Roguelikes

I keep threatening to post about the additional research I've been doing, but I'm so wrapped up in reading about it that I have yet to actually write a post.

That, and work has been a little harrowing. Everyone has wanted their projects completed by Friday this week, which crunches our schedule into a "drop-everything-else-that-was-not-immediate-and-do-this" nightmare. When it's one out of every ten jobs, this isn't an issue; but when it's six out of ten orders, it gets hairy.

Enough about boring work.

The title of this post may have gotten some attention already. Either you are wondering why I would stick those two words together in such a bizarre way, or you are wondering what it was that I found pertaining to this particular style of game (default: neither of these things, just get on with your point).

Roguelikes are a type of game that is based on the 1980's text-game Rogue. They encompass game features such as procedural map generation, turn-based gameplay, and sometimes permanent character death. More information can be found here (Wikipedia) and a basic chronology of roguelikes can be found here (also Wikipedia).

Anyone who has been around this blog for a while knows that I'm enamored with the design of MUDs. Roguelikes began in 1978 with the release of Beneath Apple Manor, the same year that MUD1 was released in England. Both styles of game have their own appeal, though MUDs are by far more intensive as far as content generation goes. I assume that part of what makes roguelikes so popular is the lack of a need for so much manual content generation. The maps of the earliest roguelikes were made up of text characters, as shown below.

Source: http://www.kathekonta.com/rlguide/index.html, which will be mentioned shortly in detail

The classification of roguelikes gets a little bit convoluted, considering there are a large amount of games out there that share some of the same qualities, but not quite all of them. Some argue that Blizzard's Diablo is a roguelike, and others say otherwise, and there are many other cases like this. But these games led to a genre of dungeon-crawling games, of which the goal is simply to traverse the generated maps, find all the goodies, and kill all the bad guys.

I was having a lot of fun doing my research about roguelikes. Somewhere in the midst of it, and I don't know what inspired me to do it, but I typed "how to program a roguelike" into Google.

I have been thrilled with the results.

First, I have to shout super kudos to my first resource. This guy took personal time to write, very candidly, a step-by-step process of programming a roguelike. And the advice he offers in this guide is not specific to roguelikes; it is advice from a professional in the field who is imparting some hard-learned lessons from his experience in software development. I think I find that equally as impressive as the time he has spent writing the guide.

Beginner's Guide to Roguelikes in C/C++

The guide is not complete, partially because of some issues in his platform (look on his blog for more information). Regardless, the 9 articles he has completed are packed with great information about developing a roguelike (or any program) with good structure and clarity.

I also found this article on RogueBasin, a wiki page dedicated to the roguelike genre. It does not go into anywhere near as much detail as the Beginner's Guide does, but it covers some really great points and gives something akin to a checklist for anyone planning to develop a roguelike. I enjoyed some of the considerations mentioned.

How to Write a Roguelike in 15 Steps

Of course, I have to post Archive.org's MS-DOS library. I think it is so neat that they have so many old games available to stream on their browser emulator. Here is a link to a playable version of Beneath Apple Manor, if anyone is interested in traveling back in time.


That about does it for me for today. I want to dive back into my programming exercises in the next couple of days, so hopefully I will have some progress to write about thereafter.