2014 Seven Day Roguelike Challenge | Hacker News Reader

2014 Seven Day Roguelike Challenge

roguebasin.com

106 pointsrobocaptain24 comments

Can't wait to see the results. The term "roguelike" should be taken with a grain of salt of course - many are more like "roguelite" or the other preferred monitor, "procedural death labyrinths."

Between Teleglitch, Nuclear Throne, Legend of Dungeon, Rogue Legacy, Risk of Rain, Tower of Guns, and a few others, the last year or so has been massively fun for roguelike fans as we've seen pieces of the genre applied to other genres, usually with pretty amazing results.

In case you or others aren't aware that Doucet is running this jam concurrently (in part to promote the term "procedural death labyrinth"): http://proceduraldeathjam.com/

Any personal recommendations out of all those?

Teleglitch, although not as random as other games it's a fine survival horror/exploratory game; and very atmospheric. However it turns pretty fast in a grind game, because no matter how far you reach you incur a high penalty starting the games from later levels. As such you always start from the first level, and after a dozen deaths, that ruins the game (for me at least). Also I've never finished the game, nor do I think I will; but it was a good experience for its price.

Rogue Legacy, as with Teleglitch; tempting at first, but even more so it turns out into a grind dungeons for money type of experience. My take on it.

Tower of Guns, while I haven't had the chance to play this game (since it runs only on Windows), I loved what I saw from the gameplay reviewers. Check out Northernlion's video on it.

Starting from level3 or 5 is gives you all you need, really. I even had more gear when starting from "5" savegame than when playing normally from 1.

If you really want to have a ton of loot, start in original level3, go to the secret boss fight (doesn't always spawn), and spend a few minutes thinking what to leave behind.

I'm disappointed Random Starting Gear is crap. Most weapons are strictly worse than their equivalents using the same ammo. It quickly degenerates into a knife run, because you have no starting pistol until you find a "second" one in level3. The exceptions are sspoon (higher damage per round, perfect accuracy) and fat john (very accurate shotgun with better penetration). These are the tradeoffs you might tolerate into the endgame... although mg3200-drm has a big, undocumented accuracy boost.

Nailguns are questionable even when used optimally.

Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup (DCSS) gets updated all the time, sometimes drastically, so in my books it's still a "fresh" (and very good) game: http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/

Try POWDER. It's inspired by Crawl, but has enough ideas of its own. In particular it makes Crawl's weapon and god systems look pathetic. And the writing is spectacular.

When I type "powder" into Google I get random games, not sure which one you are referring to. Could you give an URL?

The only rougelike "POWDER" I'm aware of is:

http://www.zincland.com/powder/

It's listen along with "a few others" at eg:

http://rogue-life.ourden.org/powder

I'd add in Spelunky, FTL, Binding of Isaac, though some of those are from the year before.

I'm really looking forward to the new and improved version of Cogmind, which also started out as a 7DRL:

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

Prettiest ASCII graphics since Brogue, and I like how the developer puts a lot of thought into the mouse interface as well without dumbing the game down (as far as I can tell).

  This seems a quiet, peaceful place.
  ####
  ...#     #######%##%#
  ##.##%%###........!.#
   #..<@..............#
  ##..######....j.......
  ....#    #..........#
  #####    #######.####

The first time I heard of this was after finding Powder, which was a cool free roguelike that worked on Nintendo DS handhelds that had ways to play homebrew (as well on other platforms). The author seems to like entering the challenge, as he has a crazy number of 7DL games on his page[1].

[1]: http://www.zincland.com/

Although some people are trying to participate to both, I think the Cyberpunk Game Jam could have benefited from not running partially concurrently.

*http://itch.io/jam/cyberpunk-jam

Yea, I've tried, but haven't been able to get anything about this to the front page. Wrote a blog post about it: http://jere.in/lets-make-a-game

I wanted to get the word out earlier, but it's not too late to start and still have a whole 7 days! I'm starting tomorrow morning.

Oh crap I totally lost track of when it started this year. Dang, I was planning to take the week of it off so I could go completely absurd with it. I wonder if I can do a crunch week at work and 7drl at the same time..

Depending on the scope of the project, you might pull it. I just signed up, although I would probably have only 3-4 hours each day.

Has anyone heard of this one:

http://www.roguetemple.com/z/hyper.php

A roguelike using hyperbolic geometry. Looking at the screenshots it instantly reminded me of M.C. Escher lithographs.

I find this game interesting : http://roguelikegames.com/star-wars

Why did they start a contest with a running time measured in hours right before daylight savings time? Are they trying to confuse people?

Because not everyone observes DST and the challenge probably isn't meant to be US centric. Even in the US, Hawaii and Arizona don't bother[1].

[1]: http://www.timeanddate.com/time/dst/2014.html

And a lot of people (think Europe) observe DST but not on those dates.

It's a conspiracy theory to help out devs in Saskatchewan, Alaska, and Hawaii.

I think it was voted on. That was the most popular week selected.

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