be games like Legacy that rise to the top of their category. You could say Candy Crush is an objectively successful game too, but I see it as a micro transaction laden piece of trash.

[1] http://store.steampowered.com/search/?term=rogue&tags=1716

The reasonable statement to make from all this is simply that you don't like rogue-lite or rogue-like games.

The claims you made beyond that are invalid

> You could say Candy Crush is an objectively successful game too

Surely... Though, you can't point to community and critical acclaim like you could with Rogue Legacy, which is why they were linked and why the other poster was suggesting you back your statements with evidence. It's less so for people to like you or your comments and more so for people to gauge the veracity of your statements...

That's covered by Achievers. Achievements aren't required, however, they do highlight specific achievements. Still, the challenge of achieving the best score, best time, or whatever else you can think of.

Maybe achiving a level. But i would like to seperate "making some number go up" from the fun of solving a challange. The joy is not only in having solved a challange, but also in trying to jump that one gap 100 times until you nail it.

Same goes for plain action, there are a few endless level games where the score is insignificant, it just gets harder and you try to stay alive and the fun is reacting fast.

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