Fall news

I've been working on Banana Rogue and Saladir for a while, but then I had to ask myself what am I doing. So for now on I'm focusing on Teemu 1.3 which I think is possible to finish before the end of this year, at least it's the plan. How well I'm going to follow that plan is another matter.

The problems in Teemu are related to role-playing game system and it's really just how much HP is taken off and what things contribute to that. Experience leveling is based on gear in this game, so I have to give players possibility to find both weapons and armours in the beginning of the game, and provide some based on the character class. Balancing everything is tedious, there is no way around it.

I'm developing Teemu (and Banana Rogue) on OSX. It's a primitive setup with micro as text editor and compiling with makefile, but since OSX doesn't have Visual Studio it's the only way. Developing on OSX is quite wacky, but I kind of like that simple setup.

Piscary on Github

Piscary aka Fishing Route is a variant of Legend of Saladir which I began to work in 2021. It's a C++ version of the game. I've been posting about it at RPG Codex forum and now it's moved on Github. As usual it's a work in progress, but should be in playable condition maybe quite soon. As you might know, Legend of Saladir is one of those "second generation roguelike developer" games, just like Kaduria and ADOM, but it was never finished. Is this version going to become a legendary roguelike game? Who knows, only time will tell.

https://github.com/paulpekkarinen/Piscary 

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.