Tag: roguelikecelebration

Upcoming: Roguelike Celebration 2025

It’s a time for annual reminders, so here I am holding up a sign, reading “ROGUELIKE CELEBRATION THIS WAY ->“. And another sign, “<- ROGUELIKE CELEBRATION SHOP’S OVER HERE!” And a third sign, “ROGUELIKE CELEBRATION STEAM SALE AROUND THAT CORNER ⤷!” Yes, I’m carrying three signs. It’s a trick I picked up from Zaphod Beeblebrox.

This year it’s happening between Saturday and Sunday, October 25-26. That’s the day after tomorrow! There’s an unusually good roster this year, and I don’t just say that because I helped find speakers for it this year.

We’ve already had a preview event with a couple of great talks, including a real star, Jon Perry, who created two of the best games in UFO 50, Mini & Max and Party House. While I spent a lot of time with Mini & Max uncovering its many secrets, it’s but a small fraction of the time I’ve played Party House. (If you want to hear Jon Perry’s talk, from September, you can find it here, as well as Ezra Stanton’s talk on Synergy Networks in roguelikes, and Alexei Pepers’ Designing for System Suspense.)

I’ve already gushed voluminously about Party House here. Let’s move on to this year’s talk schedule. Times given here are Eastern/Pacific/GMT. (The later times in GMT are pushed into the following day.)

Saturday, October 25th

TimeSpeakerTalk
12:30 PM
9:30 AM
6:30 PM		Michael BroughThe Roots of Roguelikes in Fantasy Fiction
1 PM
10 AM
7 PM		Sébastien “deepnight” BenardMixing Hand-Crafted Content with Procgen to Achieve Quality
1:30 PM
10:30 AM
7:30 PM		Max SahinStuff: The Behavioral Science of Inventory
1:45 PM
10:45 AM
7:45 PM		Florence Smith NichollsRoll for Reminiscence: Procedural Keepsake Games
2:30 PM
11:30 AM
8:30 PM		Alexander Birke and Sofie Kjær SchmidtHoist the Colours! Art Direction and Tech Art in Sea Of Rifts, A Naval Story Generation RPG
3 PM
Noon
9 PM		bleeptrackFrom Code to Craft: Procedural Generation for the Physical World
3:30 PM
12:30 PM
9:30 PM		Zeno RogueThe Best Genre for a Non-Euclidean game
4:30 PM
1:30 PM
10:30 PM		Cole WehrlePlay as Procedural Generation: Oath as a Roguelike Strategy Game
5 PM
2 PM
11 PM		Jeff LaitTeaching Long Term Consequences in Games
6 PM
3 PM
Midnight		RayA Mythopoetic Interface Reading of Caves of Qud
6:15 PM
3:15 PM
12:15 AM		Johnathan PagnuttiWait, No, Hear Me Out: Simulating Encounter AI in Slay the Spire with SQL
6:30 PM
3:30 PM
12:30 AM		Jamie BrewRobot Karaoke Goes Electric
7:30 PM
4:30 PM
1:30 AM		Stephen G. WarePlanning and Replanning Structured Adaptive Stories: 25 Years of History
8 PM
5 PM
2 AM		Tyriq PlummerScrubbin’ Trubble: The Journey to Multiplayer Roguelikery
8:15 PM
5:15 PM
2:15 AM		Andrew DoullRoguelike Radio 2011-Present

Sunday, October 26th

TimeSpeakerTalk
12:45 PM
9:45 AM
6:45 PM 		Ada NullDyke Sex and Ennui: Generating Unending Narrative in “Kiss Garden”
1 PM
10 AM
7 PM 		Younès RabiiWe Are Maxwell’s Demons: The Thermodynamics of Procedural Generators
1:30 PM
10:30 AM
7:30 PM 		Dennis GregerThe Procedurality of Reality TV Design – An Overview
4:15 PM
1:15 PM
10:15 PM 		Paul DeanPicking up the Pieces: Building Story in a Roguelike World
4:45 PM
1:45 PM
10:45 PM 		Patrick Belanger and Jackson WagnerHand-Crafted Randomness: Storytelling in Wildermyth’s Proc-Gen World
5:15 PM
2:15 PM
11:15 PM 		NifflasMusic algorithm showcase
6:15 PM
3:15 PM
12:15 AM 		Seth CooperBuilding a Roguelike with a Tile Rewrite Language
6:30 PM
3:30 PM
12:30 AM 		Quinten KonynAnatomy of a Morgue File
6:45 PM
3:45 PM
12:45 AM 		Alexander KingDon’t Pick Just One: Set-Based Card Mechanics in Roguelike-Deckbuilders
7 PM
4 PM
1 AM 		Brian CroninPlaytesting Process for Ultra Small Teams
8 PM
5 PM
2 AM 		Mark GritterSol LeWitt, Combinatorial Enumeration, and Rogue
8:15 PM
5:15 PM
2:15 AM 		Dan DiIorioLuck be a Landlord – 10 Lessons Learned
8:45 PM
5:45 PM
2:45 AM 		Liza KnipscherThe Form and Function of Weird Li’l Guys: Procedural Organism Generation in a Simulated Ecosystem

If some of these talks seem like they’re spaced closely together, some of them are “lightning talks,” very short. Those have their titles in italics in the above list.

If you follow indie gaming circles, there are a fair number of exciting speakers among the talks! Jeff Lait (homepage) has made twenty highly interesting roguelikes, many as 7DRLs. Nifflas of course is the creator of Within a Deep Forest, the Knytt games, Affordable Space Adventures and others. Dan DiIorio is the creator of the oft-mentioned (at least in my hearing) Luck be a Landlord, and Zeno Rogue makes the long-lived, and brain-bending, HyperRogue.

And make sure to have a look at the Redbubble and Steam links too! In this year’s Steam selection, MidBoss and Shattered Pixel Dungeon are already on sale.

Tonight: Roguelike Celebration Preview Event!

This snuck up on me, and in fact I had thought I’d missed it, but it turns out it’s tonight! Roguelike Celebration‘s main event isn’t until October, but they’re having a preview event tonight with two long and one short talk. The schedule is here. It kicks off at around 3:00 PM Pacific time, which to convert is 6 PM Eastern, around 10 PM Greenwich, and Midnight CEST.

(EDIT: I had the Eastern times too late by an hour. The event will begin at 6 PM Eastern time.)

Tonight’s show is being done for free, but you still need a (costless) ticket for it, which you can get here. As has been usual the past few events, there will be a live MUD-like chatroom to participate in during the show, for interacting with other audience members, for submitting questions to the queue, and just for bumping around and exploring. The doors open a little before the talks begin, to let people get used to the space, and as a buffer against lateness.

I hope you can make it! Tonight’s talks are:

3:15 PM Pacific / 6:15 PM Eastern / 10:15 PM GMT / 12:15 AM CEST – 45 minutes

Fireside chat with Jon Perry: Host Alexei Pepers and Jon Perry will chat about game design and his contributions to UFO 50 such as Planet Zoldath, Party House, and Mini & Max! (Personal note: this is not one to miss. I have been obsessed with Party House, enough to write a gigantic strategy guide for it.)

4 PM Pacific / 7 PM Eastern / 11 PM GMT / 1 AM CEST – 30 minutes

Building Synergy Networks for better Roguelike Deckbuilders, with Ezra Szanton: Roguelike Deckbuilders live or die on the quality of the drafting decisions they present. When a player chooses between 3 cards, what is going through their head? This talk is about how to achieve deep but accessible drafting decisions which result in memorable games that excite players. Synergy Networks are a helpful lens for creating sets of cards that achieve these aims. Modeling the synergies between cards as a network allows us to use ideas from network theory like path length, density and hubs. Digressions will include characteristics of synergies, broad types of synergies useful for brainstorming, and why anti-synergy is just as important as synergy itself. This talk is informed by my work designing Hellscaper and Mr Magpie’s Harmless Card Game, two roguelike deckbuilders.

4:30 PM Pacific / 7:30 PM Eastern / 11:30 PM GMT / 1:30 AM CEST – 45 minutes

Designing for System Suspense, with Alexei Pepers: The host will give a talk which she gave at GCD and had previously been trapped inside the GDC Vault.

Roguelike Celebration 2025 Call for Proposals Extended

I’m helping out with Roguelike Celebration 2025, the now ten-year-running conference-like thing about all things roguelike, roguelite, and roguelike-adjacent. Yes, I’ve presented there three times so far, and figured it was time to give back!

While RC got its start as an in-person conference, when the pandemic hit they switched over to being entirely virtual, presented through video feed. All of their talks end up posted online, so anyone can see them for years after. But if you can attend during the conference you can participate in chat, ask questions of the speakers, and explore a very clever MUD-like chat interface!

I’ve tried to spread the word about Roguelike Celebration where I can, through social media and this very blog here. Every year they have several very interesting talks that, if you read Set Side B, I know you’d be interested in seeing. They’ve hosted Tarn Adams, co-creator of Dwarf Fortress, the creators of the original Rogue, and many other thoughtful speakers.

This year Roguelike Celebration takes place October 25-26. They sell tickets, but they also let people who are strapped for cash apply for a free ticket. (If you can pay for admission though, please do, as it takes money to run an event like this.)

And if you have a roguelike, or even vaguely-related project, please please please answer their Call For Proposals, to apply to present your work to their devoted audience of extremely thoughtful attendees! The CFP site is here, and their deadline has been extended to July 20th, so you have about three weeks to get in your proposal!

Give it a shot, it’s a great way to spread the word about roguelike work, or about a procedurally-generated game you’re interested in, or just something you think the world should know about.

By volume most game players, let’s be frank, are interested in the big AAA productions. But there are lots of people out there who are willing to give indies a chance, which roguelike games often are, and we have to stick together. Not only to talk with each other and build those connections, but to do it in public, non-corporate venues. Reddit largely is a sham these days, more interested in monetizing their userbase, and Discord isn’t web-searchable, and requires navigating a maze of requests that you upgrade to “Nitro.”

I do not lie: little volunteer-run organizations like Roguelike Celebration are a lot closer to the true spirit of the internet, and the World Wide Web, than those are. So please keep them in your thoughts, if you can buy a ticket, and if you have something to present, answer their CFP! You won’t regret any of those things.

My Talk on Mystery Dungeon for Roguelike Celebration

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!

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

Sudo Sweep

It’s not a command to delete temp files as root on a Unix-styled system! It’s a fun and free little game over at itch.io!

The board on the left is a Sudoku-like game; the board on the right is Minesweeper. The two boards match: the numbers on the Sudoku board are the number of mines in the matching area of the Minesweeper game. You use each to help you solve the other!

It’s not perfect, mind you. There’s currently no way to mark a square that definitely has a mine in it, just the question marks you see in the right-hand board above. There are still cases, familiar to players of standard Minesweeper, where you end up having to guess. And don’t click the “change size” button if you care about the current game: it doesn’t make the boards larger, it starts a new game with bigger Minesweeper and Sudoku boards!

Still though, I have to give creator Rianna Suen props for a cool idea! I found this through the “map obelisk” area during Roguelike Celebration, which is a pretty cool place to find things beloved of clever people!

Sudo Sweep (itch.io, free, playable by web)

Roguelike Celebration Talks Start Tomorrow!

Ah, it crept up on me, so let me remind everyone that Roguelike Celebration begins today, although until tomorrow it just means they’re opening their social space for awhile. Nicole Carpenter at Polygon wrote a short piece about this year’s conference.

There is an admittance fee, but if you can’t afford it you can also get a free pass! Please consider paying them if you are able though, they do a lot of work every year in putting it together.

Here is the official schedule (linked), below is it presented just as a list of talks, with ✨sparkle emojis✨ around the things that personally enthuse me. ✨Just because!✨

Times given are US Pacific/Eastern. If you think the short times between starts are indicative of short talks, most of them aren’t that short, they have two tracks going on beside each other:

SATURDAY

9:30 AM/12:30 PM: Arron A. Reed, Klingons, Hobbits, and the Oregon Trail: Procedural Generation in ✨the First Decade of Text Games✨

10:00 AM/ 1 PM: Nic Tringali, ✨Abstract Space Exploration✨ in The Banished Vault

10:30 AM/ 1:30 PM: Linas Gabrielaitis, Fictions of Infinity in ✨Geological Finitudes✨

10:45 AM/1:45 PM: Ludipe, Exploring ✨Pacifist✨ Roguelikes

11:30 AM/2:30 PM: Florence Smith Nicholls, Another Stupid Date: ✨Love Island as a Roguelike✨

11:45 AM/2:45 PM Kes, Hunting the Asphynx: Roguelikes, ✨Provenance✨, and You

Noon/3 PM: Mike Cook, Generating Procedures: ✨Rule and System Generation✨ for Roguelikes

1:30 PM/4:30 PM: Scott Burger, The ✨Data Science✨ of Roguelikes

2 PM/5 PM: Nat Alison, In Defense of ✨Hand-Crafted Sudoku✨

3 PM/6 PM: Eric Billingsley, Scoped-down design: ✨Making a Tiny Roguelike✨

3:30 PM/6:30 PM: Elliot Trinidad, Touching Grass & Taking Names: Tuning the ✨Blaseball✨ Name Generator

4:30 PM/7:30 PM: Paul Hembree, Audible Geometry: Coordinate Systems as a Resource for ✨Music Generation✨

5 PM/8 PM: Jurie Horneman, Why ✨Dynamic Content Selection✨ Is Hard

SUNDAY

9:30 AM/12:30 PM: Mark Johnson, ✨Generating Riddles✨ for a Generated World

10 AM/1 PM: Jesse Collet & Keni, Fireside Chat About the Development of ✨NetHack✨

10:30 AM/1:30 PM: ✨Leigh Alexander✨, ✨McMansions of Hell✨: Roguelikes and Reality TV

1 PM/4 PM: Ray, Remixing the Layer Cake: Facilitating ✨Fan Reinterpretation✨ Through ✨Caves of Qud✨’s Modular Data Files

1:15 PM/4:15 PM: Crashtroid, Preventing Ear Fatigue with ✨Roguelike Music✨

1:30 PM/4:30 PM: Everest Pipkin, The Fortunate Isles: Fragment Worlds, Walled Gardens, and ✨the Games That Are Played There✨

2 PM/5 PM: ✨Jeff Olson✨, ✨Alphaman✨: Developing and Releasing a Post-Apocalyptic Roguelike Game in the ✨DOS Days✨ When Computers Were Slow, Memory Was Scarce, and No One Had Ever Heard of Object-Oriented Code

3 PM/6 PM: Dustin Freeman, ✨Live Action Roguelike✨

3:30 PM/6:30 PM: Jonathan Lessard, A ✨Simulation✨ with a View

3:45 PM/6:45 PM: Tom Francis, Generating ✨Boring Levels✨ for Fresh Experiences in Heat Signature

4 PM/7 PM: Patrick Kemp, Design Tooling at ✨Spry Fox✨

5 PM/8 PM: Stav Hinenzon, A Messy Approach to ✨Dynamic Narrative✨ in Sunshine Shuffle

5:15 PM/8:15 PM: Josh Galecki, ✨Procedurally Generating Puzzles✨

5:30 PM/8:30 PM: Jasper Cole, ✨Backpack Hero✨ – Player Upgrades and Progression

6 PM/9 PM: Brianna McHorse & Chris Foster, Fusing AI with Game Design: Let the ✨Chaos✨ In

Roguelike Celebration Preview Videos

A little while ago Roguelike Celebration, this year on October 22 and 23 (later this month!), did a short preview as a promotional event. I mentioned this before, it came and went, and now the talks are online.

Nic Junius: Play as in Stage Play (38 minutes):

David Brevik on the Making of Diablo (30 minutes):

And, Aron Pietroń, Michał Ogłoziński on Against the Storm (35 minutes):

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 Preview Event on September 10th

The fine folks at Roguelike Celebration are holding a free “fireside chat” style preview event next month on the 10th, at 4pm US Pacific time, 7pm Eastern! Any rogue-likers out there should definitely have a look.

  • David Brevik will talk about the development of Diablo, a game that I understand some people greatly enjoy!
  • Aron Pietroń and Michał Ogłoziński will talk about hardcore city-building survival game Against the Storm!
  • Nic Junius will be presenting a talk titled “Play as in Stage Play: Designing Dynamic Narrative Moments Through Character Acting.”

You can submit a question for the talks here, and get a free ticket for them here! And look forward to the full Roguelike Celebration 2023 event on October 22 and 23!

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: Procedural Music of Tea Garden

We’ve been recapping some of the talks of Roguelike Celebration 2022 for a couple of months now, and it’s probably about time to let it rest until next year. Still, there is one more talk I’d like to draw attention to, on procedural music generation.

The other talks presented this year use music generated by this system for bumper and intermission ambiance. It really became the distinctive sound for this year’s conference.

There were plenty of other interesting talks this year! You can see them all at Roguelike Celebration’s YouTube channel. Here are 2022’s talks all in one playlist. And if you wish to attend next year, be sure to watch their homepage and follow them on Twitter (I have heard no word yet on other media accounts).