Ten Thousand Lifetimes with Roguelikes
ian.mccowan.space
ian.mccowan.space
[1] https://subsetgames.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=35332&p=1...
But there's not one Crawl, it's been worked on for so long that there's honestly little which has survived from Linley Henzell's game other than flavor (and even that is questionable). And the newer versions make you realize what the Slay the Spire devs made a fortune on: while a hard game with real decisions where you have to play the hand you're dealt can be fun... it's also fun with the occasional "exploit", lucky broken combinations of events which give you a free win (or more likely, make you go down in a blaze of hubristic glory).
And NetHack truly is amazing in its details. How to get a pet dragon? Change your sex to female using a ring or similar, tranform into a dragon and then #sit. You’ll get an egg. Which will hatch into a (hopefully) pet dragon. Which you can accidentally kill, if you throw food at it (if you don’t feed it, it’ll stop wanting to be your pet) too hard. Lovely.
Notable mentions: Cataclysm and JupiterHell.
Nice to see a mention of the ##crawl channel on freenode, I spent a lot of time there during DCSS 0.9 to 0.12 or so, I even took 3rd in one of the online tournaments! [0] The guy that won that year was a child chess prodigy who then became a mathematics professor who has worked at Princeton, Harvard, and MIT. There was another top level player who was also a mathematician, and both of these guys won a Morgan Prize (and also have Wikipedia articles). I got a GED in my early 30s, somehow I was able to keep up ;)
Another regular from ##crawl posts on HN from time to time as well.
At some point I should write up my roguelike recollections... maybe ten years ago, Ken Arnold was stopping by Boston. Haran, one of the other crawl devs, found out and drove all the way from New York to have coffee with us. All I really remember of that was Ken explaining that he added the food clock as a way of generically solving scumming.
Hehe, I figured someone would recognize who I meant! IIRC he had created an automated bot that was able to ascend with 3 runes, MiBe of Trog w/ Axes (for cleaving?). Elliptic and N78291 were my favorite players to watch, along with mikee_
That sounds like a fun little meetup, I kept in touch with a couple fellow ##crawl players for a while (crate and ophanim) but have lost touch. I know JoshTriplett posts here sometimes too.
I contributed a single patch myself, I do believe it was a mace/blunt weapon balance patch but it’s been a while!
FWIW, I won rogue once, never ascended in nethack yet.
I like Angband but its crudity repels me. It's enough to make me do my own roguelike. Almost.
Any of you try that dwarf fortress roguelike?
These days I facilitate roguelike development each year with a group code-along (for lack of a better term). Each year a group of participants follow along together and produce their own roguelike. The tutorial is in Python but folks participate using a bunch of other languages. This year we had people who made it to the end with Rust, C++, C#, and Odin, to name a few. Completion posts are still rolling in so I'm excited to see what this year's batch cooked up. :)
I start it around the beginning of summer vacation (northern hemisphere) so unfortunately you'll have to wait ~10 months for the next one. But given the yearly participation, I believe it's worth it :)
I played the Dwarf Fortress roguelike mode several years ago, and it was really more of a toy - nifty to play around with the mechanics but too dry and arbitrarily difficult to be a fun game. But almost all the dev focus was on fortress management, maybe they’ve spruced up the roguelike with the Steam release.