Posted on September 24, 2016
genesis
The whole genesis of this blog came from my sudden desire to build a roguelike game. Well, maybe that’s not quite right; it really started back when I first played Shadowrun on Sega Genesis (see what I did there??) and basically re-lived all of my Legend of Zelda adventures but in a bad-ass cyberpunk dystopia.
Ever since, I’ve wanted to expand that world and create a place where I could tell my own stories. For over a decade I’ve been jotting down design notes about how I might actually build this world, but last week I was struck with inspiration for both the design of my magnum opus AND the will to start a new project that I might actually be compelled to finish.
I think I was walking around outside with my kid and reading some news from the Roguelike Celebration in SF that linked to the 7DRL website. I saw this list of hundreds of roguelikes that had been recently developed with varying degrees of success. This got me thinking again about the level generators in Neon Chrome I had read about on a blog by fellow Finnish developers 10tons and how much fun it would be to work on tech like that.
Later that day I whipped up a 1000 word design summary describing the core facets of the world I wanted to create, how those parts would interact, and which parts would be procedurally driven.
It felt like how Katsuhiro Otomo described his process of writing the Akira film; he had been working on the Akira manga for so many years and knew the world and the characters so completely, that when he sat down to make a film version it all just came out in a single burst. Within 2 hours he had finished outlining what would become perhaps his greatest creation.
Now, I have no pretensions that the end result of Refuge Zero can reach any level of success. I have shipped a lot of games in my professional career, but essentially nothing independently. This time feels different. The fact that I’m blogging about this, I think, is a symptom of something broken deep in my subconscious that has started leaking out into the aether.
Posted on September 21, 2016
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!
Posted on September 20, 2016
procedural metaphor
I was cleaning up my dev archive and looking through some old idea files today, and I found a note labeled ‘procgen.txt’ from a few years ago. It had some provocative quotes from a talk that Brian Eno (who I mostly know tangentially through his association with Underworld) gave in the mid-90s, exploring the merits of procedurally generated music.
Like a good theory in physics or a profound piece of art, roguelikes can offer a powerful simulation for safely exploring radical new ideas. But generally these metaphors point inwards, revealing deeper insight into roguelikes themselves. Can they be turned outward?
“I think what artists do, and what people who make culture do, is somehow produce simulators where new ideas can be explored. If you start to accept the idea [of procedurally generated music] you start to change your concept about how things can be organized. What you’ve done is moved into a new kind of metaphor.”
“Evolving metaphors, in my opinion, is what artists do. They produce work that gives you the chance to experience in a safe environment … what might be quite dangerous and radical new ideas. They give you a chance to step out of real life into simulator life.”
“We’re saddled with a whole set of [old] metaphors … about how the world works, how things organize themselves, how things are controlled, what possibilities there are. Generative art in general is a way of not throwing those out; we don’t get rid of old metaphors, we expand them to include more. These things still have value, but we want to include [new] things as well.”
“My feeling about artists is that we are metaphor explorers of some kind. An object of culture does all of the following: it innovates, it recycles, it clearly and explicitly rejects, and it ignores. Any artist’s work is doing all those four things and is doing all those four things through the metaphors that dominate our thinking.”
— Brian Eno
Posted on September 19, 2016
why roguelike?
I grew up with video games. My dad sold pinball machines and arcade games in the 80s and 90s, and I was regularly exposed to game developers who’s names are now legendary. As such, I was spoiled with video games as a child. I don’t know why any of that is important to this story, but this is my story so I have to start somewhere.
Looking back now, I’m trying to find a common thread that led me down the path towards roguelikes. All I can draw upon are the strongest impressions that video games made upon me during my childhood. The furthest back I can go is to the Apple //C, and a game called Hard Hat Mack (which I am now learning via Wiki was EA’s ‘first game’). I don’t think the game itself is what was interesting though, but rather the Apple hardware that lent itself to fantasies of hidden power and dark realms. You could switch it off and on real quick and get it to boot into a broken screen of garbled flashing ASCII characters, a secret that I discovered and kept to myself like it was some kind of arcane knowledge that had to be protected.
There was also Intellivision, which a friend of mine owned, where we spent hours in his basement mostly playing Burger Time and SNAFU (which was like a precursor to TRON Light Cycles). And of course the Atari 2600, with games like Moon Patrol, Pitfall, Frogger, and The Empire Strikes Back. All of these were fun games, but largely forgettable in terms of life-changing impact. For that you need a proper adventure. For me, this came in the form of The Legend of Zelda. (Relentless: Twinsen’s Adventure shares this pedestal, but we’ll discuss the impact of that game another day.)
I always recall my dad setting up my NES and popping in the golden Zelda cartridge, working his way into a new game, and then… getting totally lost on the first screen. Maybe you needed a kid’s imagination, but obviously you were standing in some sort of a canyon and that black square was a doorway. He handed me the controller and off I went, immediately wandering down the steps and equipping the sword. And that was it for me. I was forever after a digital adventurer.
Even as a kid, even before knowing what a roguelike was, I played Legend of Zelda in permadeath mode. Dying was simply unacceptable, and meant immediately restarting the game. This might have started as some form of OCD, as every death meant that counter by your saved game would increment, and who could allow such a thing?
Thinking back, maybe it was more about continuity. Death had consequences. Death meant the end of your journey. An adventurer doesn’t run blindly into danger, leaning on a respawn like a crutch. You had to assess the danger, weigh your options, plan your actions. And if you made a mistake then you learned from it, cataloged it in your mind, assured yourself you would do better next time.
But you were dead. That imposter standing back in that canyon with your old-self’s gear was a thief or a ghost. Who knows where he came from or what he had experienced? What was the purpose of this clone’s journey? Were his interests aligned with my own? Rather than get bogged down with the weight of this existential crisis, it was much better to start over. Besides, hitting the reset button meant you got to experience the opening theme again.
(I once decided that in the future when we can implant music players in our brains, wired to our nervous systems, and program soundtracks to play in our minds triggered by the rate of our heartbeat, the Legend of Zelda theme would be permanently programmed to my ‘determined walking/light jogging’ setting.)
But why roguelike? Why now?
