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A History of Rogue
blacklily8 writes "Gamasutra has published "The History of Rogue: Have @ You, You Deadly Zs." Despite only the most 'primitive' audiovisuals, Rogue has continued to excite gamers and programmers worldwide, and has been ported, enhanced, and forked now for over two decades. What is it about Wichman and Toy's old UNIX RPG that has sent so many gamers to their deaths in the Dungeons of Doom, desperately seeking the fabled Amulet of Yendor? This article covers the history of the game, including the Epyx failure to make a ton of cash selling it in 1983. It also goes into rogue-like culture and development."
Despite only the most 'primitive' audiovisuals, Rogue has continued to excite gamers and programmers worldwide, and has been ported, enhanced, and forked now for over two decades.
Despite? Given how easily we could at least put a simple tileset on the game to make things more realistic, I'd say that Roguelikes' ongoing popularity must be at least in part _because_ of the primitive graphics. A high-rez animated monster can only ever be a high-rez animated monster, exactly as you see it on the screen. But the dashing asterisk can be whatever you imagine it to be, and that makes it better. It's just like the way books are satisfying in a way that movies can never quite be.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
People would have figured out how to spell it.
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... if the graphics are simpler the developers can spend more time on the AI. And if theres only a few developers this is a big deal. Its probably why most text based MUDs were generally more imaginative than WoW and its clones.
I'm holding my breath for the day somebody develops a truly co-operatively multiplayer version. (No, sharing bones files/score tables doesn't count.) I know it will probably mean sacrificing turn-based play, but adding human interactivity into the already complex world(s) of Rogue will be amazing.
Question everything?
Despite only the most 'primitive' audiovisuals I'm still addicted to its descendants. They have some features not easily found in modern games, above all the difficulty and the challenge. Modern games often seem to be designed to let the player win.
While this isn't answering your question, I'd like to point out my favourite Nethack interface:
http://glhack.sourceforge.net/
GnomeHack was a very nice version of the game... But the GUI-ness of it (popup windows, scrollbars, etc..) really wasn't to my taste. So I started work on glHack, to make it feel very similiar to the text-terminal version (nice & snappy). but with graphical tiles.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
While porting nethack, 'way back when, we wanted to be sure that all of the levels worked, so we added a terminator-like character for the test players. Immune to poisons, more robust, ... Then one died down about level 23, and, of course, came back as a ghost. Made the game much tougher to win when playing as a tourist or whatever.
No, we didn't purge it from the system. That would be cheating.
The DS is a roguelike gamers paradise at this point. I'm amazed how many commercial ones that are out there. You've got something for the hardcore, the weeaboos, the kids and the computer nerds. The nethack port is worth the price of a flash cart alone. It's better than the wince/wm port!
I know there's ones I've missed. There's also a ground-up game coded for the GBA and ported to the DS.
--- Do you believe in the day?
My favorite Rogue-like will always be Ancient Domains of Mystery. The control system is so much better than Nethack.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
Well, If you'd like a more modern rogue implementation with tilesets, and have an iPhone or iPod Touch, you could give Rogue Touch a try. I wrote this version from scratch in my spare time over last fall and winter as a way to fill in downtime from consulting. Borrowed some graphics from public domain tilesets, and drew others myself. It's a tribute to the Atari ST and Amiga versions of Rogue, and it's gained quite a following lately... as a matter of fact one of my players alerted me to this story (I used to post here regularly, but have been away for a while... had to quit reading so I could get some real work done!!).
Anyway a lot of neat little tweaks were made to the formula without messing up the core game: new equipment and magic, some animations, secret characters (that have unique abilities and starting equipment), and an online leaderboard to compete with dungeon crawlers all over the world.
Come by my website http://www.chronosoft.com/ to see a video and check out the forums and leaderboards.
Urge to post... fading... fading... RISING!... fading... fading... gone.
Indeed. I can play Rogue all day at work, and everyone else assumes that I'm working at something really complicated and "techy."
No. What Dwarf fortress needs, desperately, is a better UI. I'm not just talking about proper graphics, though that would be a part of it. Even the developers have admitted that they have streched the limits of what is possible with ASCII characters.
Currently, Dwarf fortress is like a rocket ship, with literally hundreds of knobs, buttons and switches. It's frequently impossible to figure out what is going on and how to do anything about it. Which is tragic because almost everyone who sees the game _wants_ to know what is going on and to interact with the world as much as possible.
Something like Falcon's Eye shows the way. Meaningful graphics which convey the maximium amount of information in the least time, and context sensitive menus, which only display relevant options. Better still would be the creation of a system that relied on only a few "verbs", with objects in the world as nouns. As the saying goes "Complexity is Easy. Simplicity is Hard."
May the Maths Be with you!
The first version of Rogue that was widely circulated became quite a time sink for a lot of people at Caltech. This version was considerably harder than subsequent versions. It was extremely rare for anyone to actually win the game, by getting down deep, getting the Amulet of Yendor, and making it out alive.
One undergraduate, however, had no trouble beating it. Within a couple days of his starting playing, he had all the spots on the top score list, and all of them were total winners.
He then stopped playing, except when anyone else dared to take a spot on the top score list. Then he'd come to computing center, sit down, and 30 minutes later, the interloper would be pushed off the list.
Naturally, we all wondered how the hell this guy was so much better than the rest of us (and, based on what our contacts at other schools told us, better than anyone at their schools, too). He didn't do anything to hide when playing--he didn't play in an office with a private terminal. He played right out in the main terminal room, where anyone who wanted could stand behind and watch.
As far as anyone could see, he didn't do anything significantly different than the rest of us, other than he died a lot less than we did.
Finally, he told us the secret, and we all learned an important lesson. There was no big secret--he just made every little decision correctly. For example, if he had to explore a dark room, he did it in the minimum number of steps necessary. The rest of us would use the "run until you hit something" funciton and sweep the room, which made us step on more locations, which made us have a higher chance of springing a trap.
Traps usually weren't fatal. They just put you down a few hit points for a little while. But in that little while, a monster that he would barely survive, we would barely lose to.
After he got the Amulet and was on the way up, he would only step on locations he'd already stepped on while descending, and so he NEVER sprang a trap on the way up.
He knew the odds of everything (based on observation while playing, not based on looking at the code), and would use potions or scrolls at the time when they had the maximum expected utility.
He did this for EVERY decision point in the game. He made the decision that, based on all the data available at the time, was the best decision.
None of the things I listed above, or any of the other things he did perfectly that the rest of us only did 99% perfectly would make a noticeable difference by themselves. But put them all together, and all our tiny mistakes added up to losing for us, and the lack of any mistakes added up to winning for him.