The Flipside of Gaming
Sil-Q is an Angband variant. Joel Ryan, aka MicroChasm, made its tileset which shows a lot of care in its creation. Sil-Q’s tiles are modular, so humanoid monsters can hold weapons, and also have strong silhouettes to aid recognition. It’s full of the kinds of concerns pixel artists have to worry about!
From Roguelike Celebration 2022, Reed Lockwood’s talk on trap design in roguelikes. Traps are an essential part of a D&D-style dungeon exploration sim, but are very easy to get wrong, either by making them too strong or, conversely, too weak. Some interesting ideas here!
We’re going to spotlight some of the talks from this year’s Roguelike Celebration over the coming weeks, which is always crammed full of wonderful talks! The first one I’m directing your hungry gaze towards is Jeremy Rose talking about his strategy guide for Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead.
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)