ID:154163
 
OK, I've been working on a fun little dungeon crawl game based (very loosely) off of Treasure Seeker Classic, and it's been a fun ride for the 4 or 5 hours' worth of actual development I have. But it's really starting to take much more of a turn towards text MUDdishness than I had intended, though this was probably fairly predictable given my staunch stand against having to draw things.

So my question is: What makes a roguelike a roguelike? Is having random everything enough, or does it miss the feel if it doesn't stick to the classic tile-by-tile dungeons? Of course randomness is fun in general and really makes the work of world building vastly easier, but if I make a heavily text-oriented game with a lot of parallels to, say, your typical diku, but make all the dungeons and quests vastly randomized, do I have a vastly randomized text MUD or do I have a text-oriented roguelike?
To my mind, what makes a Rogue-like a Rogue-like is its graphical nature. If it's more of a MUD, then it's a MUD with Rogue-like elements of randomness.

Lummox JR
In response to Lummox JR
Which I do agree with at least partially, but is ironic given the genre's ASCII roots...
In response to Leftley
Leftley wrote:
Which I do agree with at least partially, but is ironic given the genre's ASCII roots...

You have to remember, though, that ASCII at one time was about all PCs could do for graphics, at least decent graphics. Rogue was about as graphical as it could be.

Lummox JR
In response to Lummox JR
You have to remember, though, that ASCII at one time was about all PCs could do for graphics, at least decent graphics. Rogue was about as graphical as it could be.

While that is true, I'm still an adamant ASCII supporter. In my books, if there's any non-ASCII graphics, it isn't a roguelike game, it's similar to a roguelike. =)

(I always play ZAngband with the tile graphics off. I don't really have a choice to have tile graphics for ADOM, but I play that in ASCII too. =) )
In response to Spuzzum
Spuzzum wrote:
You have to remember, though, that ASCII at one time was about all PCs could do for graphics, at least decent graphics. Rogue was about as graphical as it could be.

While that is true, I'm still an adamant ASCII supporter. In my books, if there's any non-ASCII graphics, it isn't a roguelike game, it's similar to a roguelike. =)

(I always play ZAngband with the tile graphics off. I don't really have a choice to have tile graphics for ADOM, but I play that in ASCII too. =) )

In a lot of ways this was what I liked about MegaZeux; it had the soul of a good ASCII game while extending the medium to use special user-defined character sets. It was quite clever.

Personally I've always wanted to see a simple Roguelike done as a graphical game: Rogue itself, or Nethack, transformed into something graphical would be tres cool. I think one of the main reasons this is pretty much never done is that doing graphics for the monsters would be a major chore: Rogue alone has 26 monsters, about a dozen weapon and armor types (each), lots of potions, etc. Nethack takes this to a more extreme level.

Of course, another problem with doing a Roguelike in this kind of environment is the multiplayer aspect. Rogue was not designed around multiple players. The whole idea of going into the world and not knowing that a red potion happens to increase strength is lost, because another player can now tell you that. (One could make different players see different colors, but that's defeatable through communication. And you couldn't make it the same color but a different potion, because that would be too inconsistent.)
Discovery is one of the things I really loved about Rogue; I'd be curious to know if anyone ever found a practical solution to the multiplayer problem. Or, is the multiplayer problem not as big as I think it is?

Lummox JR
In response to Lummox JR
Lummox JR wrote:
Spuzzum wrote:
You have to remember, though, that ASCII at one time was about all PCs could do for graphics, at least decent graphics. Rogue was about as graphical as it could be.

While that is true, I'm still an adamant ASCII supporter. In my books, if there's any non-ASCII graphics, it isn't a roguelike game, it's similar to a roguelike. =)

(I always play ZAngband with the tile graphics off. I don't really have a choice to have tile graphics for ADOM, but I play that in ASCII too. =) )

In a lot of ways this was what I liked about MegaZeux; it had the soul of a good ASCII game while extending the medium to use special user-defined character sets. It was quite clever.

Yep, I've been meaning to make a few ZZT-ish games for MZX at one point or another -- if anything, to gain more ideas for BYOND. Complete mods of the character sets and game mechanics aren't my cup of tea, but Robotic seems to have some finer points that might make for some interesting effects.


Of course, another problem with doing a Roguelike in this kind of environment is the multiplayer aspect. Rogue was not designed around multiple players. The whole idea of going into the world and not knowing that a red potion happens to increase strength is lost, because another player can now tell you that. (One could make different players see different colors, but that's defeatable through communication. And you couldn't make it the same color but a different potion, because that would be too inconsistent.)

If you really want to take it to a new level, you could simply create potions with randomly generated effects, benefits, and drawbacks. And so on.

Thus, no one will ever have any idea what that newly generated "raunchy, sparkling red potion" actually does. The game might go ahead and assign "enhanced potion of strength" as its true name, but that doesn't prevent an "odorless grey potion" from being an "enhanced potion of strength" either.

Haven plays into that a lot. =)


Discovery is one of the things I really loved about Rogue; I'd be curious to know if anyone ever found a practical solution to the multiplayer problem. Or, is the multiplayer problem not as big as I think it is?

Yep, discovery of the functionality of items is one of the finer points -- however, one of the biggest discovery problems I'm facing with BRW (Basic Roguelike World) is to have persistent mapping. Since the game uses text-mode ASCII graphics, I can't exactly tell the screen what to show and what not to show.

Right now, I have opacity and stuff in, but once you leave a particular section of the map, you lose sight of it for good. I've been pondering manipulation of client.images, but as I recall images don't work in ASCII mode. I never actually tested that theory, though...

(Maybe an interesting twist would be to make a "map" object for people when they enter a new area in the dungeon or overworld or whatnot. If that map is lost they'll have to redraw it when they come back.)
In response to Lummox JR
Everybody reacts do medicine slightly differently. With magic you could make it so that say character A is poisoned whil charactrer B is healed depending on a certain character's variable.