The state of roguelike games in 2026

It's sad. Then again since we lost Rogue Temple to wokes I haven't been watching other roguelike projects practically at all, so I wouldn't even know if there was some kind of new roguelike released. But I highly doubt it, since roguelike development has moved to rogueLITEs with commercial aspect of using "roguelike" as a marketing term which is actually misleading. There is nothing wrong making money from games, but sometimes it goes a bit too far.

Old games aren't doing that well either. Nethack has not been updated for years and I think we should leave Nethack alone and never even try to add features to it. It's ready. It has been ready for more than 10 years. Same with Angband and other old school roguelikes. We need new, modern roguelikes that respect the legacy of roguelikes but don't try to maintain archaic features just for the sake of it.

My own contribution is lacking, because I've been in a real struggle to even finish Teemu 1.3, let alone Kaduria. That said, Teemu 1.3 has to be released this year. I'm hoping there will be two releases actually, the initial release and then another release with fixes and more features.

I think we developers have had a problem since we lost a forum to talk about roguelikes. It is quite important to talk about our projects with other developers. But I feel like younger generation doesn't even want to engage in conversation, because their only task is to make money, so they also avoid talking about how their games are not roguelikes but only using that term to stand out from the massive number of games released. 

Agduria

This project began as a joke in 2009. Until now I didn't even remember it, but then an internet archiver contacted me and asked for link and/or release package which I didn't even have. But to my surprise I did find the source code. The way I remembered it was that someone was making fun on Kaduria and called it Agduria, but I had a memory that it was only a joke.

Fast forward to now. The project is on Github as MIT open source and there is also a web page on my homepage. It's using curses for UI library. The original had SDL, but it was SDL 1.0 so I decided to replace it with curses. Of course the current SDL3 would be better than curses (anything is), but curses is fine when developing the project. If problems arise then I will switch to SDL3.

I have no exact plans for Agduria, but I have an idea to use an existing RPG system in this one for sure. I know from experience how difficult it is to create a RPG system, so it would make sense to use an existing one, but we'll see how it goes. This is also the first time I'm programming a project on Linux using only text editor and terminal to compile the project. It has been quite wacky so far, I'm using micro as the text editor and makefile to compile the project. I don't have any special setup for it, just tabs for editor and command line for make.

Brick Atelier 0.89

New version of Brick Atelier is out today. You can find it from the homepage link at the bottom right which I finally fixed (it was the old broken mbnet link for too long). In this version the goal was to fix undo/history operations and that I did. To make things easier to myself I did remove some difficult operations from history like adding and deleting tiles to the tileset. Operations that don't have undo are features, not bugs.

I would like to think that the next version is released even faster than this one. I would like to keep a release schedule at least with this project if I'm unable to finish my roguelike projects in any sane time.

The raccoon island

I could fix all other undo/redo operations with the new simpler system, but as a side effect now it seems to be quite difficult to figure out how to handle tileset operations like delete and insert tile. I know it can't be impossible, but it sure feels like it.

Meanwhile I've returned to the raccoon island aka Teemu. The last time I was trying to balance the RPG system and it's still one of the unfinished features. But in a way you could almost play the game already, "everything" is in place, maybe some random stuff still missing. During these years Teemu has became a large-ish project with 343 source files and 44K lines of code, but luckily it's quite easy to handle, at least much easier than Kaduria which did became a mess in some parts.

I think Teemu will be quite a nice game if I can just fix balance issues. There are many ways to do that, not just increasing the damage player can do to make fighting less tedious. One of the ideas I have is that monsters would not usually even attack, their range of detecting player should be smaller etc. They could also attack each other, or flee when hit couple of times, depenging on how hard the player hits.

Brick wall

Undo and redo for paste and work selection tool is almost ready after hours of confusion-filled coding. I made undo node simpler to make it easier and I think it's the only way anyway, you have to save every "state" of the tile. There is still a problem with paste modes and selecting paste tool in undo/redo. The idea I have is to undo/redo the tool that was used at that moment which would remove confused moment when the standard mode of paste is selected which makes paste disappear if you use another tool.

Programming undo and redo has been one of the most difficut parts of Brick Atelier which may sound strange, because in theory it's simple. But it reminds me of save and load game in games which is also quite difficult to implement sometimes despite the simplicity of the concept. In Brick's undo and redo things got complex fast and there were special cases (still is), but the new undo node is simple enough so it can handle undo operations which don't have a reverse command. There are 53 undoable operations that I need to test before new release, so it's not over yet with undo.

With undo/redo fixed I can focus on some new and unfinished features. One of them will be animation tool, it should be easy to do as well...

Agduria remake

A while ago I received an e-mail from "archive" person and this is not even the first time. There are now people who are looking for old projects to preserve them as they were in the time of release. I was told that I had a project called Agduria and it even had a release. At first I remembered that it was a joke project, because someone called Kaduria by that name. Then I started to search my chaotic archives and found the project's source code. It did also have a web page in my old mbnet site.

The original was released in 2009, so enough time had passed that I had forgot it even existed. The whole situation was so funny that I decided to continue the project where I left it. It seems like the original idea included an object-oriented version of Nethack itself, but now I think it's a boring idea so I've changed some of the data, for example removed monsters like keystone kops. At the moment I'm almost ready to release it and this time it will be open source and made available on Github. I don't have to make it perfect, but I have refactored the source code to present my current style of programming. The first release is literally going to be a @ walking on an empty level so don't expect anything groundbreaking.

Brick Atelier 0.88

First release of the year, I got this ready a bit earlier this month. It's not much from feature side, but it was somewhat difficult to migrate from SDL2 to SDL3 which is the biggest change. I tried to fix double buffer drawing bugs as much as possible and also this version should be faster than the previous one. I'm working on this version in my Linux machine which has very slow graphics card compared to my main PC. You can download the latest version from Brick Atelier homepage:

https://www.kriceland.fi/brick/index.html 

The second release will be Teemu 1.3 which I should promise for this year... It also has double buffer drawing issues, because at that time I didn't realize how bad it was. SDL is not really designed for turn based way of drawing if you don't plan it for that from the start. But it shouldn't be too difficult to fix. Teemu is almost ready, but there are some problems I have to fix and as they say the last 1% of development takes 99% of the time.

I started this year with a new type of training program which works hilariously well in my case. Even the old problem with my mid back pain seems to be getting better slowly which seems like a miracle. The short way to describe my training is that I replaced weights with bodyweight style training.