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Comment by kris-s | Hacker News Reader

Are there commercially successful roguelikes that use ascii art only? Dwarf Fortress is the only one I know of and it's getting an official makeover for the Steam release.

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I don't know about roguelikes success (Cogmind comes to mind), but I can tell you that ASCII games can be successful if you have a good idea. For example, I spent about 2 months making Rogue Bit just over a year ago:

https://roguebit.bigosaur.com/

And it sold over 25000 copies so far.

Just to add on to the "not a roguelike" list (it's an adventure game), Stone Story RPG (https://store.steampowered.com/app/603390/Stone_Story_RPG/).

That's not really ASCII art. I mean it is, but iirc it's custom shader code in Unity made to look like retro style ASCII art. So it's actually way more difficult to make than a grid of ASCII characters.

Depends if its easier for you to do 3D. I remember when I found thr ThreeJS ascii shader I had a bit of fun with it...

Although I get where you’re coming from, I disagree with the assertion that this makes it “not really ASCII art”. At the end of the day modern terminal emulators use a graphics API at one point to render characters on the screen. You wouldn’t say that iTerm2 isn’t a “real tty” because it has a metal backend (in this case, iTerm2 is also using a custom shader to render ASCII/unicode — more complex than this game of course). Where do we even draw the line? Is ASCII art only legit if it can render natively in a traditional terminal? How about only one without hardware acceleration? POSIX compliant? Further down the rabbit hole we could draw a line in the sand at tty’s with no window manager.

It would still be trivial for the developer to add an “textshot” feature to export a frame to .txt, so I’d still qualify it as fitting the ASCII art aesthetic.

isn’t a “real tty” because it has a metal backend

I was at first confused. Of course "real ttys" have some metal in their back end! (I'm too young and my default mental image of a "real tty" contains a CRT, but there's probably even more metal in a teletype.)

> it's actually way more difficult to make than a grid of ASCII characters

Any pointers on how to set up a grid of ASCII characters? That'd be what I would use tcod for. It seems like it should be easy, but I guess I don't know how to look for it.

The trailer did not really show me any game play. So I can not judge it and see if I want to buy.

Showing gameplay would be pointless because 99% of the gameplay is in player's head, analyzing the code, maybe even writing some down on paper. If you just look at the screen, it doesn't make much sense.

Here, try looking at this gameplay video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4RskXHDLzo&t=183s

It's hard to pick any point in that 75 minute video that would be a good trailer material. There's nothing visually spectacular except some static ASCII art and there's no surprise mechanics that would draw attention. The game itself isn't about ASCII art anyway, so having that in the trailer wouldn't make you learn much.

But then again, it isn't a game for everyone. It's for people who are into hacking, computer internals, binary/hexadecimal numbers or assembly/machine language.

Every game that Zachtronics releases has a gameplay trailer, for comparison. Perhaps it would be useful to look at some of those for inspiration:

http://www.zachtronics.com/tis-100/

https://store.steampowered.com/app/504210/SHENZHEN_IO/?curat...

https://store.steampowered.com/app/716490/EXAPUNKS/?curator_...

I think a gameplay trailer could be made from content from that video, by stringing together a series of short clips. Show the player moving around, manipulating things. Each clip a few seconds in length. Similar to the trailer for Exapunks, you could display text like "Solve puzzles" "Manipulate bits" "Hack your way to safety" (or whatever makes sense). Maybe end with a sequence where something drastic happens (the player does something and the whole screen changes), fade to black.

I think it'd be useful to show the player what the gameplay is actually like. Sure, it's not for everyone, but you can still show what it is.

Hm, it does make sense. Perhaps I should make another, gameplay trailer as well. Steam allows multiple trailers anyway. Thanks.

25k? Interesting. I would guess about 2,500 copies based on your Steam review count.

Did you sell a lot more on Switch or something? I really would be surprised if an ASCII game could sell 20k on Switch.

> I would guess about 2,500 copies based on your Steam review count.

I have 4 games on Steam, and "review to sale number" ratio is all over the place, so it isn't that easy to use for estimation. You can get some idea, but 2500 is nowhere close really.

> Did you sell a lot more on Switch or something? I really would be surprised if an ASCII game could sell 20k on Switch.

About 2/3 of the sales were on Switch. I was surprised as well. I meant the game to be Steam-only, and then some of the players asked for a Switch version. I was blown away after the first month of release.

IMHO, turn based (or just slow paced) puzzle games are awesome for Switch because of the portability. In the evening when the kids have finished playing their Zeldas and Dragon Quests, you can lay back and solve a couple of puzzles until it's time to sleep. Looking at my personal play times, the game I play on Switch the most is "Baba is You".

No doubt. I have a one year old and playing Slay the Spire on Switch is the greatest thing ever because I can just fit it into whatever I'm doing. Maybe I should pursue this console harder...

I know that review ratio isn't perfect but it's still a good rough estimate. It did in fact clue me in that the majority of your sales were probably from Switch.

Thanks for the response!

Tangential question, was it difficult for you to receive the development kit for the Nintendo Switch?

I'm creating a game right now and I can't get them to respond. I'd love to hear what worked well for you.

Well, I have another, much more popular game that I pitched to Nintendo to get the dev kit:

http://sonofawitchgame.com/

It's got features from festivals like IndieCade, and had really good Steam reviews during Early Access, so getting a dev. kit was relatively easy.

Rogue Bit came afterwards.

BTW, I tried to check out your game, but your websites (both .com and .us from HN profile) seem to be unreachable? If you're pitching to Nintendo, you need to make sure everything works and you present yourself as an established studio.

I see, I'm definitely not anywhere near this established yet, the process is more formal than I thought. I'll try another pitch when I have more objectivity (solid website, steam reviews or similar) to present.

And thank you for the heads up, that means a lot to me -- There is intentionally nothing there at the moment.

I've not heard of Rogue Bit before, but it looks really cool and intriguing, so I just bought a copy. Thanks for contributing to the indie game world!

Thanks. If you have any feedback on the game, feel free to shoot me an e-mail (it's in my HN profile).

So amazing, all these smart people making commercial games in such a short time, and then there's me still working on the same old thing year after year, even though it was released a long time ago xD

Caves of Qud comes to mind.

This game gets a mention bottom of chapter 8 of the tutorial.

cogmind has done pretty well even if a bit niche. not pure ascii but pretty close, like df. really excellent game, as well.

Looks really cool!

Indeed, Cogmind's been my full time job for over 6 years now so far and still pays the bills every month. 11% of players even use pure ASCII mode :)

So it's... technically doable.

DF is not commercial yet. Partial list of successful roguelikes with ascii:

- rogue - (net)hack - moria, angband, etc

Don't forget ADOM, though it now has graphical tiles too.

Both Cogmind and Caves of Qud have optional tiles that look like little more than ASCII.

Door in the Woods is ASCII only and has sold ~5,000 copies in about a month. In fact this game has inspired me to try to work on a pure ASCII roguelike for my next commercial project.

ADOM (Ancient Domains of Mystery) was ASCII-art-only through 1.1 and on the strength of that fan base raised a bunch of money on Kickstarter to add a visual layer (the ASCII-only version is still there and updated as the story continues).

Not sure if that's a "YES" or a "NO" given your question.

DCSS isn't commercially successful, but I think it has the potential to be if it went that direction. The tiles version is probably most popular though:

https://crawl.develz.org/download.htm

DCSS is ridiculously fun. I've spent more hours playing it than any other roguelike.

To keep it pedantic, I'm pretty sure that Dwarf Fortress doesn't actually use ASCII, but one of its "extended" versions (the IBM one ?)...

Several commercial versions of Rogue were sold in the 80s.

Rogue?

Replacing ascii with sprites is easy to do later.

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