@Play 87: Interview with Josh Ge, Creator of Cogmind

Cogmind  (Steam link) is a unique roguelike game. It is generally in the traditional style, a turn-based map exploration game. The default graphics are done with tiles, but beneath them it even has the ASCII interface aficionados know and love.

As with many traditional roguelikes, there's a heavy emphasis on the items you find. In fact, the items are most of your character. Although you get the opportunity to upgrade the number of item slots each of your bot's four major areas, Power, Propulsion, Utility and Weapons, slots are useless unless there's something in them. And those items are often taking damage or wearing out, frequently requiring improvisation on the part of the player.

This interview with Cogmind's creator, Josh Ge, is nearly two years in the making! The possibility arose back at Roguelike Celebration 2016, but various things kept coming up. We finally concluded it mid-October 2018. Because of this, some of the information in the first section is somewhat out-of-date. Most of this interview was conducted over Twitter, with some email. It has been edited for publication.

This interview was first published in the fanzine Extended Play, available for free on its homepage and on the Internet Archive.

@Play 86: Interview with Dr. Thomas Biskup, Creator of ADOM

Although marketing and endless cloning have devalued the meaning of the term “roguelike” in recent years (most of which should be called “roguelites,” if even that), there are six games, I say, that should be considered the Major Roguelikes, the canonical ones, those that combine fidelity to the concept with popularity and size of player base: Rogue itself of course, NetHack, Angband, Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, Brogue, and ADOM, a.k.a. “Ancient Domains of Mystery.”

Of all of these, only the last two could rightly be considered the work of a single person. And of them all, only ADOM’s source code is not available to a curious player. (Rogue was never released as open-source, but the common variant Rogue Clone IV was.) Thanks to the 7DRL competition (“7-Day Roguelike”), thousands of people have made toy roguelikes of their own, but to create one on the scale of ADOM, a game arguably as complex as even mighty NetHack itself, is a terrific feat.

Fortunately, ADOM creator Dr. Thomas Biskup is both friendly and willing to talk about the game he has spent so much time and energy on, and recently spoke with us about both ADOM and its in-development sequel, Ultimate ADOM.

The first part of this interview was done about a year and a half ago. The second half was done recently, and is generally up-to-date. The whole has been trimmed somewhat and edited for publication.

John Harris: So, first question: How did ADOM get started?

Dr. Thomas Biskup: ADOM got started when I, during my days as a student of computer science, decided to learn a new programming language (C specifically). I learn best when I have some kind of project in front of me and at that time I had played games like DND, Rogue, Hack and NetHack (and seen Omega) and loved the genre. I was fascinated by the random generation parts as well as the single player exploration style of these games and felt I needed to understand how they work. So trying to use my growing C skills to that effect seemed natural. But when I started diving into the NetHack sources (which seemed to be the most detailed and thus most interesting candidate) I quickly learned how advanced and complicated those sources were. Which lead me to believe that it might be much simpler to write a game of my own. And it definitely seemed to be a lot more fun to figure things out for myself instead of spending many hours understanding the genius of others. So I started writing my own roguelike game, first trying to create a map, then figuring out how to dig tunnels, place the '@' on the screen and get it to move. All in all, things were a lot more complicated than I had expected, and so it about two years passed until, in summer of 1994, I finally has something in my hands that seemed like it could be the base for a working game. And that's the true (source code) roots of ADOM. Things started to progress a lot more quickly once I had figured out the real structure of what I wanted to build and so ADOM began to take form over the next two years that lead to initial releases and finally to the well-known and quite widespread game that ADOM is today.

Harris: Ah!  I've had a look at the NetHack sources myself and can vouch for the complexity, a lot of which comes from its having a lot of people work on it for such a long time, bolting on features here and there.  It's surprising that it holds together so well given its developement history!  I remember reading that NH 3.0 was the occasion of a big code cleanup, and the (then) recently released NH 3.6 was another such cleanup.

That has to be one advantage of working on a project largely by yourself, you don't have to worry so much about breaking something someone else has written, either technically or in design. Actually, that's an assumption on my part.  Do you have any help on developing ADOM now, or is it still largely yourself?

Biskup: Having a project of your own IMHO has several big advantages:
1. Your learning rate is exponentially higher compared to extending stuff other people have created. Because you need to figure out everything on your own.
2. You can more easily (or better: at all) realize your vision of how a game should be and feel. If you build on someone elses work lots of assumptions already will have been built into the game and if you don't like that stuff it's a hell lot of work (if at all possible) to get this stuff removed. Especially if you are getting into that project as a newcomer.
3. Forking an existing project probably will make you unhappy as you will have a hard time keeping up with ongoing work in the parallel project, both due to technical reasons (integrating parallel code changes can be impossible) and for design reasons (e.g. figuring out what all the minute changes all over the code mean and how they affect the vision behind your fork). And you'll always be compared to the original, which can be good and bad, but IMHO in the end distracts from your own design.

Team ADOM nowadays includes myself, as the maintainer and programmer for the core game and content; Jochen Terstiege, as the only other person worldwide with access to the ADOM sources, he's managing the build infrastructure, the Steam deployments, fixing programming bugs and working on the integration of sounds and NotEye and is a column of stability and quality for ADOM; Zeno, who's the genius behind NotEye and thus the reason for ADOM having graphics nowadays; Lucas Dieguez, who's our master composer and responsible for the incredible soundtrack that ADOM has nowadays; and Krzysztof Dycha, who's our head artist and Michelangelo, having single-handedly created each and every image in the graphical version of ADOM, literally the work of years.

So on one hand I'm still working alone on ADOM (e.g. the core game), on the other hand I'm part of the best team ever, as those guys are so immensely creative and resourceful that we keep pushing each other. I love working with each and everyone and believe that we have a lot of awesome stuff in store for the future.

Finally, there's our incredibly loyal, and once again growing, community. There are so many people out there that spark new ideas by using our bug/rfe database at http://www.adom.de/bugs and thus also help in evolving ADOM. The game wouldn't be what it is today without all these awesome people!

Harris: When I first played ADOM, I came to it from NetHack, which contains many references to classic Dungeons & Dragons, in its monsters and its story, as well as many literary and pop culture references. When I came to ADOM from there, I was taken aback a bit by how the game struck out on its own, largely with its own self-contained mythology and setting. Now, I think that setting is one of ADOM's strongest aspects. It seems to me now that part of the game is discovering the unusual, sometimes terrifically unusual, properties of items like the si, or all the herbs, or the many artifacts. Were these created specifically for the game, or do they draw from some other source, either outside or self-created?

Biskup: I would say that most of the content is "self-created" or "other-created" but inspired by a variety of existing sources. E.g. the general idea for corruption came from the Warhammer Fantasy Role-Playing Game with its notion of Chaos encroaching upon civilization. Andor Drakon as the god of Chaos goes back to an AD&D character of mine (1st/2nd edition), who started as an evil cleric worshiping a minor demon and at some point killed his god and managed to ascend to immortality. Imagine the original Andor Drakon in his immortal form a bit like Sardo Numspa from The Golden Child. The "si" also comes from a very long-running 1st AD&D campaign where a friend of mine and I played two dwarves, Gorko Galgenstrick and Groron Garman. One day my friend suddenly discovered a "si" in his hand-written equipment list and we had no idea how it got there. We made fun of it and months later we suddenly discovered a second "si" on this equipment list. From there the inside joke about a reproducing artifact started which in the end made its way into ADOM.

Many other details, like Aylas scarf, Brannalbins cloak and Rolf, come from characters I or friends played during D&D and AD&D campaigns.

Another huge part of influence have been the comments from the ADOM community over so many years. There are tons of awesome details that have been suggested directly or indirectly by fans of the game. I try to select those things that IMHO match the tune of the game best.

Finally, some parts have been created only for ADOM, especially the whole elemental mythology thing that is still evolving. The outlaw village, Terinyo, the black druid and such elements have been specifically created for ADOM.

So, all in all, its a big hodge podge of influences. The main criteria for inclusion being that I either am somehow emotionally attached to the various parts or that I just loved the suggestions or ideas of others so much that they needed to become a part of the game.

Harris: I like that, it gets in some of the community aspects of open source game creation, while allowing the source to remain closed and thus preserve some mystery for the players.

ADOM developed had to pause for a while.  Could you tell us why it ceased, when it picked back up, and give us a current status report?  It's on Steam now, how is that treating you?

Biskup: ADOM basically paused from 2001 to 2012. The reason behind it was real life. In 1998 I started working full time as my life as a student came to an end, which already ate up lots of free time, and by 2001 we founded a company, QuinScape. I'm still working their today with my two founding colleagues. We have more than 100 employees these days and are a healthy and experienced IT integrator. Founding a company takes so much energy, more than many people think, that my time with ADOM really deteriorated. Then in 2003/2004 I, for some reason, decided that my ego needed to see if I could do a PhD as a hobby project while building the company. So I started doing that during the early morning and late night hours. Then my then girlfriend and I decided to get married, which happened in 2009. Luckily she blackmailed me to finish my PhD by then.

But I was quite busy, to put it carefully. And I had started programming ADOM II (JADE) in Java as a kind of sequel. So I really just did neither have the time nor the inclination to work on ADOM and the longer you pause the harder it gets to come back. Luckily my very good friend Jochen Terstiege, who’s now part of Team ADOM, kept pestering me about doing more with it. And at some point in 2010 he showed me an iPad prototype he had started. (He had access to the sources because he had been doing lots of ports starting with the Amiga port from as early as 1996 or 1997).

That got me back up somewhat, and I restarted work on JADE after a kind of meditation about my hobbies during a vacation in Thailand in 2010. At that point I had been running four or five blogs, been writing various pen & paper RPGs. (I even got published in Germany with the only true world-wide pulp RPG magazine. I don't mean the RPG genre but the RPG format. Search for "Maddrax" and "Thomas Biskup" and you should be able to find some traces.) But I kept wondering: what am I looking for and in the end I noticed that I was looking for something that I already had found with ADOM: A great community to exchange ideas with and then put them into some kind of game.

So I said, "OK, let's scratch all that stuff and resume work on ADOM." Which let to the release of JADE 0.0.1 on the 2nd of July, 2011, which led to more polite pushing from Jochen. which led to us devising the ADOM crowdfunding campaign which started on the 2nd of July, 2012, and was quite successful giving us about $90,000 to work with. The money led to the formation of Team ADOM and the actual resurrection of ADOM development.

While we still have a couple of rewards to finish from the campaign (it's been a very long run), we are immensely proud on how ADOM has turned out in the past four years, with scores of soundtracks, amazing graphics, a modernized UI (although we can do so much more in that area) and so much new content.

The most recent high point has been the release on Steam in November 2015. This has opened up a new source of revenue, which is important. I yet have to earn a single dollar with ADOM. So far all the money is going into paying the Team members while I continue to work for free.

While initial sales have decreased overall sales still are on a good level that should allow us to continue for years to come we now are working in the next level. Which means: Finally getting done with the remaining crowdfunding promises and then moving into a bright future for ADOM. We have collected tons of awesome ideas but so far lacked the time to work on them since we mostly are focused on the crowdfunding stuff. It will be a kind of relief to have that done and be able to do create stuff more freely.

Just pick it up on Steam [http://www.adom.de/steam]. It's an awesome, yet difficult, game.

Harris: Wait, so you got your PhD?  I should be calling you Dr. Biskup then! And it's so great to hear ADOM's back up and running!

If you don't mind, I'd like to move more into game design issues. One of ADOM's most distinctive elements is the corruption clock, which replaces Rogue's food clock as the primary force pushing the player forward. While there are ways to counter it, I think it does a good job of forcing the player onward, especially since a few of the corruptions, such as Mana Battery and Poison Hands, have the potential to make the game much more challenging to play.  What inspired the idea?

Biskup: Yeah, I got a PhD. But only people that annoy me need to call me "Dr. Biskup," so you are safe.

Regarding corruption: I always loved Warhammer Fantasy Role-play, and how the chaos creatures sported various kinds of corruptions. I also loved how the Broo in Runequest were kind of randomly corrupted. And I always loved mutations in Gamma World. I'm a huge Gamma World fan and in ancient times I even ran the official Gamma World mailing list, when mailing lists still were the greatest thing on earth.

All this came together when thinking about corruptions. I always liked the phrase "power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." So I thought that it might be kind of cool to have something in the game that can make you more powerful but at the same time can cause all kind of trouble for you. (Don't ask me about my idea for chaos wizards and chaos necromancers as PC classes….)

As I also liked the idea of having an ongoing story in ADOM, I felt that the battle against Chaos might be more tangible due to a kind of lingering corruption effect that gets stronger over time. In the beginning it was not imagined to be a replacement/substitute/rival to the hunger system, but rather as something that connected you more closely to the overarching story.

The specific corruptions evolved from a mix of my ideas and things that were brought up by ADOM fans during those early golden days. Mana battery, if I remember correctly, is something that was brought up by one of the community people and I loved it so much that it had to be integrated.

Nowadays I love corruption as a rather unique mechanism to intertwine game design issues (the time clock you mention) and story issues (the world becoming a darker place). For ADOM II and ADOM III, if I ever were to do the latter, corruption would be a lot more prevalent in the overall world. Other beings and monsters also would slowly corrupt and degenerate, the weather would be more noticeably affected (it is affected by corruption in ADOM but probably nobody’s noticed), plants should mutate, and I have this vision of the world slowly turning into this purple corruption haze. Tentacles everywhere.

And I would love to add more means where you consciously have to trade power for corruption, such as a means for players to strengthen their spells by absorbing corruption. I love tempting people I guess.

[The following is the more recent portion of the interview.]

Harris: Have you tried D&D 5th edition yet?

Biskup: I actually own most of the books but haven't done much with it to be honest. I like what I see but I am a firm believer in simple skill systems and I am kind of angry about them for not even considering to do a simple standard skill system. And I was a little scared away because I thought that the very flat power curve doesn't nicely mirror the hero's journey I personally expect from D&D. There is just too little difference for me in the skill abilities of a 1st level fighter compared to a 20th level fighter.

But I really like how they otherwise smoothed the system. I hate 4th edition with a passion and 3rd just was too complex for my tastes.

Harris: Yeah, I hate lots of things about 4th edition. Two members of our group played a great deal of 3rd edition and are, by all accounts, experts at it. That made it very imposing to run. They know all the exploits, and so it was almost impossible for me to challenge them! In 3rd edition, it felt like I was either handing them a few XP, or handing them a ton of XP.

Biskup: I'm a 1st/2nd edition traditionalist, and actually there is yet another RPG I'm writing on the sidelines that collects all my house rules for my personal "perfect edition of (A)D&D." But who isn't these days?

The exploitation topic also is one of the things I disliked about 3rd edition. it just seemed to allow for far too much min-maxing for my tastes, and tended to lead people to search for optimal builds and stuff. I don't like that. I'm more into storytelling.

I like kind of crunchy systems nonetheless but I'm more into winging stuff when I am the GM. I need a kind of loose system of mid complexity. And complexity-wise, 2nd edition was perfect for me. We heavily used the skill system and were kind of loose with races and classes and that came pretty close to our favored style. Because we had enough crunch for the gaming side but mostly focused on the stories.

Harris: Yeah. I think there's less min-maxing in 5E, but it's still there. I've been working on a megadungeon to lead them through, it's been lots of fun for everyone.

Biskup: Mega-dungeons are an awesome topic. I really would love to do one of my own these days but sadly, with our recently born daughter, my already pressed schedule now is even worse.

It's an awesome idea, Castle Greyhawk kind of stuff. Like in the golden days of RPGs. I love that! I was so eager about the first part(s) published by Troll Lord Games, but sadly the trolls were to slow. And Gail Gygax somehow doesn't seem likely to do anything with the inheritance. A true shame.

I was at last years GEN CON, with all the special sessions on its 50 years. It was a mind-blowing experience meeting all the old legends and hearing them talk about the early days. Amazing days. I loved every minute, and got many nice pictures with them I'm such a fanboy. We actually plan to have some of them writing stories for Ultimate ADOM. I'm kind of excited about that and hope it all works out like we plan.

Harris: That must have been awesome. I never get to go to conventions, except for Dragon*Con, which happens to be relatively close to me.

Biskup: I have been to two GEN CONs but that's about all I do. We have the Spiel game fair over here in Essen. It's the largest gaming convention in the world for traditional board games. Sadly, RPGs these days are a minor topic there. But I have been to each and every Spiel since 1988. A great tradition I hope to keep up for many years. It's brilliant. And luckily just a 30 minute drive (roughly) from me.

Harris: I still can't help but think of ADOM as a new kid on the block, even after all this time, even though Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup and Brogue both came out after it and have been around for years. What do you think about those cocky upstart games? And how about the phenomenon of "rogue-lites," randomly-generated action games inspired by roguelikes?

Biskup: I personally think the problem with ADOM is that it had this long pause in the middle. That's IMHO why it sometimes feels young and ancient at the same time.

Harris: Considering how long NetHack's pauses are, I think you have no need to feel insecure there.

Biskup: I still remember when Dungeon Crawl took it's first steps and Linley started showing the source code. It was a brilliant mess. I was kind of wowed by all the things he did but kind of scared by the way how he coded it. I am highly impressed by what these games achieved and how many innovations they introduced.

Games like Brogue and DCSS are really inspiring to me. They urge me to hopefully push the boundaries even further with Ultimate ADOM. It's great to see such games because IMHO they are very important in keeping the roguelike flame alive. And I love how alive the scene feels. So many people working on innovative games. It's just great how procedural generation, permadeath, randomized game settings and stuff are more and more becoming mainstream.

I also kind of like rogue-lites, although they aren't my personal favorite. But it's interesting to see roguelike principles being applied to other gaming genres. What I hate is the kind of confusion that seems to get created in the wake. Many studios seem to enjoy trying to derive marketing benefits by calling their games roguelike, although they really aren't. That's kind of annoying. But it's a personal pet peeve and probably doesn't matter to the world.

So overall, I'm happy to see so many roguish activities and feel both inspired and challenged by them.

Harris: Yeah, it seems like half the games on Steam these days claim to be roguelike.

Biskup: It's really bad, especially on Steam. But Steam generally is a rotten swamp in many ways, although I'm grateful for the benefits it offers to ADOM! ;-) I'm annoyed about them killing Greenlight, although it was not really brilliant. But it was better than the "give us $100 and publish a game" approach. I wish they'd ask for like "give us $5000 and publish a game". or at least $2000. Something that stops the crap from appearing.

Harris: Last year I had a short gig for MobyGames, helping to fill out their database. It involved going through a list of new games on Steam and filling out their information. Some of them were hilariously bad. One was basically a love letter to Donald Trump. A first person shooter where the player was "American President, John Trump," and went and shot up mafia guys. [The game is “The Last Hope: Trump Vs. Mafia.”]

Biskup:  Aargh. That sounds truly bad.

Harris: Perhaps predictably, it was put out by a Russian publisher.

Biskup: LOL If it were a Hollywood story everyone would be saying "Nah, unbelievable crap."

Harris: Here's another question. One of the things about ADOM is how it takes ideas from NetHack and Angband and extends them. Like NetHack's shops, item systems, complex monsters and clever item uses, and Angband's monster memory and (in the Infinite Dungeon) regenerating levels. I really like that aspect of it, how it's willing to take those ideas and present its own take on them. I guess it's less of a question and more of a statement, heh. There's more there I'm sure that I've missed.

Biskup: "Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.” That's a true observation. I basically took the features from other games I loved and kind of tried to impress my own tastes. And in many cases the community also provided awesome variations on ideas that I loved.

Design for me has a lot to do with trying to improve on things that work well. So you'll find a lot of that in ADOM.

Harris: Yet there’s so many new things. Especially the quest structure. I don't think there's really any other game that uses quests like ADOM does. I think they're so effective. They're what really give the game its form.

Biskup: The quests again come from my preference for storytelling. I know that many players consider roguelike games more like a tactical challenge or puzzle to solve. For me it always has been about trying to tell an interesting story and enrich it with all the random things to make it endlessly replayable.

Harris: Yet it's a form of storytelling that structures the game. In a lot of games, storytelling kind of comes at the expense of gameplay. ADOM is a huge counterexample to that, that you can have pre-defined quests that are enhanced by randomness.

Biskup: That's also something we hopefully will hugely improve on in Ultimate ADOM. We have plans for very extensive story lines that overlap and touch each other... but in different random ways in each game. Including factions with their own goals that will drive the world forward and leave it to the player to decide, when he/she wants to interact with what parts of a huge flowing and ever-changing story line.

Harris: My favorite example is trying to save Yriggs.

Biskup: Why do you like that example so much?

Harris: I remember first finding out about it, discovering it in the game myself. I remember trying to get Yrrigs up to the healer, just on a whim, and being surprised that it worked.

What I like about it especially is that its nature is heavily dependent on the randomness of the dungeon. It's a very interesting tactical challenge, it could be very easy or hard depending on how the levels lay out and what monsters get in the way.

Biskup: I personally feel these days that tiny constant blimps of static storyline in a hugely random world leave for the best emergent experiences. Such experiences get people to talk about their emotions when they played their particular variant of e.g. the Yrrigs quest, and that's just wonderful.

Did you already manage to do the new ice queen quest and solve her secret mystery. You'll love that. It's a kind of mega-Yrrigs story.

Harris: I've not gotten to the Ice Queen, I haven't had much chance to dive into post-revival ADOM unfortunately.

Biskup: Ah, you'd love it. But it's very very high level. And the ramifications of that secret quest actually carry over to Ultimate ADOM.

Harris: My guilty secret is, for how much I write about games, I don't get to play them a lot these days.

Biskup: LOL, it's the same with me and programming games. No time to play them. That's why I am so bad at ADOM.

Harris: What other kinds of games have you played, or consider inspiring? CRPGs, like say the D&D Gold Box games? Any Legend of Zelda?

Biskup: Ah, I'm a fan of some ancient games. Regarding ADOM, the two most influential games probably have been the original Wasteland, for it's incredible amount of secret side quests and mysteries, and Bard's Tale III, just for the complexity of the dungeon story. I also love Realms of Impossibility, on the Commodore 64, for the sense of wonder it instilled into me as a child. I loved the very first "Fate" game for the "every action has a consequence" tag line, and that's again something I'm trying to stress to death for Ultimate ADOM.

Harris: Ah Bard's Tale. I played almost to the end of BT2, only to get caught up in that annoying last puzzle snare.

Biskup: I liked Phantasie III on the Amiga for it's brutal combat, weird races and again the sense of wonder it instilled in me. I solved all of the first three Bard's tales spending endless hours on them. BT III was simply brilliant.

Harris: I never got the chance to play 3, but I still have my BT2 maps somewhere. I hope they do a good job with the new BT game. By all accounts people like Wasteland 2, so hopes are running high.

Biskup: Naturally I played some of the Gold Box games. Pool of Radiance was brilliant. And that strange special extra end fight with the Beholder corps finally inspired a super difficult new end quest in recent ADOM releases, that you only can play after actually winning ADOM.

Harris: Aaaah interesting! Which means I'll probably never see it.

Biskup: That new end quest probably will be seen by 0.0001% of all players.

Harris: Which means 100 people will probably blog about it Tuesday, and they'll speedrun it at next year's SGDQ.

Biskup: LOL, yeah. I backed the new BT and am kind of curious if they will manage to be successful. I also backed Wasteland 2 and have the limited edition box standing here on my shelf... and sadly so far had no time to even try it.

Harris: I wonder what the dungeons will look like. Will it still have Wizardry-style mazes?

Biskup: I hope they go that way. But I only have seen a few combat scenes. Again, no time to follow on the details.

Harris: Let's talk about ADOM's skill system a bit.

Biskup: Interesting topic, as it will be completely different in Ultimate ADOM. I'm thinking a lot about it these days as soon we are going to add the new skill system to UA.

Harris: It's probably my favorite thing about the game, because of its similarity to classic Runequest/Call of Cthulhu percentile skills.

Biskup: Interesting. I dislike it with a passion these days, although I loved it when I initially implemented it.

Harris: That is interesting! How are you dissatisfied with it?

Biskup: On several levels:

1. I find it too granular these days. It's kind of fiddly and more recent players seem to wonder about all the numbers. As small steps in the skill have barely any noticeable effect it IMHO wastes mind space by appearing more crunchy than it needs to be.
2. These days I dislike that some skills work automatically and others need to be activated manually. It's kind of complex to understand for players.
3. They do not feel very balanced as far as usefulness goes. You have stuff like Bridge Building beside stuff like Alertness or Concentration. It’s not necessarily a bad thing but it feels kind of ugly.
4. These days I also feel that games become more interesting if the choices you have to make are kind of painful. In ADOM it's more like "pump points into the skills until they are at 100 but the road to that score doesn't matter too much."

Harris: I can't disagree with any of those things. I think Point 4 is particularly insightful. Games are basically about the choices the player makes, and if the choice is painful it means it’s important, and thus of particular interest. It is good design in general to eliminate no-brainer choices.

Biskup: So for UA I have different plans which currently run along the following lines: Skills probably will have but five or six levels (apprentice, journeyman, expert, master, grand master, legend - something like that). Each and every level will add something very meaningful. E.g. "Observation" at level 1 might yield basic data about monsters and items, at level 2 you might learn about PV/DV/hitpoints, at level 3 about power points and spells, etc. It's kind of gamey but has actual meaning. And if every skill is as useful at every level every choice will be painful. To increase the pain you probably will get but 1 or 2 skills per level to increase by one single level. And suddenly you get something that allows for vastly different play and character experiences.

I'm still working on the design details (and the skill list and levels in particular) but the basic design will be the one just described.

Harris: I agree about the need to accommodate different play and experiences. Expanding the possibility space of gameplay.

Biskup: I actually also will be doing some brutal things like removing the need for identifying items. It might be an option for some kind of hardcore mode, though.

Harris: That is interesting. It might be a good decision, depending on the rest of the design.

Biskup: I feel that it doesn't add much to the game for most players these days. It's very hard to identify items, and the presence of cursed items (in their current state) makes it even more dangerous and often ruins fun. So instead of something exciting (myriads of wonderfully alien items), we have a kind of dreary task ahead (what do I do with all that stuff I don't understand). Which is the reason why cursed items in UA also will be very different.

Curses will be much rarer and they will vary. Things like, "can't be unequipped for the next 100 turns," "will cause 4d8 damage if you unequip it," "will confuse you for 2d10 turns when you unequip it," and similar stuff. So, curses that add interesting choices.

Harris: Item identification is a weird thing, it can be done well, but the game that did the best, arguably, is still the original Rogue. Because means of identification were fairly rare in Rogue, and so often you had to use unidentified items, and take on the risks of using a bad one. Because you also relied heavily on your items in Rogue. It was that combination, you had to use items, but often didn't know what they were, that gave weight to that game's bad items and identification.

Biskup: Considering the tons of items in ADOM, I feel that having constant risks while using them bar a large fun part of the game from you. I’d rather add a lot more interesting uses and combinations to the game regarding what you can do with items.

Harris: I'm sure you'll find the best solution. You made ADOM, I feel like we can trust you on that.

Biskup: LOL, thanks. No pressure here.

Harris: I had something in my notes about "item power" vs "level power." Like, I see Nethack as a game mostly about item power. If you have the right stuff you can go pretty far, even at experience level 1. And that game doesn't generally weight item generation by dungeon level, so you can potentially find good stuff (rarely) on level 1.

Whereas I see Angband as being a game about level power, about what your character's experience level is. And ADOM I see as being a synthesis of the approaches.

Biskup: I see. Personally I believe in striking a better balance. Levels and their effects IMHO should be interesting, otherwise you kind of could get rid of levels and classes and that stuff. But interesting items should be able to change the mixture. Because items are somewhat random and randomness adds to emergent storylines. ("Man, I found that nasty eternium long spear of devastation at level 3 and it allowed me to….") So I am a believer in the middle ground here.

Harris: It is a good approach, and I like that idea of emergent storylines. The story of your character. The events and adventures that make him memorable, defined by his situations.

Biskup: It would be nice if you can get far simply based on skill and your level/class combination, but item powers should be able to steer you on new paths and approaches. And sometimes it's just nice to require certain items for certain quests or monsters. And I love how people find new approaches to defeating monsters by using items in interesting ways, such as all that stuff with wands of door creation and limiting movement of certain monsters. I never thought about that when I designed the wand.

Harris: What I see as positive about that approach is, most commercial gamedevs would see something they didn't intend as an exploit that has to be stamped out. A lot of Big Designers come to see player ingenuity as something to be fought.

Biskup: I really take the opposite position, unless something totally unbalances the very basic experience. But it's great to have these incredible innovative solutions to complex problems, and I intend to offer a lot more of that in UA because you will have pretty new innovative new ways of combining things.

Harris: I was reading the ADOM Wiki a bit to prepare for this, there's some weird stuff there.

Biskup: So you probably know more about ADOM than me. (Starts digging up the source code….)

Harris: The wiki mentions code diving to get information, which is cheating. But it also mentions a player called Anilatix who cast the Create Item spell over 150K times. And made a webpage with the results in spreadsheet form! I have the link here. All to try to figure out the item generation algorithm. I'm amused, amazed and kind of frightened of that level of player obsession.

Biskup: Wow. I didn't know that. LOL, ah, I see. I am humbled by these incredibly persistent people. Reading the binary code probably would have been less painful.

Harris: I remember the early days of the Ultimate Ending, when no one knew what it was.

Biskup: Glory days.

Harris: I kind of wonder if a secret like that would be found faster now.

Biskup: That's why there is the scroll of omnipotence in the game now... and nobody so far has managed to read it...

Harris: I've been watching SGDQ, the speedrun marathon, and some of the things people have discovered in these games kind of make me despair that people will ever be able to hide game secrets in code ever again. Well, the scroll of omnipotence kind of proves it's possible then!

Biskup: I'm not sure. In the days of yore there were amazing players from Russia that disassembled the binary and were able to point out bugs to me in a precision that I found unbelievable, for someone not having the actual source code. Such skills more and more seem to get lost these days. It's extremely hard I guess. And usually can only succeed if people do not have the right combination of skills. Grond e.g. is an extremely skilled player and he is so fast in figuring out things (and reporting bugs) it's amazing.

Harris: That was nice of them. I shudder to think of what their skills would be used for now.

Biskup: LOL, yeah.

Thanks to Dr. Biskup for spending time to talk with me, and for being patient between the two interview sections. ADOM, one of the greatest roguelikes of all, is available on Steam for $14.99. Somewhat older versions are available from the game’s home page, at https://www.adom.de/.

Slashware's game Ananias releases on Steam

I got an email from Santiago Zapata that his roguelike Ananias is about to release on Steam tomorrow.  They're having a release party on Twitch at: https://www.twitch.tv/SlashwareInteractive.  It's already on Google Play.  The game's website is here.

I can't say much about it myself, but it might be worth checking in on tomorrow's stream to see if it's your cup of tea!

Zelda Randomizer set to stream at 2 PM Eastern

Aiming to stream an unseen Zelda Randomizer game (barring technical difficulties) today at 2 PM Eastern, at https://www.twitch.tv/rodneylives.

Stuff concerning @Play, Zelda Randomizer and other things

Hey all!  I feel that I'm starting to build up a list of new topics to discuss, so expect blog resumption soon!

On that note, tomorrow (Saturday) I am going to stream a never-seen-before play of a Zelda Randomizer game.  All the dungeons in different places, the rooms scrambled, the items placed who-knows-where, possible Patra in the first dungeon, and so on.  I will post details, including Twitch channel, when it's ready to go.  (Zelda Randomizer is the thing I wrote about for the @Play book, which got republished on Kotaku a few months ago.)

Speaking of which... I've been wondering if it might be a fun activity to use duplicate Zelda Randomizer games to have multiple people playing, not as a race as is sometimes done over at Speed Runs Live, but as a kind of cooperative thing, where players comment in a chat room about their discoveries and help each other get through the game.  Hmm....

In other news, I'm considering writing another book, although shorter and cheaper, about the stories behind some of the known glitches and odd behaviors of a variety of games.  For example, it's a generally known trick among classic arcade fans that if you wait long enough on the first level the bugs stop shooting at you, and then never shoot for the rest of the game, but the website Computer Archeology discovered why it happens.  I've collected a large number of these odd facts.  Once in a while I post one of them to a website (usually Metafilter), and when I do there's about a 10% chance a big site picks it up and makes a story out of it, such as when Press The Buttons reblogged my discovery of the secret behavior of the fishmen in the original Castlevania.  So I figure I might as well make a book out of 'em, heh.

News on the stream tomorrow....

Roguelike Celebration, Notes on My Talk

I am back, at last, from Roguelike Celebration in San Francisco, and the longest trip I've taken in my whole life.  Thanks to the people who ran it for helping me to attend and for putting up with a hick from rural Georgia.  When I wasn't working on and fretting about the presentation (I was hacking away on it literally minutes before I presented it), I had a great time!

Here are all the talks of the conference, which might be useful to you even if you were there, since they had two tracks going simultaneously.

Other people have discussed the experience of being there. I did that kind of thing last year with IRDC US 2015, so I'll spare you all that this time and, instead, provide an addendum to my own weird little talk.

Carrying the vagueish title "Difficulty in random dungeon games" and noticably not carrying a description like the other talks, mine was, I believe disjoined and weird and rambling, with actual slides marked "Aside." They're not *really* asides, they're there for a reason, the slides being the skeleton that the connective tissue of my talk was supposed to join together, y'see. Whether I succeeded in that or not, well, I leave to you to decide.

Here is the talk (YouTube). Here are my slides (Dropbox link, Powerpoint)

Gachami (Copyright Konami)

Note that I didn't get through the whole thing; the presentation ran out of time right before the Bubble Bobble slide, the point of which was to demonstrate an obscure, but not truly random, play mechanic as an example of the kind of trend-causing behavior I was talking about. (If you get to the end of the slides you'll find a picture of Gachami, who is my favorite video game character of the hour. I heard that the rules of the Internet require me to provide that. Anyway, here's video of the game she's from, the ridiculous Gachagachamp.  It is not a roguelike.)

Speaking of unasked-for personal opinions, my favorite moment of the conference was when one of the Rogue devs (did I mention all three of the creators of Rogue were in the room at the same time, for the first time in 30 years? SO AWESOME!!!) asked the crowd if anyone there knew what Rog-O-Matic was, and of the hundred-or-so people there just two hands went up. One of them was mine; I've even written an article that half of which was on Rog-O-Matic! (I think it's in the book? Here it is on GameSetWatch.)

I am making this post because it is the culmination of ideas and thoughts I've been struggling to render on @Play for literally years. I'm not even convinced the main part of the presentation, on "Knowledge, Logic and Wit," is even useful, but people told me they liked it anyway. I could write several articles on these things, especially "Wit." Yes it's a terrible name, someone suggested "intuition" but that doesn't get to the heart of it I think? One could also call it general skill of playing video games.

Anyway, here are my comments on the talk:

1. I worked feverishly the days before the talk trying to assemble a jumble of thoughts into something coherent. This is why the title doesn't really fit the subject well; it drifted a bit in the days, indeed hours, before I gave it.

2. There is a whole essay to be written on how CRPGs have drifted fron pen-and-paper RPGs, often for the worse. It's the copy-of-a-copy phenomenon: early CRPGs were inspired by PnP RPGs, while later CRPGs were inspired by other CRPGs. These days, it's often CRPGs-inspired-by-JRPGs-inspired-by-older-CRPGs. (Remember: Yuji Horii was inspired to create Dragon Quest from seeing Ultima games on display on a trip to the US.)

3. There are multiple essays to be written elaborating on what exactly I mean by Knowledge, Logic and Wit. One thing I wanted to make clearer in the talk: "Wit," in addition to being not the greatest name, is also kind of a cheat, defined as everything that isn't the other two. It might be dividable into narrower categories. Also note that this classification of skill doesn't map as well to real-time and action games, in which reaction speed and decision making under time contraints also matter.

4. On grind: Now understand, I believe that if something is fun, it is its own justification. People play horribly grindy games of their own free will, so I have to conclude there is something enjoyable they get out of them. That doesn't mean that I think people should pander to this desire, the playing of basically empty games. (Some people who make horribly grindy games often think of game design in behavioral terms, like it were a Skinner box. I couldn't be more against that.)

My definition of "grind" is, something mechanical a player has to do to pass time in a game before he's allowed to get to interesting gameplay. Ideally players will have interesting decisions to make at low levels and high. The attempted elimination of gride is DCSS's aim, and it's admirable. (I even think they go a bit too far in it, but I can't fault them for trying.)

It is worth noting that many players (especially retrogamers) believe that Dungeons & Dragons itself is best played as a low-level game, that characters get too powerful at levels above six or so. Interested readers are directed to search out "E6," a variant of D&D that limits players to 6th level.

But what makes grind, grind? Aren't games played for enjoyment, regardless of the form it takes? I don't think so. Listen this.

One aspect of gaming that I hear no one talk about is their improving aspect. That is, playing games helps build alertness, ability to think under pressure, ability to judge situations, ability to look ahead to future game states, logical thinking, intuition, and a plethora of other skills that have real and direct applications for everybody! People who play strategy games very well are likely to be very smart, and people who strive to learn to play strategy games well will become smarter as a result. I don't mean this in an airy "Brain Training" way, but that well-made games push players to improve themselves as a basic function of their playing. Badly made games reward only luck, time, and/or money put into the playing.

This is why I said the human race will thank you for eliminating grind.  It's not entirely hyperbole; it literally wastes the player's time.

5. Every time I try to pin down exactly what wit is I don't do a great job. But there is something there.
Part of it, as mentioned previously, is general skill at gaming. When you've gotten good at Pac-Man, some of the skill transfers over to other maze-like, and even general action gaming. And some of the skill even transfers, slightly, potentially, to real-life situations. (See "improving aspect," above.) Some of it is putting yourself in the mindset of the game designer; detecting when something seems *too easy*, that sort of thing. Some of it is guessing story direction, like figuring out the villain ahead of time in Scooby-Doo. Some of it is subconscious pattern recognition.

Some is getting better with (player) experience, which I find to be a very interesting process in non real-time games....

6. So why is it useful to name Wit at all? Because, and here is the thing: when the moon is full, I think the purpose of roguelike design is to preserve the function of Wit in a game for as long as possible.
The nature of Wit is that it turns into Knowledge (conscious information about the game) with practice. In a non-randomized game, this is nearly immediate, which is why they aren't replayable. Once you know the game, if the game doesn't change on succeeding plays, the fun is gone.

Randomization obfuscates the processes of the game, changing the world on successive plays, which keeps it in the domain of Wit longer. This is not forever, it's only a delaying process. A walkthrough of NetHack doesn't tell you, step by step, how to win, but there are plenty of spoilers that explain almost everything about the game that can be explained.  If the processes that produced those items were somehow randomized, then those spoilers wouldn't work, but more would arise that detailed the meta-processes used, and so on, without end.  That doesn't mean randomization isn't a (very!) good idea, just that it delays the inevitable.

Even without spoilers and walkthroughs, them you can figure out some things about the game, pick up some Knowledge, but some of that is purposely made invalid when the game ends. But even if all the visually-signifying characteristics of the game changed from play to play, the underlying algorithms remain the same, which keeps the game consistent between plays, which players can subconsciously detect as Wit, but will eventually become Knowledge, which, when applied with Logic, is a surer means of winning.

This is because the nature of thoughtful play involves analysis, which is the process of formalizing successful approaches. This is why I am fascinated by games that cannot be so easily analyzed. Someone came up to me (I forgot who, sorry!) and suggested Go as a game that appeals to Wit very well, and yes that's an extremely good observation. Although analysis provides some headways into Go, the same things that keep computers from playing as well as expert Go players are the same things that keep it in the domain of "Wit," which seems to point at something fundamental. Machine learning folks may have a better name for it than I. Maybe "intractability?"

Anyway, that's it for the moment. Now that the monkey is off my back, maybe I can write @Play columns more frequently again! Until next time....

Something called the Casino Dungeon

Not a new @Play yet, indeed the time required to write a full column is rather a lot so I might be changing the format soon to something shorter, and also something that covers a wider array of random and procedural-content gaming.  But also....

I'm working on a couple of things that I've been calling SECRET PROJECTS, but they're not really secret so much so much as I don't want to get anyone's hopes up.  But the one I'm working on now is starting to look like it'll at least hit a stage where there will be a good, playable prototype, and I want to ask for you guys' opinions on it when it does.

The working title... well originally (as in, years ago, when I first had the idea) it was going to be Dungeon Solitaire, but then someone else took that name.  (Let's be clear, the Dungeon Solitaire that's already out there I have nothing to do with.)  And anyway it's not really solitaire, but it is a game that uses traditional playing cards.

Playing a ton of Game Freak's Pocket Card Jockey lately, a game I obviously like a whole lot but am still ambivalent about, has convinced me to dust the idea out and finally push through the many weird design questions I still had about it and at least see if someone other than me will find this interesting.

It has more than a few links to old-school, pen-and-paper roleplay gaming, in that characters are fragile and the dungeon is really dangerous.  The dungeons are randomized too, which by my standard at least puts it into roguelike territory, so I'll probably be talking more about it here in the coming weeks.

It's also inspired a bit by an obscure game in D&D's history, the weird roleplaying card game Dragonlance 5th Age, of which I actually have a deck somewhere around here, even though I've only gotten to play it once.  Combat, in some ways, is kind of like a trick-taking card game played against AI opponents.  That kind of replaces the traditional roguelike tactical combat, but like traditional roguelikes, dealing with and taking advantage of the AI is part of the game.

Anyway, when it's in a state to see I'll put it up here, and you can have a look for yourself.  A bit of advance warning though, the prototype will be a console program, and require Python 2.7.

Progress on 86

The Quarries of Scred article, while derailed for a while, is back underway, along with some words on its predecessor Boulder Dash.  The problem, of course, is that these games stand somewhat away from roguelikes in general, although Scred's randomness still brings it back.  It isn't lost on me that, while it seems like half the new games on Steam have roguelike somewhere in its description, Quarries of Scred doesn't.  I think it has strong lessons to teach us, though, about what turn based games can be (that is, real-time), and about map generation, which is rather random-er than your typical procedurally-generated game.

I'm a bit worried, actually, that I keep edging out from under the roguelike banner in these articles.  Back in the days of GameSetWatch I could write the occasional Pixel Journeys article, but I'm not sure if you guys are so interested in essays that don't ultimately come around to being about roguelike games.  I'll probably start (yet) another blog to handle those articles, and just link to it from here when it sees something new.

Discovered during the writing: amazingly, the publisher of Boulder Dash, First Star Software, is still a living entity.  Back in the microcomputer era they had a reputation for producing interesting and unique products, like the Spy vs. Spy games.  Nowadays they seem mostly to be a rights-holding company that licenses its holdings out to developers, or maybe contracts them to produce games based on their properties for them to sell.  But they still seem to be, fundamentally, First Star Software, not like when Infogrammes decided to drape the gory skin of Atari around their neck.  That's something to celebrate.

@Play 85: A Talk with Digital Eel, Makers of the Infinite Space Games

Some of the best quasi-roguelike space games out there are Digital Eel's terrific Infinite Space games: Strange Adventures in Infinite Space, Weird Worlds: Return to Infinite Space and Sea of Stars: Infinite Space III.  Quick-playing, always challenging, and filled with secrets to discover.  @Play spoke with the principals of Digital Eel, Rich Carlson and Iikka Keränen, about the long-lived series.


@P: Tell me about your company -- when was it founded, about the main people and your day jobs?

Iikka Keränen: Rich and I unofficially started Digital Eel in 1999 when we both worked at Looking Glass. That's when we bought the domain name and started working on the (never released) 4X strategy game we called Infinite Space. I have been working in the game industry since 1998 when I was hired by Ion Storm in Dallas TX. For the last fifteen years, I've been at Valve.

Rich Carlson: I was a musician in Minnesota for 20 years before deciding to try to make games for a living. I met Iikk at Ion. We ended up working at four game studios together! You may recall that Ion Storm, Rogue Entertainment, Looking Glass Studios were all closing, one by one, at the time. That was hard to watch, and hard be a part of but the games turned out well. Meantime, Iikka and I became friends and decided to make some games ourselves for fun. Later, when we came to Seattle for another game job, we met artist Bill Sears working at the same studio. He turned out to be as weird as we are, with a terrific sense of humor, and so we all became fast friends too. That's when Digital Eel was "officially" founded. Bill made the splash screen for Plasmaworm and we went on from there as a trio. Henry Kropf is the newest member of the Digital Eel nuclear family. He's been programming professionally for something like 20 years, starting at Vicarious Visions in 1996. (We all started in the game biz at about the same time.) He worked on PC and PS1 projects--the hardcore space-sim, Terminus (Wikipedia), for example. Since then he's worked on a number of projects and ports, most recently for the latter Digital Eel games, as well as being the sole programmer of the fantasy word game SpellBounders (iOS App Store).

@P: That's really interesting! The SAIS games have this outsider art feel, I think at least, like they're from some alternate universe where games evolved subtly differently. For some reason it's weird to think you're embedded in the traditional game development community! I find it difficult to believe you'd have the time or energy for this if you guys worked at, for instance, EA. Are you worried that the day job might interfere with the SAIS games?

RC: It is outsider art! Although Bill worked at game studios, he came from the era of Kustom Kars, underground comix and lowbrow surrealism. If you've read Juxtapoz or Zap Comix, that's the the realm. That's what you see in Weird Worlds, and on the DE splash screens. 60's and 70's counterculture art (done only as Phosphorus can!)

IK: Sometimes it does interfere - Funny that you should mention EA, we actually worked on an EA-published game (American McGee's Alice) after we stopped working on the original Infinite Space "big game", and before we made Plasmaworm and SAIS. That was a time when we really didn't have the energy to do our own thing. Valve is much better at not interfering with life outside the office. I think it has to do with it being a more mature company - most people have families and can't be expected to work seven days a week, that sort of stuff.

RC: We have to work on our games slowly much of the time. But isn't that best if you can? Slow and steady wins the race. We plan carefully and go step by step. Looking back, 15 games in 14 years says we're finishers not flakes.

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@P: How did Strange Adventures get started? What are its play inspirations? From whence came the series' unique backstory?

IK: We had run out of steam on the original 4X game, and I had realized I needed to learn proper Windows programming as my previous coding experience was DOS-based. As I taught myself DirectX, we made a simple arcade game called Plasmaworm in 2001 and then decided to make another small game using the content we had created for Infinite Space. This is what became Strange Adventures in Infinite Space. I was a big fan of Starflight, and we had also played a Star Trek boardgame that influenced the early design of Strange Adventures quite a bit. At the beginning, we were planning to have text-based mini adventures on each planet, that sort of stuff. But we soon realized that streamlining the game as much as possible was the way to go. We had written a lot of back story for the 1999 "big game" and had a very rich universe for you to explore - much more content than you'd ever see in a single session, and that kept the game lively and surprising.

RC: Other games we played that were inspiring were Frank Butterfield's Voyage of the BSM Pandora, which turned out to be a kind of proof-of-concept that a big game theme could be condensed into a small, short game yet still convey the feeling, not just the flavor, of a star spanning saga. Though the examples I'm mentioning are fantasy-themed, they played into the design concept directly. Proto-roguelike boardgames like Terrence Donelly's Sorcerer's Cave and Greg Costikyan's Deathmaze, were, like modern full-blown roguelikes like Henzell's Dungeon Crawl and NetHack, strong influences as well.

@P: Ah, you said the magic word! Starflight also came up in an interview I did some years back with Tarn Adams of Dwarf Fortress, who also cites it as an inspiration! And Starflight's lead designer Greg Johnson is also one-half of Johnson-Voorsanger, who made ToeJam & Earl, and the prime mover of the current TJ&E sequel/revision! It's starting to seem like Starflight is a secret nexus of inspiration for roguelike developers. RC: Starflight was a big deal. I remember waiting and waiting, exasperated, for the C-64 port to be released. Seemed to take forever but it was worth it. Btw, Starflight's spiritual cousin, Star Control II, strongly influenced the way music is used in Strange Adventures and Weird Worlds.

@P: All of those games you mentioned before sound really interesting, especially Greg Costikyan's entry. He's a bit of a NetHack fan himself you know.

RC: I didn't. I know he was a hardcore Civ fan. Greg has a fantastic imagination. He's tackled quite a variety of subjects. His ludography is frighteningly impressive. ("A bibliography is a list of the books you've written; a discography is a list of the music you've recorded; and a ludography is a list of the games you've designed." - GC)

@P: I'm a bit interested in that 4X game you mentioned. Is that project entirely abandoned or might it reappear someday? Or alternatively, do you feel it's important to be able to abandon a project that's no longer working, or gone in uninteresting directions?

IK: We have abandoned a few projects for various reasons. The big 4X game was one - it was just too ambitious for us to finish, too similar to some other games, like Master of Orion, and I didn't really know how to do multi-player code at the time (plus the whole MS-DOS thing!). It was a good choice to switch to smaller projects.

RC: For us it's about being caught by something. Like when you get into Game of Thrones or Magic: The Gathering. Only the special, best things capture you. That's what we wait for and pounce on when it shows up!

IK: Even if we do decide to make a 4X style game in the Infinite Space universe, it will not be the old project resurrected. But it's interesting how much "stuff" from it appears in Sea of Stars - for example, the races and most of the items etc have a direct lineage to the old 4X project.

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@P: You're calling the games "space roguelikes," could you explain, or even justify, that statement?  

IK: Right, our games don't exactly look like the typical fantasy roguelike! But they do play like one in many ways. We have the procedurally generated maps, high level of randomness and the sense of being dropped in a world that's bigger than what you can experience in one play-through. There's no saving and reloading, so all your actions are permanent. There are tons of items and it's up to the player to figure out how to best use them. I'm a big fan of traditional roguelikes as well, so I know the dissimilarities too, of course. For a while, we used the moniker "Roguelike-like" but it's a bit clumsy.  
RC: Strange Adventures and the rest of the series pass the test in most cases, yet they must be termed as hybrids. I've looked at the Berlin Interpretation and have thought a lot about this. We respect the pure roguelike form very much, for all of the good reasons. We do sometimes say these games are space roguelikes--but in the same way that FTL was termed that. The primary reason is that it is the best way to describe the Infinite Space gameplay, overall, with just one word. Describing SAIS as "space strategy" or "adventure strategy" or "strategy rpg" doesn't convey the gameplay experience at all!

@P: I didn't mean to imply that your games couldn't be roguelikes, we've certainly covered enough games that blur the lines! And I agree that "roguelike-like" is a bit clumsy, as you've probably witnessed, there's a bit of confusion on the proper way to identify games that are inspired by Rogue's randomness and replayable elements but aren't strictly top-down, tactical combat, dungeon exploration.

RC: We have to remember that the first makers of roguelikes didn't invent the Berlin list. Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson did. A roguelike is what it is (a randomized, turn-based D&D/Tolkien themed dungeon survival sim on a grid) because early roguelike creators were emulating the features of their favorite game. So, while the venerable roguelike form can number and claim these traits, it can't really own them.

@P: Describe the basic "explore a space in a limited time" gameplay.

RC: One roguelike aspect that isn't always mentioned--I don't think it's on the Berlin list--is clocks. Food clock. Radiation exposure clock. Spell duration clocks. Thirst clock. Poison damage clock. Etc. If one of these clocks time out, your character is in trouble, which adds more tension to the game. Awesome! I think clocks are an essential part of a roguelike game. Sea of Stars, Weird Worlds and Strange Adventures use clocks too. The primary one is to return to player character's homeworld within a set period of time or suffer a reward penalty. This victory condition mirrors somewhat the idea of Star Trek's "five year mission", or Darwin's voyage, or a pirate adventure for that matter.

@P: The alien races provide a good mix of beings to interact with, each of which presenting their own personality in behavior, text and combat. Any favorites?

RC: I really like one of the new species we added to Sea of Stars, the Calatians. They're mentioned in the previous games but actually make an appearance in IS3 as a full-fledged race. They boast of their mighty ships and fearsome weaponry that appear in conbat as small and unthreatening. Are they bluffing? (Tip: If you're nice to them, you might even get rewarded with one to add to your flotilla.)

IK: The Tchorak have been my favorite for a long time, just because they are so... alien. Of course, I know much more about them than you'll see in any of our games, but I hope you'll get to know them better one of these days.

RC: I can't wait to explain the sex life of a Tchorak. Or maybe I can.

@P: Secret item features (Like "hypervision," or the Lookout Frogs & Toy Robot, or the Crystal Fish?) What inspired them? Why don't more items have these features? Is there a magic number?

IK: These items are a bit like a card that allows you to break one specific rule in a boardgame - they're limited by the number of rules that can be broken in a useful way. I do agree we should think of more, there are probably fun things that we've missed.

RC: What Iikka said. There is a sweet spot where it feels good and we sort of "call it." But it's also a matter of seeing a possibile connection that might be interesting or entertaining or, more importantly, useful. If the designer puts a ship thief in the game, she should put one or two things in to help the player prevent theft as well.

@P: One-in-eight games in the original two Infinite Space games are "mission games," where the game rules change slightly and unexpectedly in the middle of play? What inspired them?

IK: I think it was at least partly inspired by some random events in 4X games, like Master of Orion where occasionally a "space amoeba" appears and starts to wreak havoc. In Strange Adventures we just had one, and we didn't want it to happen every time because that would have made the game very repetitive, so we made it fairly rare. Now, in Sea of Stars we have five different missions (and counting...) and we can just randomly pick one.

RC: These games are intended to be like instant space opera generators, so it stands to reason that every once in a while a chance to "save the galaxy," or save your character's homeworld, etc., should be included. It also breaks the game up from session to session, enhancing replayabilty, we hope, by helping to keep things fresh and surprising.

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@P: One interesting thing about Weird Worlds in particular is how frequently one can come up non-combat, or what we might call "instant win" solutions to game problems, like [SPOILERS] Mirroring enemy fleets into black holes, Vacuum Collapsing the Yellow Kawangii or using the Chromium Gong on Primordius. These solutions seems to be deprecated somewhat in Sea of Stars in favor of more traditional combat. Is there a particular reason?

IK: With the exception of the mirror, these still work :) But we have tried to balance some items to make them less game-breaking - the gong no longer has unlimited uses, the hyperdrive is not always the best choice, and so on. This is mainly done to keep the game challenging even if you find the item.

@P: On the play changes with each version. Especially the substantial formula changes in Sea of Stars (Maj. Brass prologue dropped, set sector size, no need to return home at end, all mission games, removal of popular earlier items like Aetheric Mirror and Mantle of Babulon.) Was this to fix a perceived lack in the earlier games? Is the new game's 3D starmap related to them? Will we see any of these items return in later updates?

IK: We chose not to implement the mirror for various reasons - for example, we don't want you to accidentally move Haven Station or the Klakar Nest. If we made space stations non-mirrorable like the space hulk was in Weird Worlds, then you'd keep running into situations where you get a sensor blip but can't use the mirror, and that tells you it's a homeworld. If the mirror ever does appear, it will need to have some different kind of behavior. The Mantle would be easy enough to make, but as in Weird Worlds it would end up reducing your score so it's not a great item - also, combat is fun! It would perhaps be more interesting to come up with other ways to befriend specific races.

@P: Maybe describe a bit on the use of nebulas & black holes, their role in the design as an obstacle to exploration. (Nebulas usually slow the player down greatly upon entry; Black Holes may be hidden at the start of a map, and force the player to decide to turn back to forge ahead and possibly risk losing immediately.)

IK: Since we're dealing with a time limit, adding "terrain" forces you to make plans around it and makes the game more interesting, and different each time. We originally had ideas for other kinds of obstacles, like asteroid fields, but just these two made the cut.

@P: Events — derelict ship, supernova, Esmeralda, alien rescues. Their appearance, and the timing with which they appear, has the potential to either profoundly change the game, or not really change it much at all, depending on when they turn up, it feels to me like an essential part of the Infinite Space experience. Do you agree?

IK: Oh yes, these are a big part of making each game session unique and giving you the sense that almost anything can happen in the Infinite Space universe, from the silly to the spectacular.

@P: The Infinite Space games have board and card game versions? What are they like?

RC: They're fun. Eat Electric Death! is an old school hex and turn-based tactical starship combat boardgame based on the ships, ship system, items, and the way ships manuever, in the computer game versions. Infinite Space: Explorers is essentially a starship combat card game that uses a "starmap" board to keep track of where fleets are, which stars have been explored and where card battles occur. The two Diceland Space sets based in the IS games use James Ernest's unique combat system with giant paper dice. Each die is a starship and you roll them on the table in combat. It's diceless and real time. Nobody makes games like Cheapass Games.

@P: How did James Ernst and Cheapass Games help the Strange Adventures series to get started?

RC: By generously providing a distribution point for the game. Indie game portals didn't exist then, so it was terrific to have his support. He also got CD's made of the first three or four games. Those are like collector's items now.  

@P: On mods... Where did you get the idea to make the game moddable? How easy is it, would you say, to make a mod? What are your favorite mods?

 IK: Rich and I both made mods before we started working in the game industry, so it was natural to us. I also think that the same things that make the game easy to modify, make it easier for us to create the content for it in the first place. There are a lot of cool mods, but the "Even Stranger" and "Even Weirder" series is a standout favorite for sure. Modding tends to get harder as games get more complex, but we try to make it as easy as possible. In Sea of Stars, we use standard text file format to store all the data in the game so it's possible to get started with just a text editor.

@P: Will we see the return of Major Brass?

IK: He's the face of the Terran Space Fleet :) Not sure if he's going to make a personal appearance, but anything's possible!

RC: New face; same Brass.

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@P: Who was Phosphorous?

IK: Phosphorous, aka. Bill Sears was the third Eel and our main artist for over a decade. He made the splash screen art for half a dozen games, tons of Weird Worlds items and creatures, etc. We had some unforgettable times together, and multiple road trips down to IGF in California. He passed away after a heart attack in 2012. We really miss him.

RC: Bill was an amazing friend and contributor. And musician, as we later found out! But not in the traditional sense of guitars and trombones. His music was strange, handmade in his garage and surrealistic. Technically it would be called musique concrete and found sound music. You know how it is. Usually when you hear sound collages that are a bit avant garde, you say no! Turn it off! But it isn't that way at all with Bill's music. It is engrossing like falling into a mind adventure. Very special stuff.

@P: Is any of his music in the games? Do you think there might be a place for it, even if just one or two pieces, or are there rights or thematic issues? Is there a place where readers can find them on the internet?

IK: Bill created music for both Brainpipe (Steam - Desura) and Data Jammers (Steam - Desura). We shared an Independent Games Festival audio award for Brainpipe. You can listen to some of Bill's music for Data Jammers here, and mixed medleys of Brainpipe music here: Smetlov's Locus - Trippocampus - Cognative Cascade.

Thanks to Rich and Iikka for talking with me, and for putting up with my whimsical and makeshift interview process!  Which reminds me, I still have a followup interview with Tarn Adams to finish....  by the way, surprise!  This isn't from the book but is an entirely new column!  I'll probably be splitting the column between book stuff and entirely new essays for a while, so don't forget about the site even if you already have it!

7DRL Home Stretch!

The 7DRL Challenge (warning: server under heavy load right now!), a week-long orgy of coding and caffeine in which a multitude of devs both experiences and newbie try to write a playable roguelike game, is in its last day.  It is, in my opinion, both the most wonderful and Quixotic "game jam" around.

Some years ago I wrote up every finishing game they made one year.  (Those columns are not in the book, sadly -- too ephemeral.)  I sometimes contemplate doing it again, but then the rational part of my brain says get real -- it took me four whole columns to do it the first time, taking me a couple of months, and there's far more people involved these days.  But a few outstanding games, or at least seeds for games, inevitably appear each year, and it's always a good idea to watch for whatever Jeff Lait or Darren Grey make.  I'll probably do a highlights column.

@Play 84: The Rescue of Meta-Zelda

This originally went up, all places, at Kotaku!  While there's six or so other new pieces in the book that have yet to go up on the site, for various reasons I wanted to spotlight this one again, as I think Zelda Randomizer is really something special.

So, what does it really mean to be a roguelike game?  My contention, repeated often, is that turn-based tactical combat on a grid and basic randomization are not enough, and may not even be essential, that these things, while part of the basic definition of the term, don't get to the core of what makes the genre interesting from a play or design standpoint.  My thesis is that some element of greater discovery, like item identification, is required, and that there needs to be some consequence to the player's explorations, some cost to searching.

By this measure, one of the most awesome roguelikes of recent memory?  I'll tell you.  It's called The Legend of Zelda.

(Zelda secret tune plays off-key)

Well, not just the Legend of Zelda.  There is an important modification to it, or rather, a program that systematically makes modifications.  That program is fcoughlin's Zelda Randomizer.

It was originally developed for the speedrunning community, which had to deal with an interesting problem.  Speedrunning a known computer game is not really the same thing as speedrunning a game you've never seen before.  You learn where everything is, or refer to FAQs, for the first few plays, but after that it's all about optimizing a known world.  Zelda is amazingly resistant to such optimization; the game seems almost designed around the idea that players should be able to use many different routes and approaches to completing it, to the degree that every enemy can be defeated by at least one weapon other than the player's sword until the very final boss of the game.

But despite this, and the fact that we're still not absolutely sure what the fastest way to complete Zelda is, the game is still a static thing.  The use of randomization in the original Legend of Zelda is interesting (look up, some time, the algorithm used to determine what items enemies drop, that's a rabbit hole for you), but, ultimately, each room still contains the same enemies, the dungeons are all laid out the same, and the tough rooms and treasures are distributed the same way each game.

That is where Zelda Randomizer comes in.  It is a fairly simple program, nothing more than a bunch of checkboxes really, that takes an unmodified ROM of The Legend of Zelda and, depending on what you check, scrambles it and basically makes a new quest for it.

The Legend of Zelda (Famicom/NES), described

Starring Leslie Nielsen as the Helpful Old Man

While The Legend of Zelda is one of gaming's longest-running series, not as many people these days are not actually that familiar with the game in its original form.  A brief description follows.

The Legend of Zelda (1987) is fundamentally an exploration and combat game, somewhat like Metroid in that regard, although it's an overhead view game instead of a side-scroller, and exploration takes place across a wide and deep landscape instead of in a series of cross-sectioned tunnels like a huge art farm.  The player guides an elf boy, Link, who gets his clothes by way of Pan of Neverland, through a large overworld, divided into 128 screens.  Most of the screens have challenging monsters who try to kill Link.  Scattered throughout this overworld are nine dungeons, also divided into screens, and containing even more challenging monsters.  In each dungeon is at least one item, which allow Link to increase his combat ability and exploration power.  Some important places in both the overworld and underworld cannot be reached until the necessary items have been obtained.  Also in the overworld are shops, where some additional items can be bought.  A very few items are just given to Link outright, though he may have to prove himself first.

Also in each dungeon is at least one boss, and one of the bosses in each guards a "Triforce piece."  The ultimate object of the game is to get eight Triforce pieces, which unlocks the way into the ninth and last dungeon.  In there is Ganon, the hardest boss, who guards Princess Zelda, the aim of your quest.  Defeating a dungeon's boss also awards Link a heart container, extending his maximum health by one unit.  A few heart containers can also be found in secret places in the overworld.  So, in a manner somewhat similar to Brogue, player character improvement comes from finding items instead of gaining experience points, and you don't always have to slaughter and slay to get them.  But unlike roguelikes in general, Zelda is a real-time, action game.  In fact, it's action is pretty sharp.  There are enemies (especially the so-called Darknuts and Wizzrobes) that will kill Link pretty easily no matter how strong he's become if his player isn't skilled at attacking and dodging.

The Game That Defined Nintendo Hard
When The Legend of Zelda came out, it was kind of a sensation.  Both Sega and Hudson Soft produced thinly-veiled clones of it, for the Sega Master System (Golden Axe Warrior) and PC-Engine/Turbografx 16 (Neutopia), and Compile's Golvellius, also for the SMS, has some pretty strong similarities too.  If you unfocus your eyes a bit a whole genre of Zelda-likes from around the time can be recognized, containing games ranging from Legend of Valkyrie, Crystalis, Faria, StarTropics, SoulBlazer and many more.  And of course the Zelda series itself continues to this day.

The weird thing about a game this so copied, however, is how obscure it is.  Not in the sense of being unknown, certainly not that, but in the sense of being unclear.  To modern tastes it seems undirected.  You spend a lot of time in the early going of The Legend of Zelda roaming around just looking for things.  Most of those clones I mentioned split the overworld up into smaller regions to help narrow down and direct your exploration, but The Legend of Zelda's Land of Hyrule is one humongous, homogeneous world, and you can explore 98.5% of it from the start.  Although the eight dungeons you have to find are numbered, they are not strongly ordered.  Some can be done out of order, and the only clue besides the number that one dungeon follows the other is just that, a literal clue, a cryptic message in each dungeon giving a vague area to look in for the next.  Players are just as likely to find dungeons by wandering around and looking than by going to a specified place.

This is not a good room to find with three hearts.

And finding things just by roaming the map casually is difficult, because Zelda's enemies are not trivial to overcome.  Even the weakest ones can do a number of poor Link at the start of the game, when it only takes six hits to kill him.  The original LoZ doesn't use item-based gates to ward the player from advanced areas, but enemy difficulty: if you're in an area where the enemies make you sweat, you probably shouldn't be there yet.  One class of enemy, called "Lynels" in the manual, very frequently shoot swords that do two-thirds of Link's starting health in damage in one hit, and the mountain areas that hide several later dungeons are infested with them.  Large-scale sequence breaking in Zelda is possible but requires nerves of steel, and even advanced players often leave those areas for when they've gained some power.

There is a strong sense in Zelda of being dropped in a world and told to sink or swim.  And many players sink, and sink often, and some eventually give up.  There is a tendency, among some players, to lament the weak spine of current players.  Truthfully, I am kind of like that, but when I think about it I waver in my confidence.  No one is naturally good at these kinds of games; some skills can only be acquired through practice, and I've had lots of practice.  Instead of pointing at a losing player, laughing and saying GIT GUD, I try to say: oh, you died.  Ah well, try again? 

The problem here is fear of failure, that is, thinking that lack of success at a game is a judgment against the player, and that dying just means you suck.  These players don't suck.  This happens to everyone.  I'm better than most, but what skill I have comes from practice, and even so, still, sometimes I'm awful!  And compared to roguelikes, LoZ is pretty darn forgiving: when you die you don't lose any items or money, and if you're in a dungeon you just get put back at its entrance.  The worst that happens to the player is that he comes back without much health in his meter, which can be frustrating later on, but the game gives players ways to remedy even this.

Now, about this Randomizer thingy

Some of the things that Zelda Randomizer can do:

• Move around the contents of caves in the overworld.  The cave that contained a Heart Container may contain money, a shop, a text message, or other things.  It may even be a Door Repair Charge.  Since dungeons, where are hidden both essential items and the Triforce pieces that are the primary objects of your quest, are moved around too, you will have to do a lot of searching to find them.  The Randomizer can even be set to leave its own cryptic hints as to dungeon locations!
• Move the enemies around in the overworld.  The same general enemy groups are in the game, but their locations are mixed up among all the regions.  The dangerous “Lynels,” the sword-throwing centaurs from the mountains, can make appearances in other places, and must be dealt with carefully if encountered early.
• Move the rooms around each dungeon.  While each dungeon keeps its original shape, the rooms and internal layout of each dungeon are remixed.
• It can use the game’s Second Quest (a long story) as a resource to take further dungeon layouts and enemy groups from.
• It can even be used to construct challenge games, that take the ubiquitous Wooden Sword you’re ordinary given at the start of the game and hide it somewhere randomly around the world map, or even put it in the room before the final boss (the only enemy in the game that requires a sword to defeat it).

Under some, most or all of these, and other, mixing operations, playing through Zelda regains some portion of the wonder that it had back when people first explored the land of Hyrule, back in 1986.  More recent gamers may not understand what playing a game like the original NES Legend of Zelda was like in the days of its original release.  It was rather a deeper and more complex adventure than most were used to at that time, so hidden was its secrets.  While nothing essential is hidden without some clue of its presence (usually an old man or woman to cryptically pointing you towards it), the games produced by Zelda Randomizer expect the player to know where all the secrets are already.  Everything hidden by the Randomizer is where something had been hidden before, but when there's only around ninety such places to look, that's not as much help as it might be!

Random Zelda can be really random.  I found a Triforce piece in the third room of this dungeon!

So, Zelda Randomizer’s output is mostly an additional challenge for diehards.  Speedrunners are interested in this because it brings an aspect of the original game, the element of discovery and exploration, into play in a realm where those things are usually long vanished.  People who play games over and over to improve their times come to know their prey very well.  There is usually no aspect of them too obscure to be known.  Randomization returns to play some of that aspect of mystery.

Zelda Randomizer was inspired by an earlier tool, a ROM randomizer for Super Metroid, which also somewhat interesting.  But Zelda is an unusually resilient game when scrambled.  Since most enemies can be defeated in multiple ways, yet are still usually vulnerable to swords, the strategic implications of there being, say, the Bow, the Wand, the Red Candle or even just a lot of Bombs going forward from there are great.  Also, one of the problems with randomizing a game like this are keys, which usually requires a complex algorithm to make sure the player always has enough to open all the locked doors he finds.  All later Zelda games would require such an algorithm.  The original Zelda, however, contains more keys than are needed to win the game, and has an item that eventually makes all other keys obsolete.  Even when you're using normal keys, they aren't even dungeon-specific! They can be taken from site to site and used wherever.  You can even buy keys in stores; they are expensive, but available to help the frustrated player.

That is not to say that Zelda Randomizer doesn’t take steps to ensure the game is winnable.  A number of items (specifically, the Bow, Ladder, Raft, Recorder and sometimes the Power Bracelet) must be found during play, and the program must ensure whatever result has a solution.  It’s just that not stressing out about the location of keys makes the job of randomization easier.

But this article isn't just about the joys of randomizing a beloved game into a new experience.  Because strangely, The Legend of Zelda takes to being mixed up very well.

Random Zelda Is HARD, But Strangely Fair

Zelda's overworld was meant for getting lost in, and part of the strange joy of the game is getting lost and yet kind of getting rewarded for it anyway.  The game's secrets are set up in such a way that the player will probably find one or two accidentally during the game.  Bombs that break open secret cave are also one of the strongest weapons against monsters, the flames from candles both damage foes and burn trees, and once you discover you can push certain statues it's only a matter of time before every statue in the game has felt Link's sweaty grip.

In a properly randomized game though it's not just the secrets that have been moved around, but the monsters: you might have to spend this game tiptoeing around Lynels in central Hyrule!  And the rooms in the dungeons, and the locked doors and the keys that go to them: since keys can be bought in shops in the original LoZ, the game doesn't need to make sure you can fully explore every dungeon without buying them.  And the required items, and the shops that sell some of those items.

Only seven or so of Zelda's many items absolutely must be found to win, but certain items make the process much easier.  For instance, one of the game's many secret areas hides a guy who will give Link a letter that, if shown to the old women who hide in some of the caves, will cause them to offer to sell Medicine to Link, that will fill up all his health whenever he wants up to twice.  Finding the Letter is crucial to having a good game, but there is only one in the entire world, and the player may never find it.  It's not needed, but it's greatly desired.

Well well, what do we have here!

Another example.  Only one of the shops in the game sells an item called the Blue Ring, which cuts all the damage Link takes in half.  Again, you don't need it, but you'll be glad if you find it.  Also, in five locations in the overworld there are hidden heart containers, permanent health extensions.  You don't need any of them, but you'll want all of them.  And there are enough of these really nice bonuses to find that you'll probably find a few of these helps regardless.  They will likely not be found in the same order as the original game, but that just compounds how different the game feels when you find strange and useful things like the Recorder or the Wand in the first dungeon, or even outside of it.

The aspect here that connects this back to roguelikes is the tension between two opposed qualities, emphasizing the consequences of a player's decisions balanced with keeping those consequences balanced.

Most rooms in the original Legend of Zelda are difficult, but not impossible, to clear with three hearts and a Wooden Sword.  I've cleared rooms of Blue Darknuts with that before.  That is the outer edge of its difficulty; 99% of its rooms can be handled this way, but even skilled players would find such a run to be tiring, if they were about to do it at all.  Because of that, even if a randomized game put the player into a situation where his starting location was surrounded by Lynels, he still has a chance of breaking out of it.  The ultimate fairness of Zelda's gameplay is insurance, here, against malicious whims of the dice.

But the game also doesn't hand anything to the player on a plate.  The player still must search for items and dungeons, some of which may be hidden in incredibly obscure places, and while it's possible for all a dungeon's best things to be placed close to the entrance of each labyrinth, practically, the law of averages limits the likelihood of that occurring.  The possibility that a required mobility item (something that gives the player an ability that lets him cross formerly-impassible routes) may be hidden behind a barrier that requires it is there, but that's where the Randomizer tool comes in, giving the resulting game a solvability check and rerolling it repeatedly until it passes.

The conceptual field of probability into which Zelda Randomizer casts its dice is rich enough that the situations produced are interesting even after many attempts, challenging but different, but generally not individually overwhelming so much that the player has no way to proceed.

It takes something like the Zelda Randomizer to demonstrate how meticulously the game is instructed, really.  You only need a scant few items to complete the game, but it's challenging enough that you still want everything you can get, and yet unlike in your more traditional games, skill and practice open the door to advanced play much more readily than grinding.  If that doesn't feel essentially roguelike to you then I don't know what to tell you.

You will come to hate this guy.

If this sounds more fun to watch than necessarily to play, you're in luck!  The website Speed Runs Live hosts frequent races between players playing with the same seed and flags for your spectating enjoyment!  Also somewhat along these lines is Speedrun Bingo, available for many games.  Game randomization tools are an exciting frontier in the romhacking community — there also exist randomizers for Super Metroid, Zelda II and Dragon Quest.