Exploring Roguelike Games

John Harris

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000169492
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

Since 1980, in-the-know computer gamers have been enthralled by the unpredictable, random, and incredibly deep gameplay of Rogue and those games inspired by it, known to fans as "roguelikes." For decades, this venerable genre was off the radar of most players and developers for a variety of reasons: deceptively simple graphics (often just text characters), high difficulty, and their demand that a player brings more of themselves to the game than your typical AAA title asks. This book covers many of the most prominent titles and explains in great detail what makes them interesting, the ways to get started playing them, the history of the genre, and more. It includes interviews, playthroughs, and hundreds of screenshots. It is a labor of love: if even a fraction of the author's enthusiasm for these games gets through these pages to you, then you will enjoy it a great deal.

Key Features:

• Playing tips and strategy for newcomers to the genre

• 
  
  

• Core roguelikes Rogue, Angband, NetHack, Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, ADOM, and Brogue

• 
  
  

• The "lost roguelikes" Super Rogue and XRogue, and the early RPG dnd for PLATO systems

• 
  
  

• The Japanese console roguelikes Taloon's Mystery Dungeon and Shiren the Wanderer

• 
  
  

• Lesser-known but extremely interesting games like Larn, DoomRL, HyperRogue, Incursion, and Dungeon Hack

• 
  
  

• "Rogue-ish" games that blur the edges of the genre, including Spelunky, HyperRogue, ToeJam & Earl, Defense of the Oasis, Out There, and Zelda Randomizer

• 
  
  

• Interviews with such developers as Keith Burgun (100 Rogues and Auro), Rodain Joubert (Desktop Dungeons), Josh Ge (Cogmind), Dr. Thomas Biskup (ADOM), and Robin Bandy (devnull public NetHack tournament)

• 
  
  

• An interview regarding Strange Adventures in Infinite Space

• 
  
  

• Design issues of interest to developers and enthusiasts

• 
  
  

Author Bio:

John Harris has bumped around the Internet for more than 20 years. In addition to writing the columns @Play and Pixel Journeys for GameSetWatch and developer interviews for Gamasutra, he has spoken at Roguelike Celebration. John Harris has a MA in English Literature from Georgia Southern University.

1
An Introduction to Some Rogues

August 2006 Before we kick off this collection of essays on the niche-but-awesome genre of roguelike games, it should help to define what is meant by that term.

Roguelikes are dungeon-exploration computer games, patterned after their classic namesake Rogue and set in a randomly generated world. They are known for their tremendous difficulty, unpredictability, permanent character death and the large number of methods they use to inflict that death. They were most popular in college computer labs in the ’80s, and while they didn’t achieve widespread success at the time, the genre nevertheless persists, and prospers to this day, and its dedicated cadre of devotees will argue night and day that these are the greatest computer games ever made.

Just in case it isn’t obvious by now: I am one of them.

1.1 “Is That a Computer Game or Bad ASCII Art?”

From one perspective, the roguelikes are throwbacks. Here is a class of games, not really mainstream but not obscure either, that has largely resisted modernization. While it might be difficult for someone looking at Colossal Cave to connect it with being of the same kind as, say, Telltale’s A Wolf Among Us games, your major roguelikes, by and large, look similar to how they always have.

Although all of the major roguelike games (excepting perhaps the newest one, Brogue) have bitmapped graphic modes now, they also retain their classic ASCII modes, and many other computer roguelikes use an ordinary text console window as their sole display. NetHack has inspired a number of attempts to give it fairly modern graphics (including one, Vulture, that is somehow sold on Steam), yet possibly the most played form of the game even now, 20 years after it came into being, is on public telnet servers with hundreds of players, not much different in appearance from Rogue itself back upon its release in 1980.

But while there is an air of the Neanderthal surrounding these games, they’ve survived for so long because, even after all that time, they’re still so startlingly modern. Since Rogue was created, the grand parade of computer games is supposed to have advanced in every respect. Their graphics now approach the point where they are indistinguishable from reality. So it is damning indeed that many of them are not more interesting to play than an old terminal game that has barely changed in 36 years.

Figure 1.1 Rogue Clone IV, win32 version.

1.2 “But It Helped Me Last Time!”

Perhaps the biggest factor for roguelike longevity is that they are randomly created each game. Every play, the dungeon levels are generated anew, so the player must again explore the mazes in order to make progress. But these days this isn’t as innovative as it once was, as a good number of other games have featured random dungeons since then. Many of them were directly inspired by Rogue or one of its descendants. Diablo, one of the biggest software success stories to date, remains quite popular. And yet in almost all cases, those games reveal only a glimmer of understanding of what makes Rogue so interesting.

Instead of just random dungeons, another defining feature of many roguelikes is that the items generated during the game are also randomly selected, and their appearance is scrambled each game. That is to say, when you find an unknown potion lying on the floor of the dungeon, you don’t know at first what it will do when you drink it. One game it might heal you, the next it may rob your character of sight making you easy prey for wandering monsters.

That by itself isn’t so interesting, but what is is that the appearance of the various items in the game is consistent within that character’s life, so all orange potions will be the same type, and the same goes for all cloudy ones, milky ones and even plaid ones. The game’s interface recognizes this too, so that if you drink a blue-green potion and get healed, all blue-green potions will be automatically renamed “potions of healing.” Some of these items are less obvious in their effects (What the hell is “makes you feel warm all over” supposed to mean?), so for them the game will ask the player what he thinks the item is and will then use that name until the player can find a better one. Discovering items through experimentation, in this way, is an important process in many roguelikes, and its lack is what prevents Diablo, for all its admirable traits, from being as good.

1.3 Part Hack and Slash, Part Scientific Method

All the potions and scrolls in Rogue, and most of its descendants, work that way. The player drinks or reads the item, it is used up, and its effect upon the world is described as well as the player’s character can see. But there is usually one type of item, the Scroll of Identify, that will infallibly name an object. Since some items are so subtle in their workings that the player is unlikely to ever figure out their use through trial and error, Identify scrolls are valuable treasures. But the player can only ID things he’s carrying at the time the scroll is read, and he can only pick which item is to be ID’d, not pick the effect. If you’re dying to discover which potion is extra healing, only chance can bring that knowledge to you.

There are other types of random items in Rogue too, which are even more difficult to figure out. Rings have subtle effects that are very challenging to discover through observation, and wands are dangerous to play around with. Even in a winning game it is unlikely that the player will see all the items that can be generated, let alone figure out what they all do. While there are plenty of other things to like about Rogue and its descendants, in the end it is this need to discover the game world anew every time that makes them fascinating. In a roguelike, the monsters are just one facet of a dangerous game world ready to do you in on a moment’s notice, and sometimes the beasties are less likely to end a game than the player’s stuff itself.

In the coming pages we’ll be investigating many of the most interesting aspects of this venerable and challenging genre. We’ll take a look at the most popular games, and many lesser-known ones too. We’ll do that and much more, so let’s get started! I’ll be your tour guide: the guy waiting by the downstairs, whistling for his dog.

Figure 1.2

SECTION I
Basics

2
What the Hell Does Q Do Again?

August 2006 Let’s start out by talking about something very basic, yet of vital importance to those getting involved with these games—hopefully including some of you. Whenever I’ve attempted to explain them, by far the most frequent barrier I’ve encountered in transferring my own enthusiasm to other people is not, as one may think, the graphics, the difficulty or permanent death. Almost every time, the primary reason initiates find to categorize roguelikes as Other-People-Things is the control scheme. So let’s talk about how to get started controlling the original roguelike: Rogue.

If you’d like to play along at home, the modern port of Rogue, Rogue Clone IV, is probably the foremost DOS/Windows version. Debian Linux users can get Rogue itself from the package bsdgames-nonfree. ClassicRogue (www.oryxdesignlab.com/games) is a port with a couple of extra features and both Windows and Linux binaries. You can also get Rogue for Java (www.hexatron.com/rogue/), the Sega Dreamcast (http://dreamcast.dcemu.co.uk/roguedc.php) and even the Infocom zMachine (https://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=oao0sdbcgitastyz).

As noted last time, roguelike games haven’t changed much in their presentation since the days of playing on dumb terminals in college computer labs. There were no mice or joysticks on those systems. Many of ’em didn’t have a numeric keypad, and some had no cursor keys.

What they did have, I’m sorry to say, was vi.

2.1 Behold the Wonders of vi

vi is a well-known and popular Unix text editor, in which lots of different keys do many different things. Unix computer terminals at the time of Rogue’s creation did not customarily have dedicated cursor keys, so substitutes had to be found, namely the HJKL sequence, which was basically the WASD of the age. I know I’m gonna catch it from some people for dissing it, and it’s certainly great for some things, but I don’t think anyone can claim it’s easy to pick up. Back in the days when lab students were the primary players of computer games, it could be counted on that many players would know vi, so it was natural to use its cursor movement system as the basis for Rogue’s interface. Its legacy persists in several important games to this day, including venerable NetHack, although it and all the other major roguelike games now tend to default to using a number pad for movement.

(June 2020: There is now another excellent compilation of old versions of Rogue available for free download called Rogue Collection, at https://github.com/mikeyk730/Rogue-Collection)

Figure 2.1 vim, a work-alike descendant of vi.

Also like vi, there are special keypresses for everything, and it is not a trivial matter to learn them all. And again, just like with vi, it does turn o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Notes on the Text
• About the Author
• 1 An Introduction to Some Rogues
• Section I Basics
• Section II Theory
• Section III NetHack
• Section IV Dungeon Crawl
• Section V ADOM
• Section VI Mystery Dungeon
• Section VII Various Roguelikes
• Section VIII Roguelites and Related Games
• Section VIV Design
• Section VV Miscellaneous
• Index