It got by me this year, but the now 20-year-old 7 Day Roguelike Challenge, a gamejam where people try to construct a complete roguelike within a week’s time, finished up Saturday.
Not only has it been around a long time, but a number of games have come out of it that went on to greater things. Jupiter Hell got its start as a 7DRL project called DoomRL. The amazing Jeff Lait has made a ton of 7DRLs, and many of them have some awesome twist, like a game where you can make portals, but where the portals result in the world through them being rotated and possibly allowing you to get mixed up!
Jeff Lait’s Jacob’s Matrix
There’s regular several very interesting games in the challenge each year! Its itch.io page is here. This year’s theme was, simply, “roguelike,” and 819 people have joined it so far! I can’t wait to see what they’ve made!
The weekly showcases highlight the many games we check out on the channel. Games shown are either press keys, demos, or from my collection. Reach out if you would like me to look at your game.
Owner of Game Wisdom with more than a decade of experience writing and talking about game design and the industry. I’m also the author of the “Game Design Deep Dive” series and “20 Essential Games to Study”
Boudewijn Wayers was the creator of the very first Nethack Home Page. I have no idea where he is now, but he’s listed among the alumni of the Nethack Dev Team.
He wrote a spoiler for Nethack called To Die: 50 Ways to Leave Your Game, which was a cataloging of ways to die in that game. This used to be available in several locations on the World Wide Web, but now I can only find it in one place. To help preserve it for later generations, I paste it below in full.
I feel that first I should say a word about how Nethack pages have become scarce lately. The old Steelypips spoiler site is still active, but many of the other sites it links to have perished. (Some of them have academic URLs, and have probably fallen victim to the declining web investment of universities. To think in my lifetime I’ve seen the rise and subsequent abandonment of the internet as a tool of knowledge. I blame social media!)
I should see about preserving old spoiler documents on the living internet, but until I get something put together, here is Boudewijn Wayers’ list of ways to die in Nethack.
50 ways to leave your game ============================ by Boudewijn Wayers (kroisos@win.tue.nl).
There has been talk on the net lately about various ways to get killed. Well, apart from being killed by a monster hitting you, there are lots of other ways… Some of these other things you can be killed by are mentioned here (I don’t claim to have noticed them all, but I think I did):
a blast of acid a blast of disintegration a blast of fire a blast of frost a blast of lightning a blast of missiles a blast of poison gas a blast of sleep gas a bolt of cold a bolt of fire a bolt of lightning a burst of flame a carnivorous bag a closing drawbridge a cockatrice corpse a collapsing drawbridge a cone of cold a contact-poisoned spellbook a contaminated potion a cursed throne a death ray a falling drawbridge a falling object a falling rock a finger of death a fireball a genocide spell a land mine a magic missile a magical explosion a mildly contaminated potion a potion of holy water a potion of unholy water a psychic blast a residual undead turning effect a scroll of fire a scroll of genocide a sleep ray a system shock a thrown potion a touch of death a tower of flame a wand acid an alchemic blast an electric chair an electric shock an exploding chest an exploding crystal ball an exploding drawbridge an exploding item being destroyed an exploding ring an exploding rune an exploding wand an explosion an iron ball collision an object thrown at you an unrefrigerated sip of juice an unsuccessful polymorph brainlessnes bumping into a boulder bumping into a door colliding with the ceiling contaminated water drowning eating a cadaver eating a cockatrice corpse eating a cockatrice egg eating a poisonous corpse eating a poisonous weapon eating a rotten lump of royal jelly eating an acidic corpse eating the Medusa’s corpse eating too rich a meal exhaustion falling downstairs jumping out of a bear trap kicking a ladder kicking a rock kicking a sink kicking a throne kicking a wall kicking an altar kicking something weird kicking the drawbridge kicking the stairs leg damage from being pulled out of a bear trap looking at the Medusa molten lava overexertion sipping boiling water sitting in lava sitting on an iron spike strangulation swallowing a cockatrice whole the wrath of touching a cockatrice corpse trying to tin a cockatrice without gloves
Other ways to die:
caught himself in his own tower of flame committed suicide crunched in the head by an iron ball dragged downstairs by an iron ball fell from a drawbridge fell into a chasm fell into a pit fell into a pit of iron spikes fell onto a sink killed himself with his pick-axe quit while already on Charon’s boat shot himself with a death ray squished under a boulder starvation teleported out of the dungeon and fell to his death unwisely ate the body of Death/Hunger/Pestilence using a magical horn on himself went to heaven prematurely zapped himself with a spell zapped himself with a wand
That’s all of it. Thanks for reading it, and thanks Boudewijn, wherever you are.
I remember the days when everyone marveled at how many ways to die there were in Nethack. Remember Nethack? Good old Nethack.
Multiple long ages of the internet ago, famed nethacker Boudewijn Wayers wrote a spoiler called To Die: 50 Ways to Leave Your Game. It was published on his long-gone Nethack Home Page, but copies of it remain scattered around the internet, although currently I can only find one copy on Google, from a page on tecfa.unige.ch. I’m quite sad that this venerable piece of hack lore is in danger of extinction, at least to people who don’t know the magic codes to enter on the Wayback Machine.
To Die is a wonderful bit of roguelike lore, so great that I’m posting it in full here soon to help preserve it. But today’s focus is on a more recent variation of it: a Youtube video from TheZZAZZGlitch listing every way to die in Pokemon Mystery Dungeon Blue and Red Rescue Team. (21 minutes)
In the spirit of the communal spoiler files of old, I enter the list of death causes here, in easy-to-search-for text. For the details, I refer you to the video. Note that every source of damage in the game that has the potential to reduce the player’s HP to zero has a corresponding entry in this list, so it serves as a map to every cause of harm in the game’s Pokeverse.
WAYS TO KICK THE POKEBUCKET (33 possible causes)
was defeated by (attacker)’s (move) (this is the most common cause of adventure ending) missed a Jump Kick and wiped out. missed a Hi Jump Kick and wiped out. fainted from the foe’s Destiny Bond. (an instadeath) fainted, covered in sludge. fainted from a move’s recoil damage. fainted from damage it took bouncing. was defeated by a foe’s pent-up energy. fainted from stepping on spikes. fainted from a bad burn. fainted, unable to bear constriction. fainted after the poison spread. fainted while still being wrapped. was felled by a curse. was drained to nothing by Leech Seed. fainted from hearing Perish Song. (another instadeath) fainted while in a nightmare. was felled by a thrown rock. fainted from hunger. disappeared in an explosion. tripped a Chestnut Trap and fainted. fell into a Pitfall Trap and fainted. was defeated by a Blast Seed’s damage. was transformed into an item. (instadeath) fainted from being knocked flying. was felled by a Pokemon sent flying. gave up the exploration. (quitting the game, not explicitly a death, but serves the same purpose) was blown out by an unseen force. (spent too long on a single floor and was expelled by the Winds of Kron) returned with the fallen partner. (your sidekick fainted, so you left too, automatically) fainted due to the weather. failed to protect the client Pokemon. (FISSION MAILED) fainted from a Wonder Orb. fainted from an item.
Unattainable but still used in the code, waiting for a moment that can never come (7 causes):
was transformed into a friend. (what?) left without being befriended. (hwat?) was defeated by debug damage. (nooo not debug damage) was felled by a thrown item. was deleted for the sake of an event. (oh okay then) went away. (so long) was possessed. (spooky)
Three messages exist in the code but with no way to activate them, even theoretically:
fainted from a debug attack. was defeated by a powerful move. fainted due to a trap’s damage.
It’s been a long time since I’ve recorded an episode of the podcast Roguelike Radio, not just because it was on hiatus for some years, but also because I fell away from it for a while because of Life Terrible Life. But I’m back, and it’s here, and also in it is Rob “ASCII Dracula” Parker, who has a really great pseudonym.
It’s on the most recent Shiren the Wanderer game, The Mystery Dungeon of Serpentcoil Island, a.k.a. Shiren 6, and I hope I’m not spoiling things when I say it’s really fun. The episode is an hour and a half, we had a great time recording it, and here it is!
Despite the words’ lack in the title, the two videos linked here, both made by Some Body, are all about roguelike behavior, and likely have implications for Chunsoft’s Mystery Dungeon engine generally, from which the Rescue Games derive.
In terms of depth, this post is rated 4 out of 5: highly detailed information for obsessed fans and game designers.
And, the second (44m), it goes further into the weeds and is longer:
So, here’s a tl;dw overview of the first video. Despite the length, this is really only a brief summary! Some Body got their information by reverse engineering the games’ code, so it should be considered authoritative.
PMD has three times of actions, moving, attacking and using items. First they try to use an item–if there is no item to use, or the situation isn’t appropriate, or there’s a random component and they choose not to, they fall through to attacking. If there’s no one appropriate to attack, they fall through to moving or wandering. If they’re not pursuing a target and aren’t wandering, they wait in place.
Awake Pokemon try to reach a target: team members try to reach the leader (you)*, enemies try to reach a party member of yours. If they are following someone, they try to reach the target by default moving diagonally before moving orthogonally. This is good to know, and an effective strategy, since it’s harder to escape a cardinal-adjacent Pokemon than a diagonal-adjacent one. If a Pokemon has a target in sight but can’t move towards towards it, it doesn’t move.
(* Note: for teammates, this assumes the “Let’s Go Together” tactic is in effect. Generally, tactics settings are covered in the second video.)
No Pokemon can move towards a target they can’t see. Sight in Blue & Red Rescue Team is two spaces around them, or throughout a lit room they are in plus one space into corridors. Of course, invisible targets can’t be seen, even if they’re nearby. Note, a quirk of the Mystery Dungeon series generally: when standing in the first space of a corridor, you can only see slightly into the room, but everyone in the room can see you. While your default sight range in darkness is two spaces in the PMD1 games, instead of MD’s standard 1 space, you’re still a bit blind when moving into rooms. Notably, that two space distance around you is a square, so in corridors with bends in them you get a bit extra sight distance.
Now comes the interesting part (to people who are as obsessed with roguelikes as I am): what happens if a Pokemon loses sight of its target? In PMD1, it considers the last four locations the Pokemon was in, and tries to go to the one it was visible in most recently. Note in bent corridors, it becomes harder for a character to lose its target.
If the target is four turns outside of the follower’s sight, it has lost track of it, and the follower begins wandering randomly. This can happen if the Pokemon has never had a target (none has come into sight), or the target or follower teleports, the target moves over terrain the follower cannot cross, or the target moves away when the follower is occupied, or, due to the variety of events that can happen in the Mystery Dungeons, other ways.
Followers without targets wander randomly. When they spot a target, they cease moving randomly and pursue it. But if still wandering, in rooms, they pick a random exit, go to it and go down the corridor. In a corridor, they follow it until they reach a room (then entering it), or they reach an intersection. At an intersection, we see an interesting behavior: PMD1 occured before Chunsoft switched over to making wanderering monsters pick random directions at corridor intersections! In later Mystery Dungeon games, including later Pokemon Mystery Dungeons, wandering monsters go straight in intersections if they can. This is behavior that can be relied upon, but not in PMD1.
Outmatched Pokemon can decide to flee, essentially, moving away from their targets instead of towards. In rooms, they pick the exit furthermost from their pursuer, unless they moves them towards that pursuer; then they just try to get away as best they can, likely remaining in the room. A quirk of this: sometimes a fleeing monster breaks for an an exit that is more distant from the target, but not away from at attacker, giving it a free hit. The circumstances around this are complicated: the explanation begins at 7:16 in the first video.
For attacking, Pokemon have up to four moves, and a normal “attack.” This generic attack is not part of the main Pokemon game series. It was present in the first two PMD games, but after that became less effective. In the fourth and fifth PMD games, the normal attack only does five points of damage, and in the Switch remake of Rescue Team, it does no damage at all; it’s only a tool for passing time. But we’re still in the realm of PMD1, where “normal attacks” are not only useful but frequently used, because they don’t consume any PP.
Attacks are chosen based on a weighted average of all the usable moves. Each move has its own weight value; the normal attack weight’s varies according to the number of other moves available.
Ranged attacks are an interesting case. If a Pokemon has a ranged attack, and an enemy that can be attacked at a distance, it triggers the attack routine, where it picks a move from those available, but then only actually performs the move if the attack can reach its target. This can result in an attacker passing up opportunities to attack while an opponent approaches it. Out of fairness, room-range attack moves are only used by the AI when adjacent to an enemy.
Items have a bunch of minutiae associated with their use by the AI, but a lot of it is pretty ordinary. A few highlights: teammates can throw held negative status equipment at enemies, wild Pokemon start using items at Level 16, and there is only one Orb that wild Pokemon can use, and teammates can’t use it: the Rollcall Orb, for them, summons a number of other wild Pokemon into adjacency with them.
Caves of Qud, after over a decade of development, finally reached a 1.0 release and has, for now at least, become the toast of the more-enlightened gaming internet. Of course there will people who will look at its time-based graphics and look down on it, and go back to their games of Call of World of Fortnight Among Us Craft Duty League. But if you’re here, then there’s a good chance that you get what’s special about roguelikes. And not just roguelikes, but classic roguelikes: heavily randomized, turn- and tile-based, and challenging. Hence, Caves of Qud.
Honestly, the roguelike scene is so large now that no one person could reasonably be expected to keep track of all of it. But there is no need to; others hold aloft that particular torch. Here’s a couple of videos, then, on getting started in Caves of Qud.
Publisher Kitfox Games (who also publish the Steam release of Dwarf Fortress) sponsored a video with “Getting Started” right in its title. Here it is (18 minutes):
It contains information on the different modes, the best starting location for beginners (Joppa), basic controls, navigating around the starting town, how to get around the world map (reminiscent of Alphaman!), how to spend kill points, how to read things, how to examine Artifacts, how to experiment with things (even if it gets you killed sometimes), how to steal things, performing the water ritual, and some combat tips.
Another, slightly longer at 24 minutes, intro video is by Rogue Rat:
It covers ranged weapons, the town of Joppa, Truekin, what to do when you get lost, some different skills to learn, gaining levels from giving books to a specific NPC, using its Crawl-type Autoexplore feature and other topics. Rogue Rat did a longer, more basic, intro video (34m) last year that went over many of the same topics as the first video here.
They haven’t broken the talks apart into individual videos yet, but in the meantime you can see my presentation overview of the 31, give or take a couple depending on precise definition, games in the Mystery Dungeon series here, queued up to the proper starting point in the 8+ hour video. The talk portion is about half an hour long (with a couple of interruptions due to the router I was on being a bit flaky).
Here’s an embed, but note that WordPress doesn’t seem to accept the link for embedding with the time code linking directly to my talk, so you’ll have to skip ahead yourself to 6:10:18 to get to it. Or you could watch some of the other very interesting talks on the way there! Either way!
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!
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
They keep using terms from Chunsoft’s Mystery Dungeon games, especially Torneko no Daibouken from the Super Famicom, but seem to have a good sense of how those items connect to and were inspired by Rogue.
Your armor weakens, oh my! “All the F words in the world were about to come out.”
They also die a lot. Because Rogue doesn’t want you to win. It was made for a community of players who would play it over and over, and were competing on shared scoreboards on university machines, and indefinite play makes for a poor measure of player skill. Standing and trading blows with every monster is a bad strategy in Rogue in the long run. Instead, it helps to run from strong enemies, to build up more hit points so as to defeat them, and sometimes in order to escape them to the next floor. Rogue’s monsters grow in strength as you descend fairly quickly, and the player is usually not far ahead of them in the power curve. Then around the time Trolls show up they’re roughly an even match, and they keep getting tougher. The point where the monsters become stronger than the player is different every game, and depends a lot on which items the player has found and has identified, but it always comes eventually. They eventually get pretty far, dying on their fifth attempt to a Griffin on Level 18.
* “Water supply texture: Say goodbye to the smell of raw oysters.” “The Dora doll’s twisty honey positive is getting warmer.” “I miss the days when I used to go Hee Hee in Centauros.” “Let’s quickly wash and throw away the rotten plastic bottles we drank from.” Tell me more, auto translate bot!
‘@Play‘ is a frequently-appearing column which discusses the history, present, and future of the roguelike dungeon exploring genre.
Gary Gygax was a weird person. I won’t get into his life or history or, the casual misogyny of AD&D character creation, or the Random Harlot Table. But he did know a lot about medieval weaponry and armor, and to some degree this obsessive interest seeped out and infected a whole generation of nerds.
How useful is this armor in protecting someone? Five. It is five useful. (Image from National Museum in Krakow)
I know which is generally better: leather armor, studded leather armor, ring mail, chain mail, splint mail, plate mail or plate armor. I know that, although in life each is different, battles are random, and there’s countless factors that might determine who would win in a fight, the order in which I have given them is roughly how effective they are, because it’s the order that Armor Class increases, sorry decreases, in classic Dungeons & Dragons.
While the list of armors is presented, in practically every Player’s Handbook, with their effects on protection right there in order, unless you’re steeped in the material, it is not obvious, just from reading the names of the items, which is supposed to be better than another.
Splint Mail was rare in Europe during the medieval period. It’s also really hard to Google Image Search for without ending up with pictures taken from D&D material!(Image from Wikipedia)
This is a considerable roadblock, and one I struggled with for a while, when I first tried to learn to play Rogue, because that game expects you to know how effective each piece of armor is. You start out with Ring Mail +1. You find a suit of Splint Mail. Should you switch? People who play nearly any classic roguelike are going to run against this eventually. Even now, some games just expect you to know the relative strengths of each.
If you decide to take the chance and try it on, to Rogue’s (and Nethack’s) credit, it tells you immediately how effective the armor is on the status line, and you can compare its value to your past item. To Rogue’s (and Nethack’s) detriment though, if the new armor is cursed, you’re stuck with it, until you can lift the curse (to a new player, unlikely) or die (very likely). And then, unless you’ve been taking notes, you’ll still probably forget the relationship between the two items, meaning you’ll have to guess their relative value again later, and deal with the same risk.
Classic D&D tended to give short shrift to the intricacies of real-life armor use, simplifying a complex topic beyond perhaps what was appropriate. AD&D attempted to remedy that by going overboard, giving each armor ratings according to its bulkiness, how much of the wearer’s body it covered, how much it weighed and how it restricted movement. Gygax’s tendency towards simulation is responsible for some of the most interesting parts of the game, but it didn’t help him here I think.
Most classic roguelikes, at least, use the “bag of Armor Class” approach to armor, which is probably for the best. Nethack probably goes to far in the Gygaxian direction. If you find Plate Mail in Nethack, you’re almost entirely better off just leaving it on the ground, even despite armor’s huge value, because it’s simply too heavy. Even if you can carry it without dipping into Burdened status, or, heaven help you, Stressed, its mass and bulk lowers the number of other items you can carry before you reach Stressed, and carrying many other items is of great importance. This is the secret reason that the various colors of Dragon Scale Mail are so powerful in Nethack: it’s not that they have the highest best AC in the game (though they do), it’s that they’re also really light! Even if you don’t get the color you want, it takes concern about the weight of armor completely off your list of worries.
The use of armor underwent revision throughout D&D’s development. (This page lists the changes in detail.) For reference, the relative quality of D&D, and thus roguelike, armor goes like this.
Name
New-Style Ascending Armor Class
Old-Style Descending Armor Class
Leather Armor
2
8
Studded Leather & Ring Mail
3
7
Scale Mail
4
6
Chain Mail
5
5
Splint Mail & Banded Mail
6
4
Plate Mail
7
3
Plate Armor
8
2
Why the difference in values? Up until the 3rd edition of D&D, Armor Class started at 10 and counted down as it improved. 3E updated a lot of the game’s math, and changed the combat formula so that AC was a bonus to the defender’s chance to be missed instead of a penalty to the attacker’s chance to strike. Because of that, now it starts at 10 and counts up. The changeover was a whole to-do, I assure you, but now two editions later we barely look back. Back in that day others were confused by the system too, and even Rogue used an ascending armor score. But Nethack, to this day, uses original D&D’s decreasing armor class system.
If you compare those values to those used in 5th Edition, you’ll notice that even the new-style numbers don’t match up completely. As I said, while the relative strengths have remained consistent, if not constant, the numbers continue to change slightly between versions.
That concludes this introductory level class. You’re dismissed! If you’re looking into the relative effects of different polearms… that’s the graduate-level seminar, down the hall.
The Mystery Dungeon series of Japanese roguelikes, which includes the Shiren the Wanderer games, has a fair number of obscure entries. There’s “The Rainbow Labyrinth,” a mobile entry that toyed with adding F2P features and never made it out of beta. There’s a few other mobile remakes of early titles that can’t be obtained or played now due to their platforms being discontinued. And back on Super Famicom, one of the very first Mystery Dungeon games, a spinoff and modification of Furai no Shiren, was released for Nintendo’s Satellaview add-on.
Most Satellaview titles are extremely obscure now, with their only remaining remnants that aren’t languishing in a vault somewhere inside Nintendo (if they even exist there) being saved data files on aging flash memory cartridges in the possession of diehard Nintendo players and collectors in Japan. Satellaview was treated as a way of distributing disposable software, games and other programs that were tied to a specific date or time, so there are a good number of lost items for it, and many will probably never be recovered.
Entropy and bitrot are huge problems with computer software of all types, and it’s shocking how little most companies, even Nintendo themselves sometimes, seem to think about recording essential parts of their past. So any successful reclaiming of old data from the land of howling hungry ghosts is good.
Image from Satellablog
That’s why I’m remarking here that Satellablog, dedicated to recovering and making playable as much old Satellaview software as they can, has managed to obtain a copy of Episode 3, of the Satellaview version of Shiren the Wanderer, “Save Surara” or “Save Surala” depending on the tastes of the person romanizing the title. That means episodes 2, 3 and 4 have been found, leaving only the first episode.
Save Surara was a Soundlink title, like the releases of BS Legend of Zelda. That means they were intended to be played at the same time as a special audio broadcast, and contained events that were timesynced with that broadcast. Without the broadcast (which are usually lost now), Soundlink games can’t be entirely played as originally intended, but it’s still better than nothing.
Here is video of Episode 3 in action. It’s about 49 minutes long. It’ll have to be modified to get it into a state where people who aren’t into romhacking will be able to play it themselves:
With three episodes recovered, there’s still hope that someone in Japan saved a copy of Episode 1 on a forgotten flashcart resting in a closet somewhere. Frog bless all of you awesome hardware horders over there!
