@Play 78: Another of those little projects...

@Play 78

One of the little things I've been working on, like, during the long hours when I'm not working on @Play, has lately been a roguelike encyclopedia. Not like Wikipedia, or even the many game specific wikis, this would primarily be a work that would relate, in a way, all the major games to each other. So, for example, an entry on POTIONS would give their general place in roguelikes and roguelike design, then might give more interesting examples from some of the major games. Some other stuff would be in there as well. Some of the entries I figured might look interesting generally, and were entertaining to write at least, so I turned some of them into @Play #78.

Next time... I'm thinking it's been a while since I had a look at the output of 7DRL. There are so many cool and awesome games to come out of that. A couple of years ago I played almost all of the 7DRL games that year and wrote something on all of them for @Play. Unfortunately that ended up taking much too long to finish, so I'm probably only going to focus on highlights this time out.

@Play 76: A first rule of roguelike design

@Play 76

When you die in a roguelike, is it your fault? Not always. This column offers the beginning of a framework for determining whether it is or not, by thinking about the game in a way analogous to checkmate in chess. The move that puts you into a situation in which you might die is the bad one.

At the end of the column I mention the possibility that one might formulate a set of laws of roguelike game design. I've so far come up with six of these. They'll be covered in more detail next time.

Posts are still fairly slow. I fell away from gaming for a bit back there, and am working on a new game project at the moment, and I have a final paper to finish, and other things are conspiring against me and my free time too.