How to Make a Roguelike

When developing a prototype for a 2D rogue-like, I guess using the royalty Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup assets could be a great starting point: https://opengameart.org/content/dungeon-crawl-32x32-tiles

xenihn• 8 years ago

DCSS is my favorite rogue-like of all time, and I love the tileset.

Benjamin_Dobell• 8 years ago

Art concepts vary significantly depending on the medium, 2D vs 3D, rasterized vs. vector etc. then there's significant variation stylistically.

However, seems as you specifically mentioned pixel art, maybe the following are of interest:

https://www.youtube.com/user/achebit/videos

By the way, the author of those tutorial videos is set to release his game (Dungeon League) some time in the next 12 hours, after ~4 years of dev.

gavanwoolery• 8 years ago

A strong concept and implementation will overcome art limitations. Just look at the success of Rimworld for example, which has sold over 1m copies - or of course Minecraft (150m copies sold).

bduerst3• 8 years ago

Or Dwarf Fortress, which inspired both Rimworld and Minecraft, and is free so the number of downloads are not tracked.

clarry2• 8 years ago

It's funny that minecraft sold itself to me because of the graphics, not despite them. I saw a screenshot, and that's all it took. Had it looked like a modern big budget production, wouldn't even have wanted to know what's in the screenshot.

stcredzero6• 8 years ago

I bet for most folks on HN the mechanics and programming are the easy parts. The art is really what makes or breaks games.

This is true, but from what I've seen the gamedev community seems to generally take this adage too far. At a recent meetup, I spoke to a developer for a project updating a well known IP. Their multiplayer slows down then crashes. I started asking questions, like, do the synchronizing objects have an update cycle? He didn't know, and it had been going on for months.

There's some big fraction of gamedevs who seem to think of programming as almost an afterthought. I see a parallel with the fraction of recent grads who think all they need of programming is the ability to glue libraries together. The medium really needs a balance of multiple abilities. Otherwise, it's like a musician who can write lyrics, but can't sing and play, or someone who has excellent chops on the guitar, but can't sing and write lyrics.

crazypyro• 8 years ago

You'll find this anywhere the entry barriers are slowly eroded. I think this is a good thing in most scenarios, because it means people can achieve equal or greater things with even less knowledge.

While it does cause gaps in logic and nobody wants to be supporting a code base in a professional setting that was built with design/architecture as an afterthought, it's still cool that more people than ever can do something like make a website or a game.

pm90• 8 years ago

Understanding the concepts behind e.g. how tcp/ip works is hard and requires a lot of dedicated effort. I think for those with an engineering/CS background it might be easier, but I can see why game artists or indie gamemakers may not always know these things.

superhuzza• 8 years ago

"it's like a musician who can write lyrics, but can't sing and play, or someone who has excellent chops on the guitar, but can't sing and write lyrics."

That's an interesting observation, because that's how a lot of the music industry works. Lots of songwriters who aren't good at performing, great performers who can't write well, instrumentalists who can't sing etc.

thrower123• 8 years ago

Some strains of Unity game development seems to be especially susceptible to this kind of slamming together stuff from the asset store without understanding how it works. I've tried a couple times to get into Unity, because it looks like a fabulously productive tool, but I struggle a lot because it feels like there is a lot of slop in how everything works - at least compared to the sense of control you expect when you are used to having to write your own game loop and your own input handling and rendering etc etc.

tom_• 8 years ago

On every networked game I worked on, there was one guy working on the in-game network code. Nobody else had the faintest idea how it worked, though it was typically fairly well known at least what not to do in order to make his life no more difficult.

(On two of those projects, I was the lead programmer, responsible, in theory, at some level, for all the code that went into the game. And I still couldn't have answered your question.)

codetrotter• 8 years ago

Regarding pixel art I find /r/pixelart on Reddit to be a good source of inspiration. If you want to learn pixelart, study how pixelart pieces you like were put together. Some tutorials are occasionally posted there as well.

DeviantArt used to have a good pixel art community. Don’t know if they still do these days but either way there are a lot of tutorials that have been put up there by pixel artists over time. Find the good ones.

Another option you might consider is to team up with an artist to take care of the artwork. If you find the right person then working together can be a lot of fun.

And start small! Don’t become another victim of feature creep. With fewer art assets and less code to write you can focus on making something that looks and plays great. If your idea is too big then either quality will suffer, or you will never finish it. Make small, good games first. And small, bad games too — it’s a learning experience :)

Make a team with an artist next Ludum Dare game jam and make a pixel art roguelike with very limited scope together.

msla• 8 years ago

The art is really what makes or breaks games.

Yes, it's so much more important than gameplay.

mikepurvis• 8 years ago

This is true to the point where unless you have a really novel mechanic, it's likely that to build a 2D dungeon game, you probably need a game designer and artist far more than you need a programmer. Look at the number of shipping, cross-platform titles made with GUI-based game maker type tools:

https://www.yoyogames.com/showcase

https://rpgmaker.net/games

vvanders2• 8 years ago

Yup take a look at Nuclear Throne and other really cool indie titles built on tools like that. Also if you're building your own engine it's really easy to get sucked into that than the actual gameplay/development.

As they say: "Help a man to build a game and he'll ship a title, teach a man to build a game engine and he'll never ship anything"

simias• 8 years ago

For roguelikes IMO the "make or break" part is the world generation and gameplay balance. After all most old-school roguelikes work fine with ASCII symbols so there's no real "art" involved besides arguably the shape of rooms and maybe the colors used. Even those who actually use pixel art tend to have rather primitive sprites, including popular roguelike-likes like FTL or Rimworld.

I think it's one of the reason roguelikes are often so deep gameplay-wise. You want to add a new species of trolls who can fly to your game? Just implement the logic and associate a "T" character or whatever. Want to destroy a wall? Remove the "#". Want to make a lava pit? Display a red "~". You don't have to worry about having to create new models, new textures, new shaders, new sound effects etc...

Meanwhile generating interesting levels and tweaking the Random Number God to make the game interesting and challenging without making it unfairly difficult is pretty tricky.

Good roguelikes have a good mix of human-made "scripted" elements integrated in randomly generated worlds. Too much of the former and the game feels repetitive and predictable. Too much of the latter and the game feels soulless and aimless.

VectorLock• 8 years ago

Good roguelikes have a good mix of human-made "scripted" elements integrated in randomly generated worlds. Too much of the former and the game feels repetitive and predictable. Too much of the latter and the game feels soulless and aimless.

This is great advice that extends well beyond Roguelikes.

BeetleB• 8 years ago

After all most old-school roguelikes work fine with ASCII symbols so there's no real "art" involved besides arguably the shape of rooms and maybe the colors used.

I prefer ASCII in Roguelikes. And while yes, I do enjoy old roguelikes that were very plain, I'll also say that creative use of ASCII, and colors, and ASCII "animations" can make a game much more pleasurable (and if done poorly, much less pleasurable).

Saying there's no real "art" in these ASCII graphics is having a rather limiting view of what art is. Making aesthetic games with ASCII definitely involves art.

The tiled/sprite based Rogues - I never liked them. They always restricted my imagination, and had poor graphics.

jungler2• 8 years ago

The distinction I tend to make when talking about any kind of art fidelity type of thing(whether it's roguelikes or pixel art or lowpoly styles) is that you might not have art, but you still have assets. The procedural world generator: that's an asset. Different types of terrain and traps: those are assets. Stats and abilities: Assets. Special case messages on unusual events: Assets. And so on.

And when you add new assets, you still add some kind of burden to the design. Roguelikes just hit those design challenges much faster than most, since they have a world model that makes it straightforward to get to the part where you have the assets and now they have to be tied together in some sensible way.

Action games have it relatively easier when it comes time to do this design work: You know that the gameplay is mostly going to be about collisions, timers, and finite state. The bandwidth of what can be visualized gives you some hard limits on your design scope. Role-playing, in contrast, can keep piling on details. There's more of a UI/accessibility concern in good role-playing design, something that can produce interesting scenarios without resting on obscure details that the player has to sit there calculating out.

Impossible2• 8 years ago

One of the major selling points of making a traditional (ascii) roguelike is that development is all mechanics and programming. I understand that this isn't the current mainstream view of the genre, but its a great approach to making a game by yourself if you don't have much experience with art. Mechanics are also much harder than they appear on the surface, and art, once you're well practiced, is usually pretty straight forward in comparison to programming or game design.

I also understand that on HN games are mostly viewed as commercial opportunities, but if you're asking about basic pixel and game art concepts your art will probably not sell your game. Most roguelikes are hobbyist projects, or at least started as hobbyist projects, and the point of this talk is to foster hobbyist development. If art is a bottleneck, make a good game without art and then partner with an artist.

That said, Chris Hildenbrand's tutorials (http://www.2dgameartguru.com/) have been popular among the HN crowd. There are some good free roguelike tilesets on opengameart.org (Dawnlike is great https://opengameart.org/content/dawnlike-16x16-universal-rog...) and oryxdesignlab.com has some good cheap tilesets. This reddit thread (https://www.reddit.com/r/roguelikedev/comments/436sop/roguel...) is more comprehensive and includes both of those resources.

screature22• 8 years ago

This totally brought back memories of drl (the DoomRL) evolution.

1. First built with an ascii tileset focusing on very tight mechanics and borrowing everything else from Doom (including sound set, music, setting, and theme). https://github.com/ChaosForge/doomrl + https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRL_(video_game)

2. Then Derek Yu (of Spelunky fame) comes in with a gorgeous tileset that replaces ascii as the default as of drl 0.9.9.6 https://twitter.com/mossmouth/status/806211094960189440?lang...

wild_preference4• 8 years ago

This is also why telnet MUDs are a great place to dabble in networked games. The lack of art + an easy networking model (no hard stuff like client-side prediction and interpolated animation) and you can spend almost all your time on the fun technical stuff.

Kiro• 8 years ago

Extremely misplaced comment considering this article is about roguelikes.

castlecrasher2• 8 years ago

If by art you mean presentation, then I agree. One of the reasons I love Slay the Spire so much is how darn fluid the card play is; they react in pretty much the exact way I expect them to, and that's no small feat for games. The dev said he spent about two weeks perfecting it, and I believe it.

drharby• 8 years ago

Replicate art you enjoy with modifications.

I do megaman inspired art by simply cloning the megaman sprite sheets, then modifying things like palette and form.

Do it enough you get good and learning shadowing and other techniques

city41• 8 years ago

I disagree that art makes or breaks games. I think it's really the design: difficulty balance, right number of mechanics, good progression, clever challenges etc. My most successful game to date was when I copied as closely as possible an existing franchise. Whenever I've tried to strike out with my own ideas I've never come up with a game that's very good at all. It's no wonder that successful indie game devs usually find that success by making a ton of games.

vkou• 8 years ago

Art is important, but having a rewarding, fun gameplay loop is more important.

Nailing that in a rogue-like is really, really hard. What does 'rewarding' mean? Your character getting stronger? Your player gaining mastery over the game? How do you square that with perma-death? Do you allow level-scumming? If not, how do you not put the player in an unwinnable position (too frequently)?

I am pretty sure I could learn how to do good pixel art, with a few months of training. I am pretty sure I could not strike gold with a cohesive set of compelling, fun roguelike gameplay mechanics in that period of time. (In the way that games like Dwarf Fortress, Minecraft, Angband, FTL, or Nethack (I despise Nethack) struck gold.)

tln• 8 years ago

Especially with this genre, you can make a great game with basically zero art.

My favorite rogue-like, Hoplite, originally came with pretty basic tiles. Then after it took off, newer tiles were made.

The game mechanics were so good though that I'd love that game regardless of whether the art is "great".

hellomrjack• 8 years ago

There are a ton of great resources that people that have have suggested here but the advice I would give is that, like most things, making games is a communal process so you can focus on what you do well and make some friends that do the other bits.

screature22• 8 years ago

Oops sorry for posting somewhat of a non-sequitur. I'm definitely not a designer (pixel art or otherwise), but Gamasutra often has solid community content and interesting deep dives across game design issues (like in the parent!).

See:

Basic pixel art tutorial: http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/KennethNg/20151211/261577/Pix...

Deep dive into Crawl's pixel art https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/300004/Game_Design_Deep_...

Another collection of pixel art tips (and examples) https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/176663/5_tips_for_making...

shahar2k• 8 years ago

so, I'm an artist.

I've done pixel art, I'm a professional 3d artist, I can draw sculpt and imitate various styles, tend to work in low detail 3d field (previz) where speed and readability are the top priorities.

my advice for learning art naively (without significant outside help) is imitate and iterate, start by re-making pixel sprites from games.

When making variations on these imitations, think of your art as an information and communication problem, what information are you looking to encode into your asset, what are you trying to convey to the player. enemy power, level behavior so on, try and encode it in the least amount of "noise" and then add in the noise to encode mood, style, other things, see if your original information still reads through.

as for the actual skills of art, there are dozens of tutorials out there for various styles, i'd say just learn to draw a bit, and examine your symbols, your visual grammar. if you draw an eye on a character a specific way all the time, try changing and examining why you do it that way.

I know this is vague information but a lot of artistic ability is just practice * time * good criticism. but even with great skill a lot of artists I've worked with dont think of the purpose of their art in the grand picture of things. you do that and you already have a leg up on the competition!

nubb2• 8 years ago

Thank you for this advice.

DoreenMichele2• 8 years ago

The emphasis on art in games frequently goes way too far these days. There is frequently a very heavy investment in art assets to a degree that is pointlessly excessive or even actively undermines the quality of game play.

"Less is more"

When cartoons became a well established business and newcomers couldn't compete, some professional artist left the established studios doing things like Bugs Bunny and created Droopy The Dog which had a great deal less animation involved, yet did not fail to tell a story and amuse audiences.

Consider what information actually needs to be conveyed visually. It probably doesn't have to be anywhere near as elaborate as the art in games coming out of more established studios.

platz• 8 years ago

what do you think of a game like Cuphead?

stcredzero6• 8 years ago

My current gaming passion is Heat Signature, which is a "rogue-lite" along the lines of FTL, which was my previous gaming passion. Both of those replace the roguelike turn based mechanic with a "hit space to pause" mechanic which also lets you set up awesome combos.

i_am_nomad• 8 years ago

Just watched the trailer for it: that game looks outrageously, supernaturally fun, which is why there is no way in hell I'm going to buy it. I'd have no self control.

CocaKoala2• 8 years ago

One time, I was playing Heat Signature and I was doing the final mission for a character (Characters have personal missions they can accomplish, which are much harder than normal missions and can give you special rewards). I had two useful weapons: an acid gun that would kill enemies by burning the flesh from their bones, and something called a Glitch Trap. You can place glitch traps at your feet, and if any enemies walk over them, it will disable any electronics they're carrying; this means that their shields will be disabled, and they won't be able to call for help on the radio.

The ship I was assaulting had about thirty people on it, a fairly large crew, but in my first attempt at breaking in, I was able to kill the captain of the ship. This is significant because if the captain is dead, the ship can't flee to an enemy station.

Everybody on the ship had electronic shields and armor, but they were only armed with concussive weapons; a concussive weapon will knock you out, but not deal any permanent damage.

It ended up being a horror movie in space. I'd attach my pod to the ship and board them, drop the glitch trap at my feet, and then get spotted by an enemy. They'd knock me out, pick up my body, and eject me into space, and I'd have to remote-control my pod to pick my body up so that I could board again. But crucially, when the enemy picked me up, the glitch trap disabled their shield! So now I'd board the ship, stalk and skeletonize the poor crewmember who found me last time, and then go get seen by another person so that I could glitch trap my body.

Eventually, people are carrying my unconcious body past like fifteen skeletons of their former crewmates, futilely dumping my body into space in the hopes that they'd be rid of me, and then I'd return to kill again, like the horror monster that just won't die.

When I finally killed everybody on the ship, I took what i came for and left a derelict ship filled with skeletons floating in space forever, and then retired and passed on the acid gun to somebody else.

Heat Signature is a fun game.

JCSato• 8 years ago

Tom Francis (the heat sig developer) also made Gunpoint, which while not a rogue like is still a fantastic little game (and has a bunch of user built levels). Would highly recommend.

tralarpa• 8 years ago

Writing a small roguelike is the task that I use to learn/test new languages. Mine is a very simple one: you can just move the player and open doors and there are some monsters running around. But it uses bitmap graphics and things are moving in real-time [0], so it's an example covering some interesting aspects of a language and its libraries (and IDE).

[0] With real-time I mean that it is not turn based, unlike most roguelikes. It uses a future event list with time-stamped events that are waiting to happen.

dkordik• 8 years ago

Do you have any of those examples pushed up to Github/Bitbucket/etc? Would be cool to see

shermanyo• 8 years ago

I'd be interested to check out a couple examples too

stevekemp• 8 years ago

The roguelike-dev subrredit is a great resource, especially their FAQ-posts:

https://www.reddit.com/r/roguelikes/comments/8loa8x/three_ye...

Mentioned in the post, but worth highlighting more.

forkandwait• 8 years ago

Is there a roguelike engine?

meritt• 8 years ago

Most tend to use libcotd: https://bitbucket.org/libtcod/libtcod/src

Impossible2• 8 years ago

Squidlib is also popular and has a lot more functionality in terms of level generation. https://github.com/SquidPony/SquidLib.

earenndil• 8 years ago

There is t-engine[1]. Ultimately, though, there's not so much that an engine can offer to a roguelike. Many use libraries such as SDL, bearlibterminal[2], or tcod for graphics, but aside from that most things are hand-rolled.

1: https://te4.org/te4

2: http://foo.wyrd.name/en:bearlibterminal

wild_preference4• 8 years ago

I started building grid-based ASCII-art roguelikes thinking it would be an easy way to enter gamedev. Next thing I know I've spent all my allocated freetime over many weeks trying to implement a good line-of-sight/fog-of-war!

The most naive solution (tracing a line to each tile and checking for collision) introduces weird artifacts, like illuminating a single cell 8 tiles away from a window when you're 45 degrees away from the window, that I couldn't persevere through the temptation of getting that perfect.

Then I realized this is just a taste of why all gamedev is hard. Is $GameMechanic going to be more fun implemented like $this or like $that? Well, you can't just git-branch and try both because both options are non-trivial. And it's easy to procrastinate by working on things off the critical path of finishing the game because that is what's hard.

Turns out it involves an impressive amount of visionary power + ability to laser-focus on the Hard Stuff That Matters to build a game. And I'll always respect the super heroes out there that are able to finish one. I suppose it's not so different from writing a book.

crooked-v• 8 years ago

When it comes to exact interactions with tile edges and measurements, you might want to take a look at the D&D 3.5 player's handbook (or Pathfinder, which is a derivative of it). The combat rules have a ton of thought put into line of effect and line of sight measurement, how to measure circular radii in squares, how things interact with multi-square creatures, etc.

wild_preference4• 8 years ago

Great advice, I hadn't considered that.

One resource I used was: http://roguebasin.roguelikedevelopment.org/index.php?title=C...

Check out recursive shadow-casting. Had the best results of all the implementations I tried.

User23• 8 years ago

I had the exact same issue with raycasting, and at the time there weren't really any good online resources that I could find.

robertAngst• 8 years ago

this is just a taste of why all gamedev is hard.

I feel like everything is easy, until it isnt.

CSS is easy, until you have one tiny annoyance on a front page feature.

Embedded is easy, until you need to buy a component that works only 99% of the time.

Full Stack is easy until you finally connect the front end and backend's auth.

Automation is easy until there is an update and it breaks your program.

All of this stuff is preventable with time/effort, but someone needs to do it.

There is a reason that I've started multiplying my estimates by 3, then by another 3 because getting a working system is good, but getting a perfect system is necessary.

jungler2• 8 years ago

Of course, the original Rogue game had an elegant design solution: Rooms are fully visible when you enter them. Passages have a simple distance fog. Some rooms are marked "dark" and also use distance fog. And you can only shoot in the same directions you move in so there is no raycasting needed for projectiles either.

You can implement a solution like that in a few hours and move on. And that's how it tends to work as an experienced game dev: you don't commit to any "real solution" until at least the second go-round, cause you need the context of the whole design to do it properly anyway.

wild_preference4• 8 years ago

That's a good example too of how the best option for a game (which is supposed to be fun) can amount to a hand-tuned game-specific solution despite the temptation I think most of us have as developers to come up with generalized solutions.

Maybe your LoS algorithm sucks with 1x1 columns and windows, so decide your game doesn't need them and you move on.

Kind of like how the classic mistake you hear about among gamedevs is that they built a game engine instead of the game, basically the end result of constantly following the siren's call of "I'll just generalize this."

Pulcinella• 8 years ago

you don't commit to any "real solution" until at least the second go-round, cause you need the context of the whole design to do it properly anyway.

Or you just don’t commit to a “real solution” ever. Nothing is more permanent than ‘temporary.’ =P

xsmasher• 8 years ago

This sums up the gameplay side of game development pretty well: the best solution has no relation at all to the 'correct' solution.

vvanders2• 8 years ago

Yeah, that's why I loved that industry. A million hard problems to solve. Along that lines Real Time Collusion Detection[1] is solid gold for a lot of these types of spatial issues. It's basically data structures for gamedev.

Aside from the fun problems the rest of that industry can die in a fire. The basic business model is to prey on people's passion so that they pour themselves into the job for 3-5 years and then burn out leaving open a slot for the next poor soul who signs up. There's an occasional studio that has a sane workload but I'd hazard they're less than 3% of the industry. Plus they usually are gone in 5-7 years when the market shifts(10% of the market captures 90% of the sales).

Building stuff in your spare time is the only sane way to spend time in that space as far as I'm concerned, otherwise you're setting yourself up for a world of pain.

[1] http://realtimecollisiondetection.net/

taneq• 8 years ago

Aside from the fun problems the rest of that industry can die in a fire. The basic business model is to prey on people's passion so that they pour themselves into the job for 3-5 years and then burn out leaving open a slot for the next poor soul who signs up.

Fellow ex-gamedev confirmed. :P

I ended up in robotics / industrial automation. Many of the same challenges without the issues. Plus, giant robots! Like, real ones.

ninjakeyboard• 8 years ago

This was a very inspiring talk - makes me want to try. Thanks!!

themodelplumber• 8 years ago

I can't recommended starting with a paper & pencil game highly enough. I did this myself recently and _actually got somewhere_, in contrast to the many times I had started with the computer programming part.

Here is my first result:

https://www.friendlyskies.net/notebook/free-pen-paper-rpg-ga...

It isn't amazing or anything, just a downloadable PDF with rules--but it's mine, I learned how to do it, and I love getting clobbered every time I play. I can also very easily see how to program it should I decide to do so.

Herodotus38• 8 years ago

There is a good, supportive community at https://www.reddit.com/r/roguelikedev with lots of links to libtcod tutorials. I love playing roguelikes, and although my attempts to make them have only gotten to the "move @ around the (non-procedurally generated) map" stage, I like reading posts there.

yc-kraln• 8 years ago

I made a simple roguelike for Ludumdare not too long ago. Here's the code: https://github.com/kraln/rougish

Simple, but fun :)

lostphilosopher• 8 years ago

Any book recommendations out there on this subject?

paulproteus• 8 years ago

I'm one of the volunteer organizers of the Roguelike Celebration <https://roguelike.club/> where Josh Ge gave this talk. Thanks Josh for making it to the conference! For other readers, you might want to visit the conference website and stay in touch for updates about next year's event! :)

How to Make a Roguelike

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