To do in San Francisco this weekend: the first-ever roguelike celebration

by jere • 10 years ago

141 69 10 years ago

jere3• 10 years ago

The speaker list on this thing is absolutely mindblowing.

I really wanted to go, but having just gone to a roguelike conference last month and this one being on the opposite coast, I just couldn't swing it. But it will be streamed!

busterarm• 10 years ago

Oh my god! YES.

I wish I knew about this earlier >< And I wish I weren't on call all weekend and working this insane ETL project. Hopefully there's VODs.

versteegen• 10 years ago

Holy hell, there's only a few people missing for it to literally be "all stars". Which makes it unfortunate that there are two tracks! How come IRDC never had this, and I haven't even heard it mentioned in rgrd?

jere3• 10 years ago

The scope of this thing seems to have surprised everyone.

It appears to be a combination of location (many of the famous attendees live on the west coast I guess) and Noah simply emailing people to come.

As far as rgrd, I usually only step in there around events to ask if anyone is participating and have never gotten any interest from anyone. There were a lot of announcements on reddit.

TheAceOfHearts• 10 years ago

Propose changing the link to the event page [0]. This "blog post" doesn't add anything.

[0] https://roguelike.club/

phlyingpenguin• 10 years ago

To be fair, I've had http://roguelike.club on my to-revisit list for a while and it doesn't obviously mention the twitch stream in big bold letters on the front page so I had missed that option. I'm quite glad to see it.

kqr2• 10 years ago

Looks like they are sold out as ticket sales are ended. How much were the tickets originally?

jere3• 10 years ago

$20-$45. $20 was probably the early bird. https://www.eventbrite.com/e/roguelike-celebration-tickets-2...

fjarlq• 10 years ago

Streaming for track 1 and track 2:

https://www.twitch.tv/roguelike_con

https://www.twitch.tv/roguelike_con2

jmspring• 10 years ago

If they want CA history, hand's down reach out to Joseph and his Emperor Norton tour -- http://www.emperornortontour.com/index.html

Full of history and comedy.

forkandwait• 10 years ago

The only computer game I play is DCSS. Once got to the vaults as a troll beserker, but I can't get any farther than that. (I know, I know .... slow down, just don't get killed...)

vvanders2• 10 years ago

DCSS has such incredible depth, these types of games reward you if you can dedicate the time to them.

It's not a pure roguelike but I've found Nuclear Throne to be fantastic. Nice blend of old school arcade controls and brutal rougelike roots.

WalterSear3• 10 years ago

I've been trying to get into that, but I'm just not finding it to have the depth of Binding of Isaac. Then again, what does, in twitch-rogues? Maybe I just need to make it past the first sewer level before I give up.

JoshTriplett2• 10 years ago

I've found DCSS quite fun. It eliminates most of the busywork of most roguelikes: you don't need to take separate notes, you can search for items and landmarks, you can auto-travel to known areas/levels and auto-explore unseen areas of a level, and the developers have "eliminate tedium" as a specific design goal.

I've managed to win the full game twice, and each of the sprints a few times. Spriggan berserker with piles of stealth and dodging worked really well; a manual of Fighting helped get my HP to reasonable levels. I need to see if I can get a spellcaster through the full game, and I still need to do the extended endgame.

I like sprint mode lately for quick games that take <30 minutes.

bkcooper2• 10 years ago

...the developers have "eliminate tedium" as a specific design goal.

I think lots of good has come from that. At some point, though, it started to feel like a lot of what the dev team considered tedium I considered fun, and vice versa. (I could of course download the old versions and play locally, but playing online was a lot of the fun.)

I need to see if I can get a spellcaster through the full game

"Pure" spellcasting can be done, but it's unpleasant to play (just from a UI perspective) and usually a suboptimal use of XP (DCSS usually rewards moderate investment in several areas rather than extreme specialization in one.) If you're not imposing that on yourself, then book backgrounds are overrepresented among the better starts in the game.

LunateSigma• 10 years ago

It's such a great game, and there are so many different ways to play. I know how to win a 15 rune game with a Deep Elf Fire Elementalist, but when I try to play as melee it's a totally different game and I can't get very far past Lair.

dang• 10 years ago

Url changed from http://boingboing.net/2016/09/16/to-do-in-san-francisco-this..., which points to this.

gragas• 10 years ago

So can I not go since tickets are already sold out?

WalterSear3• 10 years ago

Twitch streams

renownedmedia• 10 years ago

I like how the page doesn't mention the date.

britta2• 10 years ago

That's just the schedule page - sorry this is confusing! The intro page (https://roguelike.club/) has the date - tomorrow (Saturday), September 17.

britta2• 10 years ago

Aw, thanks for posting this and being excited about it! This is a labor of love organized by my friend Noah with help from a few other friends and me, just for fun since we love playing roguelikes.

We did sell out of tickets; our very graciously donated venue (thanks to Eventbrite) has an attendee limit since it's basically an office rather than a large venue. I hope you all will watch the streams! The talks will also be recorded so you can watch them later.

mintplant• 10 years ago

Thank you for providing streams! This just happens to be the weekend I leave the Bay Area so otherwise I'd be pretty bummed about missing it.

SubiculumCode• 10 years ago

angband zandband sangband I died in them all.

Grue3• 10 years ago

Holy shit, the developers of Rogue, Thomas Biskup, Tarn Adams, and even the creator of Kingdom of Loathing (for some reason) all in the same place?

qwertyuiop9245• 10 years ago

This is so cool that it almost (but not quite) makes me wish I lived on the west coast.

But coming from the east coast, the west coast is weird.

agentgt2• 10 years ago

I'm on the east coast as well (Boston). Although I dislike San Francisco for taking away talent and attention from Boston I wouldn't consider them weird compared to local Cambridgites. You want oddity come to Cambridge MA. To be honest though I love weird.

The major weird thing I don't like about SF is the climate (like why is hot during the wrong times of year).

qwertyuiop9245• 10 years ago

I didn't say the people were weird. But the climate is unpleasant, and you can drive for miles and still be in the same state. And even "northern" california (I believe SF qualifies) is pretty far south, so it hardly ever snows. And all the landscapes look pretty ordinary, and then you suddenly see a palm tree (although that's more LA than SF).

And I do love Cambridge. Why? Bookstores. Bookstores everywhere. If you're looking for a book, and you can't find it in Cambridge, than you're probably not looking hard enough. And there's the MIT Press bookstore as well: Their CS section houses SICP, EPL, TAPL, The Little Books, and countless other excellent books on one row of shelves. If that's not awesome, I don't know what is.

I know that as a Cambridgeite, you know many more reasons why Cambridge is cool, but frankly, having a lot of bookstores is pretty high on my list of ways that places can be awesome.

And yes, it totally sucks that so much talent is on the other side of the country. Living in the New Haven suburbs, I can say that it's hard to get a good pizza most places. And that's the least of the reasons it sucks.

vanderZwan• 10 years ago

Josh Ge will be speaking at this event. I have been closely following the devlog of his modern RL game Cogmind since the start and I can highly recommend it, as well as the game itself:

http://www.gridsagegames.com/cogmind/

http://www.gridsagegames.com/blog/

Merem• 10 years ago

For those with knowledge of the genre: What are the better, traditional roguelikes that you can recommend? I've only played Elona so far and quite liked it.

krokodil• 10 years ago

ADOM (Ancient Domains of Mystery) is a favorite of mine. I prefer the original CLI version to the Steam version (especially since the original is free). Dwarf Fortress is also very satisfying though it does have a higher learning curve.

jasonkostempski2• 10 years ago

Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead is my favorite game of all time.

eropple• 10 years ago

I'll give a thumbs-up to DDA. It's got problems--I think there's not enough game to it when you get past the baseline stages of survival--but it has a lot of different systems that mostly work together pretty well.

rogual• 10 years ago

Brogue is very traditional and very thoughtfully designed. It's the author's idea of what Rogue might look like today if development had continued.

https://sites.google.com/site/broguegame/

It's my favourite Roguelike because it's the genre distilled to its essence. Also the short bits of flavour text are very well written.

potatoyogurt• 10 years ago

Brogue is also one of the most visually beautiful roguelikes despite sticking to the old roguelike convention of using individual ascii characters to represent everything in the dungeon. It is really impressive.

mordechai9000• 10 years ago

I have been playing Nethack (and Slash'EM, a variant) on and off since the 1990s. It's one of the early off-shoots of the original game, Rogue.

I compiled it from source using DJGPP for MS-DOS (which is a GCC port for 32-bit DOS executables) and added my own random humorous messages to various situations in the game. I also made some minor modifications to the game mechanics to fix things that I personally found annoying.

Compiling was in itself a fun endeavor - it took a couple hours to recompile from scratch, as I remember, and of course there was always a surprise or two along the way - invariably due to my own errors.

Both Nethack and Slash'EM are still actively developed, and there are graphical tile interfaces available now, too. The learning curve is a little steep due to the large number of keyboard commands. That seems to be a common feature of many roguelike interfaces.

If you want to check them out, be aware that the console version usually defaults to the safest and most boring set of options - no color or graphics chars - so if you play that one, you might want to set those options first. Or go with one of the many graphical tile versions.

Also, beware: this was more of time sink for me than WoW ever was. YMMV.

howlin• 10 years ago

Brogue is very similar in spirit to the original. It was excellent game balancing and isn't overly complicated. Compared to many other modern RLs, this one is very approachable and allows one to make progress early.

pault• 10 years ago

Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup[1] was how I was introduced to roguelikes. Try starting out playing as a troll monk (trolls can eat raw flesh and won't starve as easily, and they have claws for unarmed combat).

[1] https://crawl.develz.org/

acbabis• 10 years ago

Desktop Dungeons is an excellent one. Gameplay is divided into levels which are designed to be short, and there is a puzzle mode which is tricky but very rewarding. The race/class system is also quite good. Different builds are good on different missions. http://www.desktopdungeons.net/

jasonkostempski2• 10 years ago

This thread just reminded me of Cogmind. It's Windows only and I had forgotten about it when I moved to Linux but it's working with Wine so far. It's a really good one. Early access and not free ($24 min) but it's very stable and easily worth the price.

philsnow• 10 years ago

It works mostly fine on mac with wineskin as well

JauntTrooper2• 10 years ago

Nice, I wish I could go!

My username is inspired by my favorite rogue-like growing up, JauntTrooper:Mission Thunderbolt. It was released in 1992.

Here it is, if folks are interested in playing it: http://www.old-games.com/download/3974/jaunttrooper-mission-...

ddp3• 10 years ago

Oh my, the hours we wasted inside of DEC playing that game as it was being developed, which was just called Doom at the time. It's a pity Dave hasn't given it the SDL treatment or updated it for OS X but the rights are probably all screwed up from publishing it for the original Mac back in the early 90's. It was fun because of its wonderful sense of humor and sci-fi storyline, ATMs, radioactive green slime, and all the wonderful warrens (where you could find wonderful things way beyond your current level). It really did have a story and a mystery to be solved. A true classic.

You'd need to post a picture of the Security Authorization Chart for any of us to play that however.

ddp3• 10 years ago

I just checked and Doom is available in the VMS Hobbyist program (http://www.openvmshobbyist.com/downloads.php?cat_id=3), so you should be able to get it to run under SIMH (http://simh.trailing-edge.com/), if you're so inclined. Security Authorization not required here. :-)

JauntTrooper2• 10 years ago

Wow, no kidding! You were there when he was building it too? That's so awesome. :) Did he ever make any other games?

The game fills me with such nostalgia. As a kid, I couldn't find a retailer who sold it, so I wrote a letter to Casady & Greene in order to buy a copy. I still remember how excited I was when it arrived.

The Security Authorization Chart should be in the ReadMe file, by the way. :)

plq• 10 years ago

I can't help but wonder: What is roguelike?

lbotos• 10 years ago

Not trying to be pedantic:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roguelike

It's games that are like Rogue.

rconti• 10 years ago

Way too many headlines (and accompanying stores!) on HN that don't bother to explain themselves.

kbenson3• 10 years ago

There's enough distinct sets of knowledge and experience that there will always it problems communicating succinctly (a title) and effectively to everyone. In this case, if you visit the link, one of the header menu items is "Roguelikes?" which explains it.

personjerry• 10 years ago

Offtopic, but does anyone have experience with porting NetHack? Back when 3.6.0 was first released I tried updating the Mac tileset port, but only got about "halfway" :(

poshli2• 10 years ago

Direct link in stream to Dwarf Fortress talk

https://www.twitch.tv/roguelike_con/v/89873769?t=278m

poshli2• 10 years ago

Direct link in stream to ADOM talk

https://www.twitch.tv/roguelike_con/v/89873769?t=351m

To do in San Francisco this weekend: the first-ever roguelike celebration

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