Roguelike definition – what are we missing?

There is some debate about “the definition” of a roguelike. Some argue that a roguelike must meet a list of essential features, but even those features are different depending on who you ask. What I think we are missing is the feel of the genre. It’s easier to feel than you would think. When we see a platformer or a RPG we can feel it from couple of generic features. Platformers have platforms you jump on and role-playing games have a RPG system with character classes, stats etc.

I feel that the essential feature of a roguelike is a top-down tile map of the game world with turn-based tactical gameplay. The gameplay should also have some role-playing features, but to increase the feel it better have a complex role-playing system similar to Dungeons & Dragons system. When we look at a roguelike as subset of role-playing game it’s easier to get the proper feel about it. The difference between a regular RPG and roguelike is randomly generated game world and permadeath, although it’s possible for a RPG to have some random features and permadeath. In similar manner some roguelikes can have static locations and various ways to restore the character after death. Even the classical roguelike Nethack has ‘bones’ for giving back some items from a previous character.

ASCII graphics makes the game feel more like an old school roguelike, but it’s not a decisive feature. The reason roguelikes had ASCII graphics was mainly a technical limitation and in broad sense ASCII tiles are “graphics”, too. They are just a way to represent something. Some roguelikes implement both ASCII and tile modes which work interchangeably and make no difference to the gameplay itself.

It’s quite easy to feel when the game is not a roguelike. It may look like one, but it’s often missing the complexity and size of so called major roguelike. These games have their own genre title as roguelites, but in some cases it can be argued if they are simply adventure and/or (action) role-playing games with some roguelike features. Games like Spelunky are sometimes thought as roguelikes, but for me Spelunky feels a lot like platformer game, it just has randomly generated levels. Random generation is not a feature only for roguelikes, it can be used in all genres. What makes it a feature of a roguelike is the proper context.

The problem of a flexible interpretation has been a saturation of the genre with games that in fact are not roguelikes. Some developers use the genre name in marketing, because it’s easier to get visibility for your game when you have a clear genre for it. When even developers think their game is a roguelike the genre has regressed from major roguelikes as standard to something else. It’s “acceptable” to define your game as roguelike when you have one or more features of a roguelike taken out of context.

Let’s be honest. We can all feel when the game is a roguelike. It’s all that matters, for both developers and players.

Nethack 3.6.1 thoughts

I think this release was slightly underwhelming. They fixed couple of things and it took two years. On the other hand it's understandable when you look at the mess which is Nethack's source code. It's not easy to maintain I would guess. Even so I was expecting more gameplay changes, new stuff etc. but it looks like they "freeze" this version branch and the next one will have more changes so people who want to continue play 3.6.x can do that. There are people who believe some specific version to be the only real Nethack.

The way player character's name is highlighted when your HP is not full is a nice feature, it's something you'll notice right away. Other thing I noticed is that $ keyboard command doesn't work when picking up items, but I did comment out "Finnish keyboard" section in defaults.nh, maybe I should try to comment it again to see if it works. In Finnish keyboard $ is typed as AltGr + 4 and some other keyboard commands are also different. Also, the .exe was acting strange way when I started it the first time, it hanged for like five minutes and then Windows 10 smartscreen catched it, but I ran it anyway. It may be just the smartscreen, it's warning about everything.

Even I'm whining I actually like Nethack. It's really the only roguelike game I'm playing even I'm not a good Nethack player. I know what happens in the game later, I've seen gameplay videos and tried in wizard mode, but I probably like the beginning before Quest more than anything else. It's the way things start to go, sometimes you get very lucky and sometimes you get hardships. The first time I tried this version I managed to blow up my pet with a gas spore, and then turned into a werewolf. I also learned something new: when you kick a pile of gold it scatters around. I had to try that to pick up only gold, because $ key doesn't work.

One of the reasons why roguelikes are nice games is that you don't have to win. At least it's what I think about the genre. Those people who want to win will push it through by learning strategies you need to win this game, but I think when you don't learn them it can be just as fun.

Planning a new PC

My current Windows PC tower has served eight years and it's an affordable Acer. Not bad at all, but looks like it's getting into the end of its natural lifespan. I've tried to clean it, but it's running quite hot and the HD is going to fail some day, because Windows 10 is rotating it all the time.

Most towers these days are quite bad, for example all these small form cases. You just know they are going to fail keeping everything cold enough and it's harder to add parts or replace them etc. They still make regular size towers, but prices have gone up quite a bit. I guess one reason is that thing with video cards and maybe memory chips, too.

My plan is a quad core i5 with internal video chip, and then get video card later if it's needed. HP or Lenovo, they both make towers in that price range (~800 €). I think Acer is soon releasing a new range of towers, at least there seems to be a new model in their homepage, which doesn't even look that ugly. I could wait, it's possible that Acer is going to be 100 euros cheaper than other brands.

I hate technology. It's weird, I know. I do like programming and game design, but everything tech related makes me just sad and depressed. In case of PCs you pay shit ton of money and there is always something. It's like gambling when you get a new PC. Is it going to be fine? Does it have some annoying feature or part you have to change?

There would be more options if it wasn't this gaming bullshit. I can't stand how ugly those gaming computers look even if they had good options for the price. Everything is angular so you can't even put anything on top of the tower. Maybe I will change this blog to a lifestyle blog, me complaining about everything tech related.

Modules with procedures

Experiences so far from a procedural C++ game project have been somewhat interesting. It's divided into modules which at the moment are Datatype, File, Function (for generic functions), Gui and the main module. Most of the code is in the Gui as you would expect. What I have learned is that procedural code seems to be "shorter" than writing classes, but it looks strangely messy. Maybe it's just that I don't quite know how to write clean looking procedural code.

Another interesting part is the Datatype class where I made a decision to use inheritance which may sound weird in this context. I'm using as much inheritance as I can, for example Rectangle class inherits from both Point and Size classes. And I have a feeling this is how I should have done this in the first place in my other projects as well. Using inheritance in this kind of limited context is easy and doesn't seem to have any problems this far. I had to name generic "Set" functions for Point to "Locate" and for Size "Resize" which is I guess better way to describe them. Using inheritance avoids repeating type of data and code for datatypes.

The graphics engine which is less than 300 lines of code in Gui can already display everything it needs: background tiles and letters with different colors. The next step could be the division of screen to three areas: gameview, message window and stats window.

My 7DRL plans

I think there is 7DRL season going on at the moment, I'm not sure. While I'm working on my main three projects it could be "fun" to write a smaller game. The problem you have with larger projects is that they become less and less manageable which is something that just happens. For a reason.

I do have a fun plan for this "7DRL" project in which I'm trying to write C++ with procedural style (also known as C) but with some classes where they are the most logical solution. The code is going to be more "modular" as more functions can be stacked in one file, rather than C++ style two files per class.

I wouldn't do this without a great idea for gameplay which I have had for couple of years. For simplicity I'm going to use ASCII graphics with SDL2, similar to what I have in Teemu. In fact I'm probably going to use Teemu's GUI (+fonts) and change it to procedural style.

Another reason I'm doing this is that I really need some time off from my large projects.

Language design: class

With my limited intelligence I had an idea to start designing my own programming language. There are some examples of the syntax in Roguetemple forums 'My language' thread that has had zero interest. I don't know, I'm pretty stoked about programming languages.

When it comes to really important stuff in a language it's how to manage data with functions and/or classes (or something else). My current understanding about class is that it's a nice theoretic idea which most often simply breaks in real life situations. That's why we have those getters and setters and the class can be exposed or it's not going to be neatly modular piece of code. Also in my experience inheritance is way harder than people think at first.

Functional style has different way to handle data which also is highly theoretic when you think about so called pure functions. In reality most functions are what experts call procedures in that they change whatever data is input to them.

My vast experience tells that both classes and functions have their problems and also both work better in different situations. The obvious question when designing a new language of course is there a way to solve those problems in some way? Or do they even need to be fixed, maybe they simply always exist no matter how you try to prevent them. It's like removing pointers from Java, did that actually fix anything important? Sometimes languages try to prevent the dumbness of programmers and they take it maybe a bit too far.

I've thought about one way to relieve data handling with something called resource block which is a collection of data that can be optionally limited to some classes. This data is like static data in C++ that it's initialized when the program is started, but it could be possible to change it. I'm using that kind of data in my C++ projects all the time, but there isn't any kind of built-in way to handle that data in C++, you have to use namespaces to hide it etc. By the way, I don't think I'm going to have namespace in my language, because I think it's fixing a problem that should not be a problem in the first place.

The daily maze news

The maze routine itself works, but it has to match in the rest of level creation. The way I accidentally solved it in the labyrinth level (the only level using maze for now) was make the maze routine "continue" from itself, the tiles it has created in previous "hives". A hive is one instance of maze diggers which are the corridors of the maze left by replicating diggers.

Sometimes it happens that everything runs into a dead end, usually a digger winding on itself. The fix for that is create hives until X number of tiles created. I found out that the number of available wall tiles divided by 3 gives a good result. The reason for that only roughly 50% of maze area is floors, the rest of it is walls. Not a surprise there. But if you divide it only by 2 it seems that the routine can't fulfill the requirement of mazes to create and runs into an endless loop.

There are some questionable things in this method where I'm first creating couple of rooms and then shooting mazes from walls of those rooms. Most important question: are rooms always connected by mazes? For number of test runs it seems to be true, but I have a feeling it could fail in some rare situations. If it happens it's still possible to check each room for connections and create them later with manual style, but I'd rather wish the maze routine work in reliable way.

Yard

The structure generation of Cornucopia is ready, but still needs some tweaks like room types and interior generation. Maybe the smallest room size could be 5x5 rather than 4x4, because smaller rooms tend to squeeze themselves into strings of rooms which don't always look that great.

The green rectangles are yards. It's a feature that can come after a room (as the yard of the room) or as first feature. I think it's a rare, well, feature in roguelikes to have yards in the dungeon.

After those tests I added two different room types randomly to make it more colorful and it does work quite nicely, when you have more room types than just one. At the moment there are only three features: room, yard and corridor, but I think it already looks nice. The interior is more important than the "shape" of the feature anyways.

This routine is probably going to replace 'small room' routine used in various level themes and I like the idea of "layered" generation starting from basic dungeon and then adding stuff like this.

If there is one thing that bugs me it's that backyard in bottom right corner of the screenshot. It doesn't seem to have a door connection which could be some kind of rarely occurring bug. So maybe it would be wise to create important stuff like stairs only to the basic cave area.

Frost

It was somewhat cold this morning (-15C) but also foggy which is quite rare at least in here. It's creating some spectacular looking frost on trees:

As imaged using my potato Fujifilm X10. Frost is like strings of crystallized snow which I guess is formed when that warm foggy air is attached to end of the string in wind. Or maybe I'm just guessing.

About that Cornucopia generator. I've fixed double walls which is generating quite nice looking rooms, since some of them become irregular (not strictly rectangular) and also made the corridor creation. In that I realized you can't create corridors before the next feature is made so corridors need a special routine to allocate their space with Restricted mask type. The only things left are different sizes for each feature type which has complicated the routine somewhat, but in the end it will be useful to have, and then determining which kind of rooms the generator is creating.

Cornucopia

Finally starting to get somewhere with the feature creator which there is a class Cornucopia for it, because my naming skills are perfect. I had problems with reverse connections and the way next feature is adding a connection to previous feature later. I have two examples to show with rooms as features. Later features can be anything, but mostly corridors. The minimum size of rooms are 5x5 tiles, but they could be as small as 3x3 to squeeze them in smaller spaces.

This first example is actually a very rare "failure", because it has five starting points (rooms) as feature parameters, but no clones at all! I was amazed when I saw this, but it's possible that rooms are made in a place where they can't clone, because they can be only made in a solid rock, not on top of the basic dungeon which is a drunken walk generated cave. However, when you increase starting points it's less likely for this to happen.

This second example is more from extreme end where almost all free space is used by clones that all started from five starting points. It's possible to reduce this kind of generation by giving each feature less than 3 exit points to only clone from 1 to 3 directions randomly. Also the percentage value of created floor tiles can be a limit to the amount of features.

Sadly, this routine is far from ready. One problem seen here are double walls between rooms which are the result of features looking for free space without generating over the existing room walls. But it's possible to remove double walls later and expand the space of one of two rooms sharing a wall.