
To do in San Francisco this weekend: the first-ever roguelike celebration - jere
https://roguelike.club/schedule.html
======
britta
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
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.

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jere
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!

~~~
versteegen
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?

~~~
jere
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.

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

[0] [https://roguelike.club/](https://roguelike.club/)

~~~
phlyingpenguin
To be fair, I've had [http://roguelike.club](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.

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fjarlq
Streaming for track 1 and track 2:

[https://www.twitch.tv/roguelike_con](https://www.twitch.tv/roguelike_con)

[https://www.twitch.tv/roguelike_con2](https://www.twitch.tv/roguelike_con2)

------
forkandwait
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...)

~~~
JoshTriplett
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.

~~~
bkcooper
_...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.

~~~
JoshTriplett
> At some point, though, it started to feel like a lot of what the dev team
> considered tedium I considered fun, and vice versa.

What kinds of things got dropped that you liked?

~~~
thaumasiotes
I don't like the hunger clock.

~~~
wtbob
Seconded. It's nothing more than a nuisance, but one has to constantly carve
up carcasses just in case, and constantly drop rotten meat. Not fun.

~~~
thaumasiotes
Just to be clear, there are two things going on:

1\. Your character gets hungry periodically and needs to be fed. I'll refer to
this as the "hunger system"; I don't really have so much of a problem with it,
although I wouldn't be sad to see it go either.

2\. The amount of food in the game is _finite_. This is the hunger clock. If
you take too much time in any one area, you will starve because there is no
more food available; the only way to get more food is to move into a
dangerous, uncleared area, and you'll need to spend that food exploring the
new area. I'd like to be able to play slowly and carefully if I want to.

------
Merem
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.

~~~
rogual
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/](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
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.

------
vanderZwan
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/cogmind/)

[http://www.gridsagegames.com/blog/](http://www.gridsagegames.com/blog/)

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

Full of history and comedy.

------
JauntTrooper
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-...](http://www.old-
games.com/download/3974/jaunttrooper-mission-thunderbolt)

~~~
ddp
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.

~~~
JauntTrooper
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. :)

~~~
ddp
No, I think that was his only game. I never completed the game on the Mac, I
think it was a little beyond where Doom was on VMS when DEC fell apart. Yes,
it was always a good week when a Dave released a new version. Working at DEC
was really quite special looking back. More like being in grad school, really.

------
poshli
Direct link in stream to Dwarf Fortress talk

[https://www.twitch.tv/roguelike_con/v/89873769?t=278m](https://www.twitch.tv/roguelike_con/v/89873769?t=278m)

------
kqr2
Looks like they are sold out as ticket sales are ended. How much were the
tickets originally?

~~~
jere
$20-$45. $20 was probably the early bird.
[https://www.eventbrite.com/e/roguelike-celebration-
tickets-2...](https://www.eventbrite.com/e/roguelike-celebration-
tickets-26125753833)

------
poshli
Direct link in stream to ADOM talk

[https://www.twitch.tv/roguelike_con/v/89873769?t=351m](https://www.twitch.tv/roguelike_con/v/89873769?t=351m)

------
personjerry
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" :(

------
Grue3
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?

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

~~~
WalterSear
Twitch streams

------
qwertyuiop924
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_.

~~~
agentgt
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).

~~~
qwertyuiop924
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.

~~~
agentgt
Totally agree with the landscape (SF) and the bookstores (Cambridge).

I love hobyy/game stores as well (we have one in Waltham as well as many in
Cambridge).

I hope they do this as on the east coast some time. I'm a long time ADOM and
Crawl player. I really only play rogue like computer games. I would post links
to my crawl profile but it is rather embarrassing how much time I have spent
playing crawl. I'm sad to miss this event.

~~~
qwertyuiop924
I'm embarassed by how much time I _haven 't_ spent playing nethack. I mean, I
haven't even gotten below about L5. I need to up my game :-).

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

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

~~~
kbenson
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.

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

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

------
SubiculumCode
angband zandband sangband I died in them all.

------
dang
Url changed from [http://boingboing.net/2016/09/16/to-do-in-san-francisco-
this...](http://boingboing.net/2016/09/16/to-do-in-san-francisco-this-
we.html), which points to this.

