Thinking about Rogue-Likes

his past week, I've been playing more Caves of Qud in preparation for its 1.0 release. It is fascinating to see a game that fits into a genre that rarely succeeds financially make its way through early access and into a modern release state. When I bought Caves of Qud, it was far less accessible. It had no tutorial, and there were things that would instagib you just outside of the starting town. Permadeath was brutal, and the UI was far more challenging to learn. When Qud was keyboard-only, it had the old-school Dwarf Fortress feeling of staring at keybinds until you fumbled your way into figuring the basics out. The first dozen or so Qud streams I did back in 2016 were titled "Quey Bindings of Qud" because that is what I was doing, constantly looking for a keybind, hoping something I was trying to do was possible. While, yes, there was a wiki, a lot of the in-game dialogue and text were placeholders. Even some of the injectors were unclear about their function. There was a lot of guesswork in those days, and I'm glad that is no longer the case.

Traditional Rogue-likes are extremely obtuse due to their visual design. Due to their visual simplicity, developing in-depth systems and mechanics is a lot less challenging, but it makes new player onboarding a brutal challenge for any development team. The more in-depth a game like this gets, the more is asked of the player. In a world where modern mainstream titles are becoming more and more streamlined to help busy adult gamers actually finish games, Rogue-likes are often built to never be finished. This is both in the playthrough sense but also in a development sense. Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead or CDDA is a good example of this. From a development perspective, it could have systems and mechanics tacked on endlessly. Decades from now, someone will be playing an even deeper and more developed variant of CDDA. Same with Nethack and Qud. From a player's perspective, the game loop of Rogue-likes actively punishes the player as they try to finish it. Every playthrough is likely to end in sudden death from something unknown. In Qud, it is likely some baboon that was outside of the player's line of sight or an invisible troll in the cold depths of the underworld. In Nethack, it could be some invisible trap you didn’t think to look for. While CDDA will simply send an angry undead moose after you.

Rogue-likes are more about the time you spend playing than the end goal. While chipping away at a monolithic game’s systems, you slowly begin to understand how the machine that powers the sandbox functions. This slow learning curve can be frustrating when large amounts of time vanish before your eyes as the goatfolk pummel you to death with the shafts of their carbide battle axes. Yet, the new beginning to try and optimize a build or take new starting stats as you try once again to take over the small universe hand-crafted and lovingly displayed on your screen will always be significantly more satisfying to me, even if I never finish it, than seeing the credits at the end of a Bethesda RPG.

Another game I played this week was the remake of DoomRL: Jupiter Hell Classic. DoomRL (or DRL) was a demake fan game of OG Doom as a roguelike. What if, instead of wands and staffs, the player had a shotgun with ammo instead of mana? It turned the game into a tactical experience about hiding behind corners and avoiding oncoming fire from beyond your line of sight. DoomRL was one of my first roguelikes. In 2007, I got it on a USB drive from a friend, along with ADOM (Ancient Domains of Mystery), Angband, and a few variants of Rogue. These games were really impactful on me as a youngster. They were games I could put tens or even hundreds of hours into without even scratching the surface of their depth. Yet, from run to run, they stayed interesting.

DoomRL was important to me because of how accessible it was. I knew how Doom worked, and first-person shooters were commonplace. The logic and goals of a roguelike with shotguns were a lot more straightforward than trying to figure out the obtuseness of ADOM. Because of the nostalgia and my own interest in the genre, I am really hopeful that Jupiter Hell Classic succeeds. Jupiter Hell was a Kickstarter game that succeeded in that it released, but talking with Kornel Kisielewicz, the game’s designer, it has always seemed like the Kickstarter-funded DRL successor was never quite a financial success. It made enough to keep its creators barely afloat and had a myriad of development woes. Running on an in-house engine is expensive, both time- and cost-wise. I mean, hell, the Mac version damn near bankrupted them.

Unlike Jupiter Hell, Jupiter Hell Classic is straight pixel art. It looks lovely and allows for much faster development. The full 3D world of JH means developing and animating creatures and bosses takes time. Mod support is great, but it is harder for modding teams to spin up 3D models to add anything new to the game. Pixel art and simple sprites, on the other hand, are much easier to whip together.

The demo of Jupiter Hell Classic covers the first few maps of the original DRL. While the original game is still free and open source, covered with its Doom-inspired visuals, the paid version that will be coming to Steam this spring will help fund the continued existence of the small, scrappy studio Chaos Forge, keeping the traditional roguelike community alive by making these niche games for a small audience. Try the demo, download DRL, and add Jupiter Hell Classic to your wishlist. These games are historically important to the industry and some of the most compelling strategic gameplay experiences you can find.

This week I'll be streaming Tuesday - Thursday. I'm taking Friday off this week. I'm super busy with attempting to buy a condo and that is taking way more of my mental capacity then I expected. Lot's of tracking down paperwork and meetings with banks.

The YouTube channel got 111,538 views in the this week and on twitch my 7 day viewer average is 570. The Twitch stats are probably closer to 200 but the day I had last week on front page is kind of inflating that number a bit.

I actually uploaded a video this week! I'm also deep in the process of editing a mini Qud movie. It won't be super long like the df videos but hopefully it'll be just as entertaining.

This is from the vods channel. Some footage of me playing Jupiter Hell Classic.