Tag: conference

Roguelike Celebration 2024

Starting this Saturday at noon US Eastern time (9 AM Pacific, 5 PM Greenwich, 7 PM CEST) is Roguelike Celebration 2024! I’m presenting half an hour on the Mystery Dungeon games this year, at 3:15 PM Pacific/6:15 Eastern/11:15 Greenwich/1:15 AM Sunday CEST. Whew, the roundness of the Earth makes it difficult to express times!

It’s being held entirely online again this year, and offers a fun social space to explore that’s kind of like a MUD! Roguelike Celebration’s schedule is here, and you can get tickets for $30 for the whole event here. They usually set aside some free tickets for people who can’t afford the fee, although you might have to check around to find them.

Roguelike Celebration is nominally about roguelikes and procedural generation, but I think it’s interesting from a wide variety of gaming perspectives, and every year I find several talks that are incredibly interesting. Past years have offered presentations from people who worked on games as diverse as Kingdom of Loathing and Blaseball. Here are the talks being offered this year:

Saturday

  • Harry Solomons: Trampling on Ghosts: Hauntology and Permadeath
  • Cezar Capacle: Enhancing Narrative Through Randomness and Complications
  • Max Bottega: Keeping Art Direction interesting in a procedurally generated world
  • Stanley W. Baxton: Bringing Real-World Occultism into Your Games Without Accidentally Being Racist
  • Jeff Emtman and Martin Austwick: Neutrinowatch – the podcast that plays itself
  • Nic: Braided Narratives: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Linear Stories
  • Pandamander: “Out of Book,” The Psychology of Why Roguelikes Keep Us Playing
  • ?: Inverse Terrain Solver
  • Adrian: Probably Impossible – NecroDancer’s network code
  • John Harris: A Trip Through The Mystery Dungeons (psst: this is mine)
  • Marlowe Dobbe: A Swarm of Monsters is Hard To Build: Generating Visual Concepts for Enemies in Roguelikes
  • John Bond: Doors or no Doors: How Roguelike games take you places
  • Dan Norder: Chase, The BASIC Language Proto-Roguelike

Sunday

  • Yong Zhen Zhou: Who Controls the Controller? Thinking about physical player interactions outside a digital game
  • Tabea Iseli: Animal Crossing meets Roguelite Dungeon Crawler – The surprising genre mixture behind Grimoire Groves
  • Philomena Schwab: 100,000 wishlists in 3 months – Weird roguelikes are taking over the world
  • Kaysa Konopljak: Going legit with DotA: How to transform a thousand authors into four
  • Alexander Birke: Practical procedural world and story generation in Sea Of Rifts, a naval roguelike RPG
  • Robin Mendoza: The Use of Knowledge in the Labyrinth: The price mechanism as a storytelling device
  • Ollie: The Right Variety – Understanding and Visualising the Output Diversity of Your Generators
  • Eiríkr: Uxn – Permacomputing & Roguelikes
  • Brian Cronin: Black Box Sim for Roguelikes
  • Isaac Io Schankler: Orb Pondering Simulator LIVE!
  • ?: 7 Layer Dip, Multi-Layered Narratives For Roguelikes
  • Emily Halina: New Levels from a Single Example via Tree-based Reconstructive Partitioning (TRP)
  • Courtney: Cheating the System (By Design!) for Epic Combos
  • Joe: Magic in Game Design: (Mis)Directing the Player’s Attention
  • Tyler Coleman: Finding your 80/20 Rule with Proc-Gen
  • Nat: Procedurality and the Primes

Roguelike Celebration Preview Sign-Up

I’ve mentioned both Roguelike Celebration 2023, and its upcoming preview event, before, but it’s getting close now, happening on September 10th. It’s free to attend! Here is the signup link.

One of the fun touches the Roguelike Celebration people do is provide a MUD-like chatroom for attendees. Both the preview and main event this year are once again virtual, so you can watch and participate from the comfort of your home! Preview presenters include David Brevik (works on Diablo), Aron Pietroń and Michał Ogłoziński (Against the Storm) and a talk by Nic Junius on “dynamic character moments through character acting.”

Roguelike Celebration 2023 Preview Sign-Up Form ($0)

Roguelike Celebration 2023 Deadline Approaching

This is just to remind people that the (extended) deadline for Roguelike Celebration 2023 is coming up on us very soon, July 15th! If you have an interesting story to tell about roguelikes, a roguelike game to show off, or even just something involving procedural generation, please consider giving them a pitch! The conference has been virtual the past few years, and it is again this year, so you can stream your talk from wherever you live!

I’ve presented twice, may do so again this year although frankly my talks have always run over, I always have so much to say and the time is over before I’ve even gotten to a literal tenth of it. They do a lot to keep roguelikes in the public mindspace. If you have something to say there, I hope you’ll consider applying.

Roguelike Celebration 2023 Call For Presenters

Roguelike Celebration 2022

Roguelike Celebration 2022, the yearly conference about this peculiar genre, begins tomorrow! This year it is again being held virtually. Its schedule is here, and you can get your ticket here. As I write this tickets cost $30, but if you can’t afford that there is an option for free admission at that link. If you can pay though then please consider it? I presented there last year, although in my 30 minute timeslot I didn’t even get to cover like even 10% of what I had planned.

It generally has much of interest both to players and developers, and covers more than strictly-defined roguelikes but also a variety of games and topics related to procedural content generation.Here’s a selection of talks that I personally think may be interesting, although there are many more than this planned:

  • Persistence and Resistence: How narrative in roguelikes is currently underutilized, by Sherveen Uduwana
  • Remembering Moria – a roguelike before the roguelikes, by Santiago Zapata
  • How hard can it be to create a non-violent rogue-lite dungeon crawler?, by Tabea Iseli
  • Smoothing the Sharp Edges of RNG, by Evan Debenham
  • A Million Little Players: Monte Carlo Simulations for Game Design, by Phenry Ewing
  • Tips and Tricks in Procedural Generation, by Pierre Vigier

I hope to see you (virtually) there!

Video: tom7’s Harder Drives

tom7, aka suckerpinch on YouTube, is a freaking genius. I don’t believe in geniuses, but he is a strong counter-argument, I will admit.

His modus operandi is to take some absurd premise and carry it to its logical conclusion, usually using some form of technology along the way. He then makes a video about it. Sometimes the video is in connection with a paper he’s written for SIGBOVIK, which is an entire oil tanker full of worms that I really don’t want to get into here, suffice to say it’s hosted on the site of the Association for Computational Heresy.

The PDF of their 300-page record of proceedings calls itself, “The fifteenth annual intercalary robot dance party in celebration of workshop on symposium about 26th birthdays; in particular, that of harry q. bovik,” about which all I can say, honestly, is, woof. I encourage you to go to that side and read, or at least try to read, some of their papers. You will come to feel like a complete imbecile, but you’ll probably be entertained.

AnYwAy. This post isn’t about SIGBOVIK but about tom7. The post above is about his questionable quest to construct mass storage devices out of unlikely things, like masses of Nintendo Tetris emulators, or a mass of used COVID tests. In the past he’s done fascinatingly-insane videos on bad chess algorithms, generalizing the concepts of uppercase and lowercase, created a number of weird bikes, or (to stick with the blog’s theme) teaching a computer to play Super Mario Bros. in a fairly silly way, which at least will teach you what lexicographical ordering means.

Found via a Metafilter post from user zengargoyle.