Rogue Board Game

Philippe Lafortune (a.k.a The Geek Connoisseur), is a die-hard retro-gaming fan from Quebec who runs the RetroGamersHub community. Recently, he has been working on a side project to create a board game inspired by an old game called “Rogue”.

Rogue: The Board Game concept is an immersive and challenging board game that immerses players in a treacherous 10+ level deep dungeon labyrinth filled with dangers, treasures, and quests. As adventurers, you must navigate through a series of modular dungeon levels, each brimming with its own unique rooms, corridors, and secrets, capturing all the intricacies of a classic dungeon crawl. This can be played in either Solo or in a 2-4 player Co-op gameplay mode.

The project is on an early stage, as the geek is working on it “as time allows, amidst other priorities and responsibilities”. However, he informs us “a detailed rule book draft has already been meticulously crafted with all my ideas and its unique gameplay details.”

Initially, my idea revolves around developing a Roguelike Core Board Game Set, centered around the classic ‘Amulet of Yendor’ quest. However, I’m also planning other unique and diverse quest add-ons, offering more flexibility to interchange them as desired. These add-ons will enhance gameplay with new elements, creatures, magic weapons, armor, and various game items, accumulating between expansion packs.

Moreover, I’ve been documenting my ideas about gameplay mechanics, its details, and rules. My aim would be to create an engaging and adaptable gaming experience, designed primarily for solo adventures but also capable of accommodating 2-4 players in cooperative mode. Of course, rigorous game testing will be necessary to ensure a seamless and enjoyable experience in both scenarios.

The next step involves giving life to the game board artwork, crafting the various decks of cards planned, designing the game mat and reversible dungeon tiles, and dice, designing miniatures, finalizing the rules, and polishing up other graphical elements. I’m also in the process of creating a digital playable prototype using one of the tabletop simulators!

He has recently teased us with an homage to Rogue’s cover art. No, not THAT box art but the original B&W “Artificial Intelligence Designs” made for Rogue’s initial forays outside the mainframe world, back on 1983.

The original cover art and the colorized version

I’ve brought the original monochrome with a touch of red game artwork, from the pre-Epyx era, back to life with a full-color digital mockup. Although there are still a few tweaks to fine-tune, I’m quite satisfied with how it’s shaping up.

The best way to get updates about the project is to follow The Geek Connoiseur in Facebook. I will do my best to keep you updated as well!

I’ve kept a higher resolution copy of the recolored cover in the archive.

BONUS: Here’s a random musing from the very Michael Toy about the cover art

That’s pre-Epyx so that is me and Jon Lane and Mel Sibony who made up AI design, I think AI Design was, at the time of that box, running out of Jon and Mel’s house in Sunnyvale, in true Silicon Valley style.

After some time, they moved into more of an office located at 201 San Antonio Circle, Mountain View. Here’s some info I gathered from the very Glenn Wichman as well:

Yes it looked very different in the 80s. It used to be a mall and office park. John Lane probably knows the most about it. I’m pretty sure they tore down the building we were in.

As I recall they were subletting space from a guy who sold Unix servers. But it was all a long time ago.

Grog – a new small roguelike by Thomas Biskup

Thomas Biskup, the developer of ADOM, has just released “Grog”, a small and very traditional roguelike he has been developing on and off during the last years. Here’s the first-ever recorded gameplay of it; it’s a traditional roguelike to the bone, with some legit intense moments of despair, a rollercoaster of emotions.

Grog was born in 2018, Thomas was inspired to create it while playing rogue and some other very traditional roguelikes during the Roguelike celebration in San Francisco. We were using real terminals connecting to a PDP-11. He fell in love with the charming simplicity of these games.

Thomas started working on the game at his hotel, after the event, just trying to see how much of his idea of a game carrying the “simplicity and purity” of these games could be done on it for 7 days.

I was probably trying to convince him to do a 7DRL here, as we had sushi overlooking Alcatraz.

After this initial push, I believe he went on to all the work in Ultimate ADOM and his many other occupations; it wasn’t until next year’s roguelikecel that he let me know there had been some progress on it, and he even intended to release a version of it before the event started.

It was only until early 2022 that development was resumed. All the core aspects he set to do from the beginning are present in the current version: a small level count with a couple new monsters and a kind of special feature introduced on each.

From the beginning, this was a project that was meant to be more relaxed (and personal!) than the development of ADOM and uADOM. I hope you can enjoy it… get it now at https://roguelike.games/grog/ 🙂

7DRL Celebration and GDC meetup at Roguenet

There have been two further events using roguenet, the first one happened on July 8 with the occasion of the 7DRL reviewing committee finally finishing their reviewing work; the top 12 games by average score where showcased at the temple at another 1 day long celebration, similar to the previous 7DRL Expo.

For this event I managed to add a simple geocaching game, as well as a small but needed feature to know when one person was typing, to prevent awkward typing silences where you didn’t know if the conversation had died already (especially needed because of the private hangouts)

Sometime later, July 21 2021, I decided to use roguenet as a virtual venue for the yearly GDC roguelike meetup; this time I managed to include a big change in the chat feature for experimentation; the private hangouts where replaced with a “shout” kind of interface, where you didn’t have to start and join them but rather could hear whatever nearby people (within your sight) was saying.

In the end it seems a mixture of both conversation systems will be the best; we will only know until next event. I will continue developing roguenet for future events. If you are curious or want to help, you can always check the repo.

First 7DRL Expo @ RogueNet

March 25, 2021, we had the first ever 7DRL Expo at RogueNet.

The temple was set up to host the booths for 11 different roguelike projects, visitors were able to check a video of the 7DRL, and talk with their developers using roguenet’s unique chat interface.

Following the peculiarities of the 7DRL challenge, the event happened on a single day IN YOUR CURRENT TIMEZONE. I created a simple tool to schedule your timing to log into the expo, for increased chances of meeting with the developers of the games.

A new expo, featuring the top 10 7DRLs of 2021 and an improved version of roguenet, is planned to be organized as soon as the review committee shares their results.

Spoiler Alert: The 7DRL Expos are being organized in preparation of the first roguetemplecon, which I hope to run in Q3 2021.

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If you have anything worth sharing for the mailer daemon next week, please let us know via twitter @roguetemple with the #mailerDaemon tag!

Roguelike Celebration 2020

A report by slashie_

On October 3 and 4 2020, the fifth iteration of the Roguelike Celebration happened online. Last year I missed it (flying Medellín to San Francisco is expensive!) but I had no excuse this year.

The biggest novelty of the event was the MUD-like platform created by Em Lazer-Walker, who has been part of the organizer team for some years now. She describes it as a playful text-based online social chat space, a hybrid between communication apps like Slack and Discord and traditional text-based online game spaces such as MUDs and MOOs.

The main interaction window

The app was accessible via any decent web browser, and it integrated the different components of the online conference, including a virtual environment inspired by the physical spaces of previous years where you could move between rooms, pick up stuff, do fun stuff like dancing, and of course talk with the other people.

A map of the premises

The main sections of the event were the Theater, where the talks took place, the unconferencing lobby and rooms (6 of them) where people suggested and voted for topics and then were directed to Zoom conferences for live video chatting, and the showcase hall where different roguelike projects where on display. There were also lots of other rooms for socializing, and even a dance floor with cool music from the previous years and a bar where you could get the classic roguelikecel cocktails.

Having some polymorphic fun at the bar

The platform was also integrated with the almost non-stop video streaming, MCed by Alexei Pepers and Noah Swartz, and run in the background by Kawa. It included real-time high quality captioning made by Maggie of White Coat Captioning, and people could interact with the stream by posting questions or topics for discussion.

Some of the many talks

The main chunk of the event where the talks, of course, and this time there were a lot of them both full size and “lightning” (10 mins). following the same format as previous years (single track, two days), being online opened the possibility of having speakers from all around the world discussing a wide range of topics, from technical to more mundane.

The videos have yet to be posted in the Roguelike Celebration youtube channel, for now, you can find the raw streams there. The topics included game design, accessibility, a lot of procedural generation, community management, programming languages, roguelike history, and more.

Roguelike Wizard Darren Gray discussed What a Rogue is like, as his baby human quaffed a Potion of Tranquility.

Additionally, as in previous years, there was an interactive game (Help me Steal the Mona Lisa), where players could interact with the streamer, helping him hack devices to infiltrate museums and generate enough income for his character’s luxurious life.

Bundling some procedural generation elements, and a lot of “asymmetrical” cooperative multiplayer design, designed to increase engagement between streamers and viewers.

Finally, Noah (the creator of the event) announced this was his last year as part of the organizers’ team, as he has different requirements for his time these days. He shared how he had a hard time finding space and sponsors for the first event, and how now it has grown to have over 700 participants. He’s leaving the organization of future versions of the events in the capable hands of the other organizers who have done a great job so far.

/me claps, many thanks to Noah for creating this fun event!

See you next year at Roguelike Celebration 2021!

Important changes in the rules and structure of Roguetemple’s Forums. Direct actions have been taken.

Today I finally got to address things that were pending being addressed a long time ago in the forums.

  • The “Being Respectful” aspect in the Rules has been updated and extended, and an explicit section for “Executive” action in case the rules are not followed has been included as well. In the past, we have allowed certain disrespectful behavior that will no longer be tolerated.
  • This included banning particular accounts that had traditionally made the forums hostile and unwelcoming for new members. I’d like to personally apologize to everybody for this very late reaction, and I hope this serves as an example of our willingness to take direct action to make things better for the community.
  • I also included some parameters for the kind of content allowed, to make it clear we welcome discussion of non-traditional roguelikes and we discourage off-topic discussion.
  • The board structure was updated to reflect the new Content parameters.
  • I’m also in the process of updating the Theme (changed the background for now)

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Roguelike Celebration 2020 is happening!

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Roguelike Celebration is going to happen this year again! of course, due to things happening in the world, this year it will be a Virtual celebration.

Get ready for some awesome talks and Roguelike madness, October 3 and 4.

Our next celebration will be a virtual event on Saturday October 3 and Sunday October 4, 2020.

We’re planning to have live-streamed talks, so if you have an idea for a talk, submit a talk proposal!

A thing that we’ve loved about past Roguelike Celebrations is hosting activities that aren’t exactly “talks”, such as live speedruns, procedurally-generated comedy shows, and interactive live games. As we move virtual, we’d love to see even more things like this! If you’d like to present any sort of live activity that isn’t necessarily a “talk”, the CFP is also the right place for that!

A thing that we’ve loved about past Roguelike Celebrations is hosting activities that aren’t exactly “talks”, such as live speedruns, procedurally-generated comedy shows, and interactive live games. As we move virtual, we’d love to see even more things like this! If you’d like to present any sort of live activity that isn’t necessarily a “talk”, the CFP is also the right place for that!

We’re also working to expand our celebration beyond just live talks and performances. We don’t know yet what that will look like, but we’re thinking about things like commissioning articles for a roguelike zine, running a shop full of community-made swag, or hosting more experimental interactive experiences.

If you’re an artist, game dev, or otherwise make something that could end up as part of our conference, drop us a line at contact at roguelike.club.

 

As mentioned above, they are currently also accepting proposals for talks. So if you want to share something interesting related to roguelikes, either developing or playing them, send your pitch!