News Grab for Mon Jun 21 2010
Posted 21 Jun 2010 |
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Please submit links, short commentary or opinion to jwalker.joe@gmail.com
Roguelike News Grab
A digest of news from the roguelike community.Updated Mondays.
Please submit links, short commentary or opinion to jwalker.joe@gmail.com
Please submit links, short commentary or opinion to jwalker.joe@gmail.com
Please submit links, short commentary or opinion to jwalker.joe@gmail.com
Please submit links, short commentary or opinion to jwalker.joe@gmail.com
It's been a busy week for Kornel Kisielewicz.Please submit links, short commentary or opinion to jwalker.joe@gmail.com
Please submit links to jwalker.joe@gmail.com
Please submit links to jwalker.joe@gmail.com
The Roguelike News Grab has been up for 9 days now and has received almost 300 hits. The form of the News Grab is still very much in an experimental stage, and I have decided to start making fewer, longer posts (about two or three per week,) which I think better suits its nature as a news digest. I plan to work out a more regular posting schedule soon and would appreciate feedback on how readers feel about post frequency, length, and style. Please email your thoughs on these or any other issues to jwalker.joe@gmail.com or post in the thread on the Temple of the Roguelike Forums.
The third alpha of Dungeonmans was released on the 18th, with a minor update quickly following on the 20th. There is also a trailer to go along with it. Dungeonmans, another graphical roguelike, is developed using the XNA library, allowing for an XBox port. According to the dev team post on the Temple of the Roguelike Forums, the game has "a focus on action and tactical positioning." While it seems very polished, the developers have stated that a commercial version is unlikely, but that they hope to make some money from donations.
The dev team is interested in receiving feedback from players, who can opt to send gameplay data to them as they play. They can also provide feedback on the site. The team hopes to introduce the fun of roguelikes to people who would not otherwise play them by getting rid of ASCII graphics and complicated controls.
The new release of PWMangband, "a new variant based on latest MAngband 0.7.3 and add some features to make it less 'boring'," was posted on the Mangband Forums PWMangband board on March 5. The game has been in development since 2007.
This graphical, real-time, multiplayer game has recently had a minor update to the client and a major one to the server.
Featurecreeper is a variant of the 7DRL Madness. Like in that game, the defining feature is that the player must protect their sanity from hallucinations including imaginary monsters who appear as the player grows less sane. Featurecreeper changes some of the glyphs, adds new monsters, new insanity effects, and more.
Dave Moore has written two short articles about features that will be in future releases of Kharne: independent light scources and poison. He also stated that the old roadmap will be abandoned and that version 0.05c will be released when potions and ranged combat have been implemented.
The announcement of Dungeonman's new alpha release has been met with some controversy, with many ToTRL posters complaining about the game's use of XNA, which requires a fairly large run-time to be installed. Krice has made the bold assertion that XBox owners are not human, while others have attempted to salvage the thread. However, the fact that negative feedback about the game is centred on the use of the XNA library rather than its graphical nature shows that the RL community now considers graphical games just as roguelike as ASCII ones.
New screenshots of in-dev XBox 360 roguelike ASCII Quest have been released, showing an overworld, which will have four towns, the first "barracks" dungeon and leveling up, among other things.
The Test of Inn was announced on Roguebasin on April 20. No release has yet been made. It is currently set in an infinite dungeon; its main feature is that NPCs have the same characteristics as a player, making them fully-lootable and resulting in them fighting each other as well as the player.
DaJAngband, according to the author, is an attempt "to add flavor and character to vanilla Angband while keeping the gameplay similar to the original with one town and one dungeon." Version 1.2.1, a bugfix-only release, is now available.
Some updates and fixes have been uploaded to the public source code repository for Dave Moore's roguelike Kharne. There will not be a new version of the game released, however, until all of the changes described in Progress Report #19 have been completed.
The 8th episode of Dwarf Fortress Talk, the infrequently-released podcast covering Dwarf Fortress development, has been posted. According to the release announcement:
In this episode, Rainseeker, Capntastic and Toady One talk about some of the sciences with respect to Dwarf Fortress and answer some email questions.
Magecrawl developer Chris Hamons has posted an article on the game's development blog summarising the functions of the three main libraries that comprise Magecrawl.
Indie developer Vic Davis, author of turn-based strategy games Armageddon Empires and Solium Infernum and the in-development roguelike-inspired Rogue Expedition, has written up some of his thoughts regarding failing in games. He argues that a game designer can ameliorate a player's frustration with failure by "offering choices to interact with the game that cover a broad spectrum of risk vs. reward."
A preview build of the XBox 360 roguelike ASCII Quest will be available for those with XNA Creators Club Premium memberships on April 25. There is still no firm release date for the final version, but "the end is definitely in sight."
Karl Garrison has released a Nethack patch that allows a character to start with any genocidable monster as a pet, if the "pettype" option is set to one of a number of new options.
The discussion over Dweller's licensing continues with author Bjorn Ritzl agreeing that it may be best to release the game with no license (i.e., retaining the copyright,) and Ido Yehieli suggested that BitBucket may host the source of projects without licenses. Others engaged in a tedious exchange about the minutiae of various licenses.