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

Sunday, October 26th

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.

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(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.

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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.

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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!

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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

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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)

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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

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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):

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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)

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• 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!

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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

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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).

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We’re continuing with our weekly presentation of talks I found interesting from Roguelike Celebration 2022! They regularly have one or two talks that go some ways outside the roguelike remit, and this year one of them was an interesting talk by Cara Hurtle about using both Telnet and Hypercard, an old multimedia system created for classic Macintosh computers, to discuss queer and trans experience. The talk itself is SWF, although following content outside the video might lead somewhere NSFW.

It’s a short talk, only about 15 minutes, and covers some interesting topics!

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Honestly, I could devote a post to every Roguelike Celebration talk. I’ve been limiting myself to just one such post a week, on Saturdays. This one, a short sixteen minutes talk about terrain generation, is for the developers out there.

Constraint-based generation, also known as “wave function collapse,” is a system where, as objects are placed randomly during generation, the generator “solves” the world around them, placing later terrain as is necessitated by prior terrain. If the generator reaches a contradiction, a situation where there is no viable terrain that can be placed, it undoes the contradictory placement and continues from there.

It’s a technique that’s fairly popular in procedural generation circles, and among other games is used in Caves of Qud. It’s also fun to watch it work!

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As I mentioned earlier, the creator of Moria, Robert Koeneke, died recently, but thankfully before he went he did interviews about his experiences, notably in David Craddock’s Dungeon Hacks.

Roguelike Celebration 2022: Celebrating Moria (Youtube, 25 minutes)

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Strategy guides for classic roguelikes are not like strategy guides for other genres of games. It is technically possible to win at NetHack without perusing spoilers, but it will probably take you a long long time. Fortunately for those with less free time, there exists the NetHack Wiki. And, since the games are randomly generated with each play, you can actually be perfectly spoiled and still find the game challenging. Although, I still think people will find playing these games without spoilers interesting and rewarding-knowing everything there is to know about NetHack makes the game seem much smaller.

I haven’t covered Cataclysm or its updated version Dark Days Ahead on @Play yet, and I really should! An interesting fact about it that comes out in the talk is that DDA may be one of the largest open source projects of all. It has had over 1,700 contributors! The mega-popular programming language Python has had around 2,000!

Roguelike Celebration 2022: Jeremy Rose presents The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Cataclysm (30 minutes)

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