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my favorite unwinnable roguelike scenario is turn 0 death nethack tas. zero interaction, you just die. it's like you have to have autopickup enabled, have to happen to spawn on an item, and that item has to happen to be a cross-aligned artifact. it'll get picked up and immediatley kill you. good times, nigh impossibly unlikely to occur in a real game.
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# ? Oct 27, 2023 04:10 |
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# ? May 27, 2024 23:11 |
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WarpedLichen posted:I mean there is at least one mathematically unwinnable Slay the Spire seed out there. I think the issue is that it's very hard to tune things that finely. A game might seem like it's on track for that level of difficulty, but once players start getting a few thousand hours on them it may turn out to be another story.
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# ? Oct 27, 2023 04:17 |
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I remember that, it requires you to pick a very specific starting loadout and still had a [quickly checks]... 1 in 3 million chance of happening, and took ages to actually record it occurring. Seeing how that satisfies some goober's desire for an unwinnable game, clearly this is all masterful design.
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# ? Oct 27, 2023 04:18 |
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the holy poopacy posted:Unless it's egregious 99.99% of players would never be able to tell anyhow. This is the key point. Pretty much every discussion about unwinnable seeds boils down to doing a bunch of math in order to find something to be mildly annoyed about. I can find plenty of things to be mildly annoyed about with far less effort.
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# ? Oct 27, 2023 06:04 |
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nethack has an easter egg for it which I think we can all agree is the best way to handle it
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# ? Oct 27, 2023 06:26 |
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I remember a *lot* of discussions about "theoretically winnable" design in this thread years ago, I can't remember where the consensus landed I will say that balance tuning is really hard, and deckbuilder roguelikes above others get the gimlet eye, because inexperienced designers and weak design in general can just completely torpedo the entire game no matter how well the rest of it is put together, thematically, presentation, or otherwise thinking on it, I'm actually harsher about roguelikes specifically in this way than a lot of other genres for other games, I can more often excuse crappy design (with resignation, in the case of 4X, with annoyance in the case of AAA multiplayer) but for roguelikes, whether leaning traditional, action, cards, or something else entirely, if the foundation is flimsy it kills my interest real quick the basic compact in any of these games with some form of permadeath is the expectation that you have a fair shot at winning if you play well, if that isn't clearly identifiable as a pillar of the design at a glance I'll tend to avoid it same for those where it's too complicated to parse if the design actually sucks rear end (this tends to be more of a subjective experiential thing, You Have A Janky Feeling About This Floor)
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# ? Oct 27, 2023 11:21 |
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Giving the player a completely unwinnable scenario, no matter what choices the player might make, sounds like peak poo poo design.
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# ? Oct 27, 2023 11:30 |
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Yeah, that seems going too hardcore. Having a game that it isn't only hard to win on its own, but having situations on the game where maybe (!) they aren't winnable sounds like too much to me.
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# ? Oct 27, 2023 12:18 |
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John Lee posted:bro it's literally one in a billion, if you're worried about those odds you'd better be scared to leave the house because of rogue serial killers, while also simultaneously buying a lot of lottery tickets I'm talking about in abstract, "a game". If a game is a coin flip I won't play it. If a game is like 5% unwinnable I probably won't want to play it, definitely not if it's a long game. Slay the Spire doesn't rate for me because I'm not close to winning ascension 20 at a high enough rate that unwinnable seeds are a problem. Even in an unwinnable game I'd 1) never know, and 2) still have room for improvement and can learn from that game. In any case I read the Jorbs posts in the linked thread and I think Coolness Averted was not remembering what he said correctly. First of all, Jorbs says "any seed you can eventually beat by retrying and taking bad cards/playing cards in bad orders until [you win] is functionally problematic in all the ways that a truly unbeatable seed would be". So his definition of unwinnable is unwinnable with 'correct' play in the absence of hindsight. He also thinks that "it sucks that some runs just end up being losses for pretty much any reasonable player", so he doesn't value the unwinnable nature of a game for the unwinnable nature itself. His point of view is that "my enjoyment of the game increases as the % of the time that my decisions appear relevant increases" and that this approach almost unavoidably produces "unwinnable" games. His examples: Jorbs posted:this game has a bunch of randomness which stops us from knowing where we're going to end up if we make decisions So I don't think anyone is actually arguing that unwinnable seeds are desirable in and of themselves. And I don't think anyone was arguing that mathematically unwinnable seeds are desirable at all. In StS you could probably eliminate all the unwinnable seeds without messing up the overall game given how narrow they are. And I think you ideally should TBH, there's no good reason to have a mathematically unwinnable seed beyond it being too much work to eliminate something that will rarely come up, but that's why I say "ideally". I also think it's worth noting that this is maybe only acceptable in a very straightforward game like StS where there are ultimately a very narrow decision space and the game is relatively short. Unwinnable through standard correct play in say Nethack would be a super gently caress off with this bullshit situation for me. That game is too long and too open ended for unwinnable seeds to be acceptable. It's not such a tight design that difficulty is necessarily going to produce unwinnable seeds. Things like you move a space and a rock falls and you die are like whatever, that took 10 seconds of my time. But any situation deep in the dungeon needs to be winnable. Phigs fucked around with this message at 12:33 on Oct 27, 2023 |
# ? Oct 27, 2023 12:30 |
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Triangle Wizard 2 at last arrives in the world, surprisingly, as something of a semi-remake and upon the most fortuitous of days for it: https://www.trianglewizard.com/post/triangle-wizard-2-released quote:Triangle Wizard 2 is the sequel to 2008's Triangle Wizard. Triangle Wizard 2 stays true to the gameplay of its parent but features updated graphics and a less obtuse interface. It is a realtime roguelite combining an ASCII character art style to represent creatures but normal graphical effects for spells and the environment. The player's character is a wizard represented by a triangle.
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# ? Oct 27, 2023 12:38 |
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New Risk of Rain next month!!
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# ? Oct 27, 2023 14:37 |
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GodoRogue also saw a v1.5 with some nice QoL and outright playing the thing gains: https://aikoncwd.itch.io/godorogue/devlog/626526/godorogue-update-v15 quote:Thank you very much for the warm reception of the previous version 1.4. I've received a lot of feedback and wanted to quickly release a new version considering the advice and bugs reported by all of you. Here is the list of new additions and improvements. This new version implements Field of View (FOV) and support for playing with the mouse. The main keys for accessing help (?) and using stairs (<, >) have also been changed, and some classes have been balanced. Enjoy!
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# ? Oct 27, 2023 14:47 |
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Started playing crawl on the computer now too. Crawl is fun, and i like to play it
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# ? Oct 27, 2023 14:50 |
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ExiledTinkerer posted:GodoRogue also saw a v1.5 with some nice QoL and outright playing the thing gains: new coffee break roguelike? and it's made in godot? i'm in
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# ? Oct 27, 2023 16:19 |
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I haven't even touched Against the Storm for over half a year now but I'm seeing it update with a new huge system like every 2 weeks. Which is a pretty crazy pace for an Early Access game. Meanwhile, Chrono Ark is advertising it's all important Swimsuit DLC before the game is out yet.
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# ? Oct 27, 2023 17:19 |
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Phigs posted:I'm talking about in abstract, "a game". If a game is a coin flip I won't play it. If a game is like 5% unwinnable I probably won't want to play it, definitely not if it's a long game. Slay the Spire doesn't rate for me because I'm not close to winning ascension 20 at a high enough rate that unwinnable seeds are a problem. Even in an unwinnable game I'd 1) never know, and 2) still have room for improvement and can learn from that game. Yeah, jorbs' argument seems very reasonable. His point essentially is that if the worst unlucky streak you can have is balanced such that you can still solve the game via careful reasoning (i.e. not cheating), then any run where you don't have luck that bad is going to be very easily solvable, which makes the game boring once you get good at it. So game designers wind up at a "pick 2 of 3" situation: high variance, challenging, guaranteed winnability. If you want to maximize depth (high variance and high challenge) then that means accepting that there's going to be a certain number of unwinnable runs... but if the game has high randomness and high difficulty then players generally won't be able to tell when they were actually doomed by RNG from when they made a mistake, so unwinnable games are essentially invisible. Granted, that may not be very comforting for some players. "Unwinnable" is also a surprisingly fuzzy definition. There's the usual debate of "theoretically winnable with tool-assisted RNG foreknowledge" vs. "reasonably winnable with optimal play", but even then there's a sliding scale. A seed that's so torturously difficult you need to constantly pick arbitrary choices that are often pointless or stupid on their face because that happens to play off the RNG just right obviously falls in the former category, but what if e.g. you have to pick between two roughly equivalent choices at an important juncture where the RNG is such that one leads to certain death while the other leads to a routine victory? No one is going to realistically be able to crunch all the probabilities to determine which option was mathematically superior, and even if they could, if it turns out the choice that leads to death technically had a 1% higher chance of success in a vacuum does that really mean you chuck the run on the "only winnable via TAS cheats" pile?
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# ? Oct 27, 2023 17:23 |
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Historically, Crawl (that is, DCSS) explicitly had a policy that unavoidable deaths weren’t considered a bug, for basically that reason: If they engineered the game to never present such situations, the game would be too easy and boring. In reality, I think Crawl is basically always winnable for characters that don’t “fail to launch” and die really early, so it’s not that important of a point in practice.
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# ? Oct 27, 2023 17:52 |
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The most unwinnable game of crawl I ever had, involved a long hallway from the entrance that led to a creature carrying some exploding darts. There was nothing to hide behind, the only thing I could do was pray I closed the distance and killed it before it blew me up. Which...did not work out. But hey, that was like, 1 game out of 1000.
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# ? Oct 27, 2023 17:55 |
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Arzaac posted:The most unwinnable game of crawl I ever had, involved a long hallway from the entrance that led to a creature carrying some exploding darts. There was nothing to hide behind, the only thing I could do was pray I closed the distance and killed it before it blew me up. Which...did not work out. entrance vaults with a 1-width hallway as their only exit are the main source of these, i had a wizard character that opened a door into a 1 width hallway with a jackal pack in it and then miscast magic dart 4 times in a row and i feel as though that game was functionally not winnable
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# ? Oct 27, 2023 17:58 |
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Jack Trades posted:I haven't even touched Against the Storm for over half a year now but I'm seeing it update with a new huge system like every 2 weeks. Which is a pretty crazy pace for an Early Access game. Metaprogressed right into fan service. I recently got into Against the Storm again after trying to briefly on release. I would give it a shot if you are still in the mood. The gameplay feels a lot tighter and the game feels very much complete. For whatever reason it really hooked me enough to play about 20 hours in the past couple weeks when before I played about 3 and felt bored.
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# ? Oct 27, 2023 18:05 |
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Drone Incognito posted:I recently got into Against the Storm again after trying to briefly on release. I would give it a shot if you are still in the mood. The gameplay feels a lot tighter and the game feels very much complete. For whatever reason it really hooked me enough to play about 20 hours in the past couple weeks when before I played about 3 and felt bored. I played it for a couple of hours when I bought it and it was so good that I'm going to wait until it completely done, instead of playing the poo poo out of EA version burning myself out before 1.0.
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# ? Oct 27, 2023 18:08 |
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Funnily enough I started a new save file for Chrono Ark a few days ago to try out the 2.0 changes. Game still good! Managed to get to the clock tower on my first run where Phoenix told me I was too early and shooed me back to the beginning. I think one small quibble with it is a common problem-- it feels like the more complicated characters don't necessarily offer more power to go with their lower skill floor. Heinz / Azar / Pressel are going to carry you just about any encounter (Miss Chain and Lian also deserve honorable mentions, the former for being virtually unkillable and the latter for just dumping out shitloads of damage).
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# ? Oct 27, 2023 19:04 |
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Harminoff posted:New Risk of Rain next month!! Edit: Also, Endless Dungeon reminded me that Dungeon of the Endless exists, so I reinstalled it, wiped my save, and did a couple runs until I got a win. It's a fairly fun game, but it really reminded me that it gets old quickly.
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# ? Oct 27, 2023 19:37 |
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Broken Cog posted:How does it look so far? Doesn't it have both new devs and publisher? I think it's the same devs, if we're talking about the refresh of the original game. Never got into the second game for whatever reason, but the original still holds up IMO. Even solo, it's so fun going from plinking at lizards to launching full-on orbital strikes on giant baddies
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# ? Oct 27, 2023 20:12 |
RoR is all gearbox now. The o.g. devs said they did all they wanted and sold the ip
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# ? Oct 27, 2023 20:14 |
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Submarine Sandpaper posted:RoR is all gearbox now. The o.g. devs said they did all they wanted and sold the ip As I understand it, Risk of Rain Returns, the 2d game in the style of the original, is being developed by the original devs. Gearbox owns the IP now and will be developing any future games or dlc for 2. Basing this off of the original news post here. quote:Hopoo Games will remain the developer of the Gearbox-published Risk of Rain Returns, and Gearbox will both develop and publish potential future titles in the series. It's possible there's been other updates I missed or this is just a weird on-paper thing and "Hopoo Games" is different people than the original devs or something though, I haven't been following super closely.
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# ? Oct 27, 2023 20:26 |
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Ghostrunner 2 has a roguelike mode, ergo it is a roguelike
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# ? Oct 27, 2023 20:57 |
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Lufia II's Ancient Cave was a cool roguelike before roguelikes were cool.
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# ? Oct 27, 2023 21:04 |
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SettingSun posted:Lufia II's Ancient Cave was a cool roguelike before roguelikes were cool. Hah, I think mentioning that mode and asking what it'd be considered was how I was pointed towards the roguelike thread here (or on another forum) in the first place.
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# ? Oct 27, 2023 21:06 |
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Snake Maze posted:As I understand it, Risk of Rain Returns, the 2d game in the style of the original, is being developed by the original devs. Gearbox owns the IP now and will be developing any future games or dlc for 2. returns is being developed by the original devs, this has been known since the moment it was announced they had a bunch of ideas to revamp the first game with while making risk of rain 2 and wanted to put that stuff out as something for players to have and then just move on, because they want to go back to developing 2d games and at this point they can't imagine much more to do with the risk of rain ip
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# ? Oct 27, 2023 22:04 |
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Broken Cog posted:How does it look so far? Doesn't it have both new devs and publisher? Here is where they announced the date, but it also has a ton of footage you can skim through. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LfsYltzCxg
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# ? Oct 27, 2023 22:10 |
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do we get this for free if we have the original?
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# ? Oct 27, 2023 22:17 |
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nintendo did that when I wrote them and said I had already bought the first mario
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# ? Oct 27, 2023 22:30 |
Oh cool
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# ? Oct 27, 2023 22:31 |
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Godorogue is a good idea but I got bit by a bat because I tried to look at it and that takes a turn. The flavor text is... interesting bat posted:Disturb their peaceful reverie, however, and they shall flutter to life, their bites, though not devastating, a testament to their displeasure.
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# ? Oct 27, 2023 22:34 |
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Lost for Swords with another solid "make game work better, be better" update: https://maxbytes.itch.io/lost-for-swords/devlog/626969/v120-bosses-curses-and-the-mezzanine quote:First boss: Banshee, waits at floor 10 of the Gathering Tower
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# ? Oct 28, 2023 02:22 |
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Jack Trades posted:I played it for a couple of hours when I bought it and it was so good that I'm going to wait until it completely done, instead of playing the poo poo out of EA version burning myself out before 1.0. Yeah that's where I am too. Plus there were a lot of systems to learn and keep track of, and I'd rather do that all at once when the game is in 1.0 than keep up with it as it moves along.
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# ? Oct 28, 2023 03:16 |
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goferchan posted:I get it, and it's interesting as like a galaxy-brain level mastery problem with the game. Is there an unwinnable seed of Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup? Go back to the days of being unable to butcher chunks with a cursed club of distortion and I’d say definitely.
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# ? Oct 28, 2023 03:24 |
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Shaman Tank Spec posted:Well, that was the final push I needed to buy Inkbound. I wasn't opposed to it before or anything, but this felt like a good opportunity to pull the trigger and maybe send a message about a positive change. Just popping in to say that I got Inkbound on a whim and the community is really friendly and chill. I'm enjoying the gimmicks I'm discovering so far.
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# ? Oct 28, 2023 04:30 |
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# ? May 27, 2024 23:11 |
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Fun little roguelike you can play over on Itch.io - short runs, maybe a bit too easy. Unless I got insanely lucky on drops, might get three happy runs out of it and be content. Folder Dungeon quote:Folder Dungeon is dungeon crawler roguelike inside computer folder! Make difficult decisions, fight enemies, collect powerful relics! Simulated computer folder, it's not one of those games where you explore (or delete) your real file system. LordSloth fucked around with this message at 20:16 on Oct 28, 2023 |
# ? Oct 28, 2023 20:13 |