Free Roguelike Giveaways for the Holidays on the Roguelike Steam Group!

The Roguelike (RGLK) Community Group on Steam is giving away 3 free Steam games for the holidays!  How do I know?  Because I'm the one giving them away!

The games are "Hack, Slash, Loot" (item), "Dungeons of Dredmor" (item) and "The Binding of Isaac+Wrath of the Lamb DLC" (redeemable code).

All you have to do to win, is have a Steam account (register for free), join the group and wait for Christmas!

http://steamcommunity.com/groups/roguelike

Winners will be drawn randomly.  If you have a preference, put it on your wishlist!  If you already own all these games, you'll be skipped and another number will be drawn.  Winners will be announced after all prizes are successfully claimed.

Aside from that benefits of joining the group include announcements, discussions, events and contests related to Roguelike-ry as well as a community of players who share a similar love of exploring dungeons and being killed by that horse on the 7th floor when I tried to feed it an apple!  Seriously, what's up with that?

I'm not making any money or raking advertising dollars in off this so the only thing I have to gain is more souls to offer up to Huan Ti in my continuing search for the Amulet of- I mean nothing...absolutely nothing to gain...at all.

Merry Dungeoning!

Holiday greetings, fellow Rogues!

In case you're not aware, there are currently a lot of great sales on Steam for Roguelike games, including Hack, Slash, Loot, The Binding of Isaac, Krater, Dungeons of Dredmor and FTL (Faster than Light).  Of those games, you'll probably find HSL to be the most traditional roguelike of the bunch.

Also, Humble Bundle 7 is currently on sale for 11 more days and it's full of dungeoning goodness!

It includes 2 platform/puzzle titles Snapshot & Closure, Shank 2 ( a 2D BeatemUp), Indiegame: The Movie (a documentary film), The Binding of Isaac (a non-traditional Roguelike) and if you pay more than the average (about $6.41 atm) then you also get Legend of Grimlock, a 3d dungeon crawler as well as Dungeon Defenders along with all the DLC packs!

http://www.humblebundle.com

Steam fans, be sure to check out our Roguelike (RGLK) community/group on Steam for Roguelike news, discussions, giveaways and contests!  And remember, you gotta be in it to win it!  So join our Steam group today!  I'm not saying there might be some holiday giveaways but...there might be some holiday giveaways...know what I mean?  All you have to do...is be a member.

http://steamcommunity.com/groups/roguelike

Diablo 3 and...well...just Diablo 3.

There has been a lot of talk lately as gamers get all antsy in their pantsy about Diablo 3's upcoming release date, May 15th.

Aside from Diablo 3 and the occasional and non-life-changing updates and patches to various RLs around the "internets", there hasn't been a whole lot of news on the Rogue-front.

While Diablo 3 has been the subject of much hype and fan-boy salivation there are those who aren't too enthused about the real money "Auction House".

Many beta testers have in fact lamented that there is a disctint drop in decent loot in Diablo 3.  It sounds to me like they have increased the "grinding" on Diablo 3 to a God-like level or what you may also know as Every-Korean-MMORPG-Ever-Made.  It makes sense of course to avoid market saturation but it sounds like the odds are in the casino's favor more than they are in yours.

Blizzard's take from auction sales has also been criticized.  Blizzard charges a dollar for you to post the item, regardless of whether or not it sells.  For stackable items they take a 15 percent cut on all sales.  Alright!  You finally sold something and want to transfer it to your PayPal?  Blizzard takes a 15 percent cut on top of that!  Then of course you have to pay the PayPal transaction fee as well.  So if you're selling commodities it will cost you a dollar plus 30 percent of the sale to post, sell an item and pull the money out.  For non-stackable items it will cost you a dollar plus 15 percent to post, sell and pull out your greenbacks.

You can find out more about the auction house drama here at Gamespot.

Server Regions are separated into 3 categories, Americas, Europe and Asia.  To give you an idea of the lumping going on here the Americas includes US, Canada, Latin America, Australia, New Zealand and Southeast Asia.  Europe includes Eastern Europe, Russia, Africa, Middle East and UAE.  Asia includes South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau.

Talk about one of these not being like the other.  I'm expecting there to be some serious server division and possibly some straight up hate between some players.

There is something called Global Play which will allow players to Region jump to play with their friends but you basically only get to take yourself and won't be able to transfer any items between Regions because God knows, if a US player took a glowing, purple sword from a South Korean player and brought it back to the Americas server the whole world would implode.

And as some added last minute disappointment D3 will not ship with PVP and supposedly Auction House will take at least a week before it's up and running in the Americas and longer in other regions.

So in other words, get ready for the release! ...and then get ready to continue beta testing it.

Game on!

7DRL 2012 Ends!

7DRL, the 8th annual challenge to make a complete roguelike (aka dungeon crawler) game in just 7 days is over now.  There were no places or prizes awarded.  Possible e-fame and a sense of accomplishment were the only real prizes.

There still isn't an official tally of the total number of entries, winners and not-so-winners as announcements are still being made and some are crawling out of the woodworks.  However, Björn Ritzl has posted a nearly complete list of entries, successes and failures over at the Peeks and Pokes blog.

There's a number of interesting (and FREE!) games to check out and for those that didn't quite make the deadline there are still some promising titles that will continue to be developed in hopes of a late release.

Check out the latest news at the official 7DRL page.

7DRL 2012 nears 50 entries with 3 days left!

With 3 days and some change left in 7DRL's 8th Annual challenge to make a Roguelike game in 7 days, competition entries are nearing 50!

I suspect we'll see some more Roguelikes pop up by or before the compo ends on the 18th. There are already what look to be some unique and interesting entries in the competition as well as a fair number of first timers to the competition.

To recap, there are no official prizes or places for 7DRL. If an entrant completes their game with the 7 days, then they have "won". There is only e-pride and e-fame at stake here but either way the outcome is fun and brings with it a ton of new Roguelike games and open source code sharing which is great for both players and developers.

Stay tuned to 7DRL news when on Sunday we find out, which games make the cut and who gets crowned as the next...IRON CHEF!
(Sorry, the wife was watching the Food Network last night.)

MarioRL: But our princess is in another castle!

I'm working on MarioRL right now as my entry in the annual 7DRL contest.  7DRL is a programming competition that takes place annually.  The goal is to make a finished, playable Roguelike (aka dungeon crawler) game in 7 days.

There aren't any actual prizes or places.  If you finish your game in the allotted 7 days, you're a winner basically.

There are a lot of great roguelikes based on other games such as DoomRL, CastlevaniaRL, ZeldaRL and so on.  I realize a Mario themed anything isn't incredibly original but it hit me this weekend that no one has ever made a roguelike based on Super Mario Bros, a game ripe for rogueliking.  I mean, you travel through various dungeons, fighting monsters trying to rescue a princess.  A little cliche sure but perfect!

I'm using GM:HTML5 which I just purchased last week so I'm not sure how great of an idea that was but I'm rapidly learning the GML scripting language.  GM:HTML5 does have drag and drop game creation but for something like a roguelike game you definitely have to use the scripting language.

It's similar to Java or C++ in a way and while I'm no expert in either, I'm picking it up fairly quickly.

With any luck, I'll have a playable game by the contest's deadline and once that's over, I'll take my tune polishing and fine-tuning it.

And of course, here are some screenshots:

Developer Bulletin: Unity 3.X, Android and IOS free until April 8!

Developer Bulletin:

Unity is an award winning, cross platform game development tool and they've got a great offer going on right now.  Even if you're not a Unity user, haven't used Unity before I highly recommend you snatch this up while it's free and decide later!

If you want to know the differences between the free version of Unity and the mobile basic package take a look here to compare features.


From Unity's official Facebook/Twitter:

We are excited to offer you Unity Mobile Basic for FREE! The offer is valid through April 8, download now and save up to $800! https://store.unity3d.com/

7DRL Approaches! 10 - 18 March 2012

The annual 7DRL competition is nearly upon us.  For the uninitiated, 7DRL is an annual competition to make a finished, playable roguelike game in 7 days.

This year's 7DRL will run from Saturday, March 10th to Sunday, March 18th.

There are no places, medals or prizes save for bragging rights and interwebs fame.  The goal of the contest is simply to make a finished game within the time frame.  If you achieve that then you can consider yourself a winner.

You can find out more about 7DRL and it's history here and at their official site.

The folks at 7DRL have posted some contest ideas here and there's also a discussion here if you'd like to join in.

Feast your eyes on the new DoomRL!

For those newcomers to the Roguelike genre who are still put off by text mode games there is now officially not a single damn reason not to download and play DoomRL...right BLEEPing now!

DoomRL has long been heralded as a Top 10 Roguelike but the lastest release finally brings a long lusted after graphical interface to DoomRL.

This new release is best described as a Doom inspired wet dream bathed in the blood of demon corpses.  In addition to graphic tiles it now also features an updated user interface and mouse support.

It's available for Windows, Linux and Mac so stop reading this article right now and go check it out at the official DoomRL website before they run out of bandwidth!

Planet Roguelike MIA

The Elderlore website has been down for sometime now and along with it, Planet Roguelike a massive roguelike news aggregator.

In the absence of Planet Roguelike, I'm trying to rebuild an uber Roguelike RSS Feed featuring articles about RL News & Development.

Just click on Planet Roguelike at the top of the page to check it out.  If you have roguelike feeds to suggest you can leave a comment on the page.

You can also check out RogueTemple forum user Britzl's Roguelike Feed Aggregator on Yahoo Pipes which keeps tabs on a number of popular Roguelikes.

Everyday I'm Dungeonin'

It turns out it wasn't entirely feasible to keep a daily log of all my Nethack adventures since I don't live with my mother...

So I figure instead of just blogging about my droll Nethack adventures why not blog about about my love of Rogue/Roguelike games in general?

So yeah...that's what I'll do.

Also, thanks to BilliamBabble for the great dungeon wall-wallpaper.