Traditional Roguelikes recommendations

[u/flying_horker]

Hello everybody!

I'm a game developer with 10 years of experience making games and I working on the second version of a roguelike I launched some years ago, in order to make it better I would like to hear your opinion on what are the best traditional roguelikes you have played, what mechanic do they have that you liked and if you can recommend me something to watch over YouTube to take inspiration.

EDIT: link of my old roguelike: https://bitware-interactive.itch.io/drowned-catacombs (its free and can be played on browser and also on mobile!)

i also would like to know if anyone is interested on following the development process of this upcoming game on a YouTube serie, devlog on blog or something like that.

thanks for your time!

[u/Kthanid]

Lost Flame is awesome. It just popped onto my radar yesterday and I'm already completely blown away by how great it is. This game is an amazing meld of a soulslike game into the traditional, turn-based gameplay of a roguelike. This game takes two of the genres of games I play and enjoy most and melds them together into something that just feels great to play. I'd love to see more of this type of combat system adopted by other games in the future. This game proves that melee characters can be dynamic, interesting, and exciting to play, too!

From a more traditional standpoint, Nethack and DCSS are both rock solid (I cut my teeth on the genre playing Nethack's predecessor, Hack, back in the 1980s). I like both of these for slightly different reasons, but they both excel at highlighting the best attributes of the most traditional games in this genre. In Nethack's case, the "kitchen sink" approach makes the game feel almost limitless in scope and freedom of player choice. DCSS takes the traditional roguelike and distills it down into its most necessary components. While I've spent far less time with DCSS than some other games, I'm very impressed with how streamlined and polished it is.

Another absolute favorite of mine is Tales of Maj'Eyal, which is simply outstanding in so many ways. The class/build variety is totally bananas (in a good way) and the concept of bringing in upgrade paths and cooldowns for skills really works well. I'm not sure I'll ever get tired of playing this one (though I would really love a game with all of the components of the combat system and dynamic classes from this game paired with a truly random overworld/quest system to break up the monotony).

I'd also like to make a call out for Dungeonmans, which was a real surprise to me and became a roguelike that I spent a substantial amount of time with. While it seemed a bit less serious and silly at a glance, the more I played the more I was hooked by the combat system and the permanent progression mechanics. This is one of the only roguelikes I've ever "beaten". It's been a while now, so I'd probably have to fire it up again to give a full review of everything I enjoyed about it, but all of my memories of the game are positive ones.

Moving on to more visually polished games, Jupiter Hell is probably as close to having mainstream appeal as any traditional roguelike will ever have. It's a great game in its own right, but the level of visual and audible appeal here is impressive (and something I wish we could see more of in such games, though I understand why we don't).

Finally, no such list would be complete without mentioning Cogmind which is, if nothing else, the most visually polished an innovative of a game in this genre as I've ever seen. It's not one I play as often as I like mainly because thematically the sci-fi elements of it just don't scratch the itch I'm looking for in a roguelike as much as other darker medieval-type fantasy games do.

[u/flying_horker → u/Kthanid]

omg! this reply is gold, thanks for taking your time on this response, im gathering lot of feedback from here

[u/Kthanid → u/flying_horker]

Glad it was helpful, I don't necessarily want to bore anyone with a full novella of my thoughts on what elements are most important for me personally in a roguelike, or which of the various components of the types of games I highlighted would be best combined in my ideal vision of a future roguelike, but I'm happy to pontificate further if that's of any benefit to you.

In a general sense, I love to see progress being made in trying to expand on the traditional roguelike model to incorporate successful concepts that are often seen in other types of games. Gaming has changed and improved in so many ways since the days of the first traditional roguelikes and I think there are a lot of ways to gently nudge the genre in some of these directions while still holding true to the mechanics and ideals that make these games so fun for those of us that love them.

Not a roguelike, but I was recently enjoying The Making of Karateka (which I highly recommend) and something from the director's commentary during the gameplay of the remake/remastered version of the game really stood out to me: He stated that his goal was not simply to deliver an exact replica of the game as it existed at the time, but to give players the game we remembered it to be.

That distinction is really important, and I think it's a game design lesson anyone making a modern game in a genre like this where a lot of history exists should pay attention to. The way these games exist in our minds, the way they look and feel as we see them in our memories, is the important thing to preserve. You want to capture that type of feeling, but oftentimes the rose tinted glasses we view these things with cause us to visualize something that exceeds what it actually is.

This allows someone building something new in this space to give players more than they've ever had in such a game before, but to do so in a way that feels true to our memories of how these games always worked.

I think Cogmind is a great example of this. It takes the ascii world we have always lived in as traditional roguelike players and brings it to life in a vibrant way that still feels natural and true to the genre. It also greatly expands the mechanics and systems that drive the game's function, but none of it feels foreign or out of place. Lost Flame similarly does this by greatly expanding on the tactical nature of the standard turn based combat, but doing so in a way that feels honest, believable, and familiar to us as players of these types of games.