Level Design and Shaping a Roguelike Experience | Hacker News Reader

Level Design and Shaping a Roguelike Experience

gridsagegames.com

140 pointstiniuclx20 comments

The original title of this post is "Level Design and Shaping a Cogmind Experience," but I felt that the HN audience would be more familiar with the name of the genre than the game itself.

If you're one of the lucky 10,000, Roguelikes are a type of video game that has remained virtually unchanged since Rogue, which was released in 1980 for Unix mainframes. Most games are based around procedural generation and dungeon crawling.

Cogmind is a modern, Sci-Fi take on the genre and possibly the most user-friendly Roguelike out there.

I haven't seen a real Roguelike in years. I'm going to have to take a look. the 'Rogue-lite' genre has been my favorite for years with games like Binding of Isaac and FTL. I'm excited to give this a try and see what a true modern Roguelike looks like. Thanks!

I would recommend you check out streets of roguefor a goofy brawler / GTA vibe rogue lite with local and online co-op

How's it compare to the modern, Sci-Fi zombie apocalypse roguelike "Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead"?

While I haven't played CDDA, I can talk a little bit about what makes Cogmind unique compared to the rest of the genre.

Cogmind is classless - you always start the game with the same set of items and abilities. Your build is defined by what parts you find or salvage from enemies, as well as certain events that give you permanent upgrades.

The most obvious difference is the combat system: each and every item you equip can be damaged and destroyed. Items also have a 'coverage' statistic which is proportional to how likely the item is to absorb a shot. For instance, armour in Cogmind isn't really special under this system - it's just an item with high health and coverage.

Cogmind is also mostly based on ranged combat, though melee is an option for both you and enemies. Therefore, the tactics you must use are slightly different.

Your game is great!

You should definitely give CCDA a look if for no other reason than to oggle at the sheer breadth of the project.

Few notes about CDDA:

CDDA also shares the classless aspect with Cogmind.

All items (including your own limbs) are destroyable.

While it doesn't offer the ability to fully swap body parts (that'd be a great feature suggestion. Hmmm..) it does offer mutations and bionics.

It offers a solid mixture of both melee and ranged combat along with vehicular combat.

All that being said Cogmind was a definite standout title. 10/10 on the UI/UX.

I've played both (even contributed to the CDDA project).

Both games:

- Are what I'd consider traditional roguelikes

- are hella fun and 150% worth playing. 10/10, would suggest to a friend.

CDDA:

- has significantly more to do, more items, and more overall depth

- Has better "role playability"

- Is incredibly open ended.

- is under heavy development (just had a HUGE update drop. Be sure to check it out!)

- is fully open source

- can be somewhat confusing for a newcomer (though less than something like Nethack)

- Performance can sometimes be rather meh due to the complexity of the models, particularly in locations with many mobs.

- many systems are not yet fully fleshed out (looking at you NPCs) though many issues have been resolved in the latest release and the experimentals.

Cogmind:

- Has arguably some of the best UI/UX you'll find in a rogue like. Take a look at Caves of Qud and TOME as other great examples of proper UI/UX in rogue likes.

- provides a much better tutorial

- has a more fully fleshed out story

- offers a more guided and less open ended experience

- is more "complete".

- excellent performance

- is not open source (to my knowledge)

- is definitely worth the purchase price if you're a rogue like fan.

I wouldn't say 'virtually unchanged'. That's like saying "platformers are a type of video game that has remained virtually unchanged since super mario bros. 3, which was released in 1985 for the Nintendo Famicom. Most games are based around jumping and navigating platforms."

Really, aside from the introduction of 3d (which has remained relatively niche, as far as platformers are concerned), development in the two has been comparable.

You picked the wrong time to use that example, considering that Nintendo will soon release Super Mario Maker 2, a new game which includes a mode with virtually unchanged mechanics from Super Mario Bros 3. https://www.nintendo.com/games/detail/super-mario-maker-2-sw...

Regarding Roguelikes, the biggest change was Diablo in 1996. Diablo was arguably a Roguelike with fancy graphics and a real-time mode hacked onto a turn-based core. https://youtu.be/VscdPA6sUkc?t=1643

Good reference; Diablo however was different enough (mostly having to do with the randomly generated weapons, repetitive gameplay / grinding, online functionality) to become its own genre though (ARPG iirc?). In turn there's a lot of games now with e.g. random weapons (like Borderlands) who reference that system as Diablo or ARPG-like, instead of Roguelike.

I had seen some screenshots of the ASCII art a while back and wanted to learn more but didn't know the name of the game. Thanks!

>Roguelikes are a type of video game that has remained virtually unchanged since Rogue

Do you count HyperRogue [1] as a roguelike? ;)

[1] https://roguetemple.com/z/hyper/

It turns out this guy has a really excellent blog, and a good lead-in to it is a talk he gave on how to get started developing Roguelikes:

https://www.gridsagegames.com/blog/2018/10/how-to-make-a-rog...

This talk came dangerously close to derailing my 2-week work-cation plans; if libtcod-go had actually built, I might have been in serious trouble.

I must say I haven't even played a traditional rogue-like and it might derail my plan as well...

Same, I just can't get into the roguelike genre but it's appealing as a side project. Also because it's quite different from my day job (data wrangling, rest apis, forms etc, yay)

By a fun coincidence, I stumbled on the r/roguelikedev subreddit this weekend and they are just today starting a "how to make a roguelike" read through. (It is a different tutorial than what you linked.)

https://old.reddit.com/r/roguelikedev/comments/c1xj5b/roguel...

Cogmind is the most thoughtful and elegant roguelike ever created. The dev is also prolific in the community and happily shares his RL dev experience to anyone that will listen. I recommend anyone who is even remotely interested in RL design and development to browse through his blog, which has literal years of high quality content.

Love Cogmind! If you're a purist, first thing you'll want to do is [Esc] [4] Options [v] Keyboard Mode [F] ASCII mode. Can confirm the game works on Linux using Wine.

It also works well on Steam using their Proton system, although you'll have to opt in to it. I just bought this game last week!

Poking around the site and this game and blog look awesome.

Also: how to build a Roguelike https://www.gridsagegames.com/blog/2018/10/how-to-make-a-rog...

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