Is roguelike the indie crutch?Does it take more time and effort to design a level a specific way, or the roguelike way?I like roguelikes just as much as the next guy, but it seems that there may be a flooding of the indie scene with them in the nea

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Adventurer 12/29/14 (Mon) 08:24:44 No.435

Is roguelike the indie crutch?

Does it take more time and effort to design a level a specific way, or the roguelike way?

I like roguelikes just as much as the next guy, but it seems that there may be a flooding of the indie scene with them in the near future, with the success of Necrodancer, Spelunky and BoI:R.

Adventurer 12/29/14 (Mon) 08:33:11 No.436

your actual question is "are some specific roguelike mechanics an indie crutch" because none of those games you listed are roguelikes.

and to answer that question, yes. yes those mechanics the way they're being used by brain dead thick rimmed glasses wearing lumberjacks are nothing more than crutches.

Adventurer 12/29/14 (Mon) 09:13:37 No.438

In general, roguelikes are a genre for lazy developers. You don't have to care about graphics, handcraft levels and so on.
The thing is that roguelikes make up for this "laziness" by having more depth in gameplay mechanics, while pseudo-roguelikes are just this "laziness" slapped onto [insert genre here] without much thought.

Adventurer 12/29/14 (Mon) 11:26:36 No.439

>>438
They're not for lazy developers, the work simply lies elsewhere. They have to think up harder on gameplay concepts than on shiny graphics or a 3D engine.

Adventurer 12/29/14 (Mon) 18:22:21 No.444

>>438
Roguelikes are a pain in the ass to program.

Adventurer 01/03/15 (Sat) 00:54:15 No.486

>>435
It depends on the game in questioning and the direction the dev teams want with it.

Yes, roguelikes can be a crutch if your creative directors are complete retards and can't think of a storyline, so you concentrate on gameplay more and immersion / storyline less, adding the 'Permadeath' feature to justify not being able to keep a linear storyline with one single character.

Adventurer 01/06/15 (Tue) 02:27:13 No.514

No. Roguelikes are a fucking nightmare to code, and the complexity of a good roguelike requires extremely good design.

"Roguelike" is a title that gets attached to every piece of shit indie game that comes out these days because it's like some kind of hipster shit badge or something. But that doesn't mean we don't see good roguelikes come out of the indie scene. I mean Dredmor was pretty fun, and I still swear by Binding of Isaac. Hell even FTL was a good game, though calling it a roguelike is seriously wrong, considering it's basically Oregon trail in space.

If anything though, the roguelike trend in indie gaming has been a boon for us. It meant TOME got a lot more attention(not that it already wasn't) and that ADOM came back from the dead. Hell, just ADOM coming back was enough to make me forgive all the "roguelike" travesties of the past decade.

Adventurer 01/20/15 (Tue) 14:01:58 No.610

>>514
Ah yes, I actually like how the Rogue Legacy creators suggested "Rogue-lite" term for these games trying to be roguelikes and borrowing some elements like permadeath and randomization.

As for easy to create factor, well..
If you are an autistic coder with passion for procedural generation, roguelikes should be your thing, programmer art or even no visuals are forgiven by core audience. Otherwise, well, this might be painful to make!

Adventurer 05/13/15 (Wed) 23:03:05 No.1018

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>>435

You could say that slapping procedurally generated levels to a game that does not fully benefit from its inclusion is not a particularly smart design choice.

Designing systems that exhibit emergent behaviour through randomization and then balancing them to make playing them actually fun is a whole different beast from games with fixed-scenarios that can be polished while having to take into account only a handful of contexts in which their mechanics may be used in.

Balancing something as organic as a roguelike well is quite an involved task, which is the reason why they often boast ridiculously long development cycles compared to other games.