

My Philosophy and the Tale of 100 Rogues - rcfox
http://expensiveplanetarium.blogspot.com/2010/11/my-philosophy-and-tale-of-100-rogues.html

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jcromartie
Great philosophy on game design. RPGs generally suffer from terrible game
design, and they get away with it because of their audience. Big sprawling RPG
video games strive to be as complicated as their paper counterparts, and
that's exactly what players are looking for; at least the traditional RPG
market.

They're the Perl of video games.

I picked up Oblivion (a few years late) and am kind of turned off by what
seems to be a complete lack of attention to the player's experience. All of
the work went into the world and game system. The environment, items, spells,
NPCs, AI, towns etc. are all the focal point of the game and NOT the gameplay
or the interactions that are part of playing the game. Swinging a sword feels
like no action at all. Swinging a sword and hitting an enemy is _completely_
anticlimactic, as there is no feedback other than perhaps some audio and the
enemy health bar decreasing. Most RPGs suffer from this lack of visceral or
juicy feedback.

As for the situation on the App Store; when "perusing various games on the App
Store ... 'unimpressed' is a severe understatement" is my sentiment as well.
But the tricky thing is that the _successful_ games/apps are not always the
best. It doesn't necessarily require taste, principles, or even a huge effort
to get a smash hit.

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angrycoder
Whats stunning is how little the author knew/knows about the genre he jumped
into.

"We had been playing this interesting indie game "POWDER" ... but at the time,
I had no idea that POWDER was just the tip of a massive, 30 year old iceberg -
the Roguelike genre (here's the wikipedia page on Roguelikes, if you aren't
familiar)."

Which is surprising, but understandable.

However, this:

"Along the way, I also got very into "Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup", which while
it is a fantastic game, the original author, Linley, was not very disciplined
about throwing things into his game"

That is pretty much the exact opposite of why Dungeon Crawl was created.

~~~
quanticle
What struck me was that he was designing a rogue-like game, but he didn't know
about nethack. I mean, how can you claim to know about a genre if you can't
name the single most popular game in said genre?

~~~
rcfox
This might a good thing. Most roguelikes are fairly similar. This person's
lack of experience in the field may lead to innovations that would be lost in
the sea of familiarity.

~~~
quanticle
It might lead to innovations, but his lack of experience will be equally
likely to lead him to make mistakes that other rogue-likes found and fixed
years ago, especially in areas of game balance.

The classes in Nethack have been refined many years to be distinct, but equal.
That is, each of the classes has distinct strengths and weaknesses, but the
sum of the strengths and weaknesses is still roughly the same for every
character. This means that there is no "ideal" character for beating the game
- the ideal character depends on one's play style and the phase of the game
one is in.

For example, consider the barbarian class and the wizard class. The barbarian
class is great for hack-and-slash players, and is extremely strong early in
the game. However, high initial strength and lack of intelligence means that
the barbarian peaks early, and is at a disadvantage later on, when ranged and
magic attacks become more prevalent.

The wizard, on the other hand, is quite weak at the beginning. He starts out
with few supplies, no armor, and limited magic. However, his ability to learn
new spells and increased skill with thrown weapons means that the wizard
becomes quite a powerful character later on, surpassing the barbarian in most
cases.

These sorts of dichotomies are the sort of thing that really make games like
Nethack enjoyable. By ignoring previous works in the genre, this person avoids
mistakes, but also avoids a lot of the richness that adds to the depth and
replayability of his games.

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BoppreH
A "Game Designer" that has never heard of roguelike? But the game turned out
to look good.

And please, change the title to include "iPhone game" or similar, currently it
looks like a philosophy article in lesswrong style.

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highhardroad
I agree about adding iPhone/iPad to the post's title. It would make it more
clear. As for the his rogue-like "100 Rogues" game, I have found it to be rich
and engaging, terrific little game. Extremely persistent, solid support, from
the dev. It was worth the $5 for my iPad.

