grep ‐‐week 38

In the news each week (games industry and elsewhere) I tend to come across interesting bits related to roguelikes, procedural generation, cyberpunk, the singularity, etc.  You know, all of the important things in life.  I suppose it could be useful to gather this info on a regular basis and stick it all in one place for easier parsing.  So here we go!

Roguelike Celebration
@roguelike.club
Of course the most obvious item in the news this week was the Roguelike convention in San Francisco!  And also of course, I don’t live in SF anymore, so I was unable to attend.  But coverage of the convention has been making the rounds, and it looks like there’s plenty of great output to explore.

Devs discuss the past and future of the ‘roguelike’
@gamasutra.com
Here is Gamasutra’s coverage of the convention, full of links to more literature from some of the convention’s presenters.

Rogue Creator Says We Need A Better Word For Permadeath
@kotaku.com
And here is Kotaku covering the convention’s panel with the original Rogue dev team, starting an interesting conversation about the origins and purpose of permadeath mechanics, and also how to disincentivize troublesome player behaviours that procedural worlds often allow but are deeply un-fun.

My God, it’s full of stars: Event[0]’s AI is a near masterpiece
@gamasutra.com
In procedural news, this interesting headline popped up on Gamastura this week.  It’s a review of event[0], which was released last week and features a procedural chat engine capable of ‘over two million lines of dialogue’.  I’ve put a couple of hours into it, and it’s pretty well executed (I’ll post a full review after I’ve completed it), but I’m surprised more reviews haven’t pointed out the obvious, that it’s clearly just a tweak on Douglas Adams’ Starship Titanic. *shrug*

Alien Languages: How We Talk About Procedural Generation
@gamesbyangelina.org
And finally, here’s a really interesting piece spawned from the fallout of the apparently epic disaster that was the No Man’s Sky launch, discussing the problems that developers encounter because “we lack a shared, well-understood language to communicate in about procedural generation.”

Make or Break the Singularity 1on1: Crowdfunding Campaign is Live
@singularityweblog.com
And finally finally finally, before I forget, Nikola from the most excellent Singularity 1on1 podcast has been having trouble getting his crowdfunding campaign off the ground.  He needs your help!