A little more on TJ&E's Kickstarter

I believe this article in the L.A. Times, combined with the Kickstarter text and videos, successfully address every qualm I expressed in @Play 79.  Go Team ToeJam!

I've got two or three possible next columns coming up.  It's possible the review essay might not show up for a little while.  There's so much to talk about!

Where we've been

I'm starting to work towards archiving and maybe making an ebook out of notable @Play columns.  Towards this end, and to help me avoid going over old ground too much, I've made a list of all 79 columns to date, which I present here.  On off weeks, I will also be republishing the best of the original run of @Play here.  Note though that there's no links yet, it took me long enough to build the list.  They're not too hard to find on GameSetWatch still.

001: An Introduction to some Rogue-s: Introduction to the genre & basics.
002: What the hell does Q do again?: Basic roguelike keys, basics of vi
003: Rogue and its inspiration: OD&D, AD&D, pen and paper random generation tables
004: Giant Eel Stories #1: Stories of NetHack ascensions form Usenet
005: Review: Pokemon Mystery Dungeon Blue & Red (DS & GBA)
006: ToeJam & Earl: The Roguelike That's Not an RPG: On ToeJam & Earl (Sega Genesis)
007: Thou Art Early, But We'll Admit Thee: Ways to Die in NetHack
008: A View of the Field: The major roguelikes as of November 2006
009: Hack Hacks: Popular and interesting NetHack patches as of November 2006
010: A Coward Dies a Thousand Deaths, My Computer Several Billion: Automatic players Rog-O-Matic and Angband Borg
011: I Never Meta Rogue I Didn't Like: Metagame aspects of roguelikes, that is, aspects that persist outside the current game
012: Giant Eel Stories #2: More NetHack ascensions from Usenet
013: Mapping the Infinite Cavern: Dungeon generation in prominent roguelikes
014: ADOM, NetHack With a Goatee: Introduction to ADOM
015: Tips For Travel in Gridland: Basic roguelike tactics
016: Before Learning to Walk, One Must First Crawl: Introduction to Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup as of March 2007 (the game has changed a lot since then)
017: I Believe It Not!: In-jokes of NetHack
018: Storytelling, Bah!: The limits of using games as a storytelling medium
019: Doom, Doom, Doom, Doom: Review of DoomRL
020: Hack's Lost Brother: Information on Amiga HackLite
021: Things to Do While Visiting Ancardia: Quests of ADOM
022: Spoiled for Options: The relationship between NetHack and spoilers
023: Architecture of the Mystery Dungeon: Introduction to Mystery Dungeon series
024: Taloon's Mystery Dungeon, in Great Detail: Playthrough of that game (Super Famicom fan translated)
025: A Journey to Table Mountain, Part 1: Shiren the Wanderer (Super Famicom fan translated) playthrough start
026: A Journey to Table Mountain, Part 2: Conclusion
027: Fei's Problems: Conquering Fei's Final Problem in Shiren the Wanderer
028: Balancing a Game That Looks Balanceless: Notable NetHack exploits
029: Review of Glenn Wichmann's Seven Day Quest
030: Introduction to POWDER (various)
031: Homebrew Roguelikes on the DS
032: A Quick Look at the NetHack Sources: Compiling NetHack for yourself
033: Introduction to Angband
034: NetHack Intensified: Introduction to SLASH'EM
035: The Delights of Mystery Dungeon: Getting started with Shiren the Wanderer DS
036: Introduction to Larn
037: Roguelikes & OD&D
038: Towards Building a Better Dungeon: Lacks in traditional roguelike gaming
039: Super-Rogue, Banished to the Deeper Regions: Introducing the Roguelike Restoration Project & Super-Rogue
040: Review: Izuna: Legend of the Unemployed Ninja (DS)
041: Brought to You Today by the Letter...: On the use of letters to represent monsters
042: Modeling Motion on a Dungeon Grid: On benefits and limitation of a grid-based universe
043: Eye of the Vulture: NetHack graphic variant Vulture's Eye
044: Introduction to Legerdemain
045: Review of Monstania (Super Famicom fan translated)
046: Ten Years of the devnull NetHack Tournament, Part 1
047: Ten Years of the devnull NetHack Tournament, Part 2: Interview with tournament maintainer Robin Bandy
048: Objects of Collection: Item types in classic roguelikes
049: Cause For Incursion: Review of Incursion: Halls of the Goblin King (using 3E AD&D rules), supplement on Vancian Magic
050: Spelunk, Spelunk, Spelunk: Review of Splunky Freeware, column retrospective
051: XRogue Has Not Yet Ceased to Be: Info on RRP games Advanced Rogue and XRogue
052: 2009 7DRL Winners, Part 1
053: 2009 7DRL Winners, Part 2
054: How to Win at NetHack
055: The Rights to Rogue: On untangling the ownership of Rogue
056: 2009 7DRL Winners, Part 3
057: Review of Fatal Labyrinth (Sega Genesis)
058: Introducing SporkHack and UnNetHack: On a couple of balance variants for NetHack
059: The Python Strikes!  You are Being Squeezed: On the uses and limits of Python as a roguelike dev language
060: Interview with Keith Burgun, designer of 100 Rogues
061: A Date with Asuka: on Dreamcast Mystery Dungeon
062: Potions and Scrolls: One-use magic items in Rogue
063: Dreamforge's Dungeon Hack (DOS)
064: The Berlin Interpretation
065: Crawlapalooza, Part 1: Skills and Advancement
066: (Crawlapalooza, Part 2) What's With All These Skills, Anyway?: Examing the skills themselves
067: (Crawlapalooza, Part 3) Beogh's Liturgical School for Orcs: role and race selection in Crawl (as of February 2010)
068: (Crawlapalooza, Part 4) Travel Functions & Play Aids: Special features of DCSS
069: Wii-ren the Wanderer: Review of Wii Shiren the Wanderer
070: Interview with Rodain "Nandrew" Joubert, creator of Desktop Dungeons Freeware
071: Purposes for Randomization in Game Design: On the rationale for randomizing game maps and other elements
072: Review: Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo's Dungeon (Wii)
073: Mayflight #1
074: Mayflight #2
075: Sprinting Rapidly Through the Dungeon: DCSS's Dungeon Sprint mode
076: Check and Made: On the idea of critical moments and the writer's First Law Of Roguelike Design
077: Eight Rules of Roguelike Design
078: Excerpts from a Roguelike Encyclopedia, Part 1
--- The great divide ---
079: The Re-return of ToeJam & Earl

@Play 79: The Re-return of ToeJam & Earl

This is the beginning of the revival of @Play, my old roguelike column, formerly of GameSetWatch. I had intended for the first column to be a retrospective over the length of the original run. But seeing as how there's over seventy columns in the sequence, that's taking a bit longer than I expected, and something came up. Something pressing. Something that demanded that I write about it, here, first. Sorry about that, next time will be the "official" relaunch, whatever that means.

What could be so important? People who remember the first run of @Play will remember that one of the earlier columns was entitled ToeJam & Earl, the Roguelike that's not an RPG. I made my case, I think pretty well, about the inclusion in the genre of a game that's not a tactical, turn-based D&D-styled fantasy combat game. and I think the case is even stronger now that games that fall even further afield are getting that label stuck to them.

ToeJam & Earl is a game that is dear to my heart. Although it is a slow-playing Sega Genesis game with a surprisingly low framerate in normal situations, and many other weirdnesses besides, it has excellent design and gameplay. Its two player co-operative mode is possibly the best of the type ever realized. Its characters, even the enemies, are rendered with a cartoony charm that doesn't get old over many replays. But that's okay, because TJ&E is designed to be played again and again, and even after being won it's still an interesting game to play. Because, as you can probably tell from the title of the column I mentioned, indeed the fact that I'm bringing it up here, TJ&E has many roguelike characteristics: randomized items, random maps, and yes, the ability to lose the game too. And because TJ&E is a very challenging game, players will most likely lose their first several plays, before they learn the many tricks necessary to survive.

When I first played it I had played Rogue before so I could see the design relationship between them, but I didn't know of many of its successors. Hack and Moria were not on my radar. I might have read about Larn once (in a review of an Amiga version in the pages of Commodore Magazine). NetHack was around, but I think it was another year before I found out about it. In TowJam & Earl I found a game that had many of the addictive qualities of Rogue, which I knew of directly from playing it on a relative's DOS PC, yet it was on my Sega Genesis! And what's more, if I had a friend over, we could play it with each other! It probably remains my favorite Genesis game of all, and that's despite some strong (non-roguelike) competition.

ToeJam & Earl wasn't the first console game to borrow enough elements from Rogue to make it eligible, in the main, to be called a roguelike. While Chunsoft's Japanese series Mystery Dungeon didn't make its Super Famicom debut until 1993, Sega had developed a roguelike called Fatal Labryinth for its short-lived SegaNet service, a few months later produced on cartridge the similar Dragon Crystal for its Game Gear portable system, and eventually made a cart version of Fatal Labryinth. Those games are merely okay, though.

I liked what I did for the original TJ&E column above, and it continues to stand I think. To get to the point, I bring it up because half of the team who designed the original game, Greg Johnson, said in an interview with Venture Beat that he plans on doing a Kickstarter to fund the creation of a true, in-the-spirit sequel to ToeJam & Earl. This is big news, although it should also inspire some wariness. To explain why, I will have to delve a bit into the history of the original game's reception, and why it hasn't really gotten a full game in the mode of the original in 24 years, especially since that's what the third game was supposed to be....

I. The Wake of TJ&E Genesis

Here's a synposis of the original game. The heroes, the titular ToeJam and Earl, are two aliens from the planet Funkotron, which is kind of like a more cartoony and kid-friendly version of a P-Funk show. Funkotronians are a happy and peace-loving lot, devoted to music. While cruising through space in their (peers down nose through glasses at script) "Righteous Rapmaster Rocketship," Earl steers their capsule straight into an asteroid. The machine crashes into ten pieces scattered around the least funky planet in the universe: Earth. To return home, the two aliens (or just one of them if you're playing solo) must explore the planet and reassemble the ten pieces. However, the Funkotronian perspective on spatial physics must be radically different from those of a native of the Earth, because what appears as a round planet to us is presented in the game as a set of 25 floating platforms hanging vertically in outer-space above each other. Each of these "levels" bears somewhere on its surface a flashing yellow elevator. Entering that takes the player up to the next level of the 25. One piece is always hiding at the top.

You go up by intentionally taking the elevator, but often you end up going down involuntarily. If you step, jump, plunge, or are thrown or knocked off one of the levels, you'll end up at a random location on the level below, and have to re-find the elevator to get back up. Compounding the difficulty of your search, the levels are randomly generated each game (but persist during the same game) and are full of Earthlings, of varying degrees of malice. Most Earthlings have some kind of attack they can perform that damages you, but many have, either instead of or alongside a damaging attack, some special property that can cause you problems. Hula Girls randomly inspire your character to hang out and dance.  Cupids can mess up your controls if they hit you with an arrow, Moles steal items, and Boogeymen are usually invisible. Both the number and challenge of the monsters increases as you ascend through the levels. In true roguelike fashion, survival for any length of time is extremely difficult at the end, so you have to move fast, get what you need, and get out, and probably consume some of your items to do it safely.

Unlike most roguelikes however is one of the most interesting aspects of TJ&E's gameplay: the players are defenseless by default. In normal situations, they have no attacks. You never have to kill enemies during the game, but there are situations where they might be directly blocking the way across an essential path, or are just pursuing you closely and refuse to give up. Fortunately, the duo can use presents, which I suppose are remnants of a huge messy birthday party, they find scattered around the levels. There are 25 different kinds of these, and they're analogous to the potions and scrolls of Rogue: once you use one it takes effect immediately.  There are both good and bad types, but you don't know what they are at the start of the game. They're saved for you in a limited inventory screen.  Once you know what one of a type looks like, all other presents with the same wrapping paper will contain the same thing, and the game will even remind you of this information. You can pay a random wise man (naturally found dressed in a carrot suit) to identify presents for you using "bucks," which are also found scattered around.

There are a wide variety of these presents, and discovering them is a major part of the game. Some contain Tomatoes which can be used as missiles to turn the tables on your pursuers, or a tomato Slingshot, which is even better. You can use Super Hi-Tops help one zoom away from them, Spring Shoes to soar over their heads, and Rocket Skates to rush away in a roar of jets that's just as likely to plunge you down a level or two—oops. There are presents that heal, reveal some of the map, and award an extra life. There are also presents that put you to sleep, summon a damaging raincloud, or even instantly kill you, but fortunately Funkotronians get multiple, although not infinite, lives to live. The very worst present of them all, even worse than the instant death present, is the diabolical Randomizer, which randomly scrambles all the presents in the whole game, forcing you to have to start learning what everything is anew. After you've identified 15 of the 25 without finding one, opening unknown presents gets progressively more and more tense; the strength of the game's opposition is high enough that an unfortunate Randomizer opened on level 20 can doom your game, even if you're in great shape otherwise.

This isn't a full description of the game's many charms. Here is a YouTube playthrough of a successful single-player game of ToeJam & Earl, played in Random Mode (the way you're supposed to play it). It starts a bit slow, but the first present he opens is the instant kill Total Bummer, and at about 21:30 he is stumbled upon by The Randomizer.... Here, the Game Grumps fight through a few minutes of the game in two-player mode, in their cheerfully dismissive way.

II. Public Reaction & Panic on Funkotron

Most console games, even back then, sell strongly at first then trail off over time. ToeJam & Earl reversed that: it started slow, but built up as time passed and people found out how witty and fun it was. Let me assure you, who has seen witness to many worthy games without ad budgets to speak of fade silently away, unloved and unmourned, from the shelves of stores. What happened to TJ&E wasn't supposed to happen. They broke from the script.

And even if you played it for ten minutes, so that you can assure your friends that you "gave it a chance?" You can tell watching the Grumps on their play through, they're not seeing it in their early run. They don't even open a single present. The game has to grow on you, and most people aren't looking for that now, and weren't looking for it then either. But it did grow on people, I don't know how but some people besides crazies like me gave it a shot, through what sufficed for spreading "virally" before the Internet, that is to say, through plain old word of mouth, one addicted player showing it off to his friends, and going on from there. Even now the cult of the game lives on. (Aside: how did Sega choose to market this game to people? Here's a TV ad for the original game. Here's one for the Genesis sequel. Er, yeah.)

I can't tell you how it caught on. I can only tell you what appealed to me about the game: the challenge, the humor (part of that being the digitized speech), the charming characters, the mysterious elements, and the replayability. I assume that people saw in it what I saw in it. And I say, anyone else who tells you why the original succeed or failed is also making an assumption, unless they've conducted actual polls of its players from around that time, and even then I will have my doubts.

Whatever it was really, Sega decided its design elements, its roguelikeness, couldn't be it. That's why Sega asked creators Greg Johnson and Mark Voorsanger to abandon their efforts at making a sequel in line with the original, and make a more traditional platformer for a second game. (Note: speaking honestly, this is really the third TJ&E game. The true second, called Ready, Aim, Tomatoes!, was a mini-game included in the pack-in cartridge for Sega's Menacer light gun accessory. I have not played it, but everything I've heard about it suggests that it is slight. If you want to be pedantic, I think the Art Alive cartridge has a few TJ&E character stamps on it too.)

A complete description of the sequel, ToeJam & Earl: Panic on Funkotron, doesn't fit in with this column, because it is not a roguelike at all. There's no inventory, no tactical positioning, and no randomness. It is fairly challenging, but it's the same challenge every time. Some of the humor is back, and the game play is quite polished, and truth be told it's not really a bad game at all, though surprisingly long. Two-player co-op is very hard to do in a platformer, and it does a good job. It has large, well-animated and appealing characters, vivid, colorful graphics, and huge worlds to explore. But fans agree, it's not the same.

III. ToeJam & Earl III: Mission to Earth

If the story had ended there, well, who would have blamed them? There are lots of popular games that never spawned a sequel, or just one sequel and no more than that. Something about TJ&E inspired another game nine years later, for the original Xbox, called Mission to Earth. It didn't do well in sales, despite a front-page story on Play Magazine. (Do you remember Play Magazine? I do. Sorta.) I don't have sales figures to hand, but the reviews mentioned on the game's Wikipedia page range from moderately good to quite poor. The bad ones sometimes cite good reasons (the dated hip-hop theme displacing some of the original's whimsy), and sometimes bad ones (one mag claims its random maps necessitated generic missions, when a game like this shouldn't have had missions at all). In short, like many also-ran games that have a glimmer of greatness hidden within them, nothing really to distinguish it.

TJ&E III was supposed to mark a return to the style of the original game, and was touted as such in marketing, probably because someone at Sega remembered the failure of the original sequel. It returned in some ways, but didn't in others, and as I've said before, a game can be roguelike in many ways except for one thing, and that one thing will wreck the whole design. Take permadeath out of Rogue, or its challenge, randomness, variety of monsters, variety of items, clever tricks, or food system, and you have a greatly diminished game. All these things support each other; you can't half-ass it. If you take out even one part you had better know what you're doing. It is not a friendly genre to executive meddling.

Reader, I have played this game. Do not laugh, but I owned a copy of this game. I bought an Xbox specifically so I could play ToeJam & Earl III: Mission to Earth. I can tell you what I found disappointing about it. I suggest my reasons are universal ones. I'm sure you could find someone who would offer different ones. I think they're wrong and I'm right, but what else would I say? Anyway, here is what I think the game did wrong:

- The game organizing model is completely wrong. It isn't a short-length game in a with limited lives like the original, but a long game organized as hubs with level doors and with no serious penalty for failure, where each finished level is basically a checkpoint. Its structure is similar to that of Mario 64-style platformers: collect things in order to meet unlock requirements for later levels, from which you collect more things. The game saves after every level, which puts you back on the hub. If you fail, you go back to the hub. It's structured as an unloseable metagame wrapped around smaller level-length games, completely at odds with the tension and danger that soak the original's later levels. In short: no permadeath.

- The default mode is "Story Mode," as opposed to "Random Mode." Story Mode offers a strongly-designed experience with mini-games and missions and such. Random Mode offers a lesser version of that. The Xbox version of the game was obviously designed to be Story Mode first and Random Mode as an afterthought, while the Genesis game was Random Mode for everyone and Fixed Mode for those who couldn't hack it. In other words, diminished randomness.

- The original game's present system returns, with both good and bad presents. But the whole point is lost, because all the presents are known from the beginning. I've written before about how Mystery Dungeon games tend not to be very interesting until the items start to get randomized, which is usually, annoyingly, frustratingly, well into the bonus content. The same is true when the game is ToeJam & Earl. One of the major themes of roguelike gaming is discovering the world as you play, but here all this information is handed to the player on a platter. It is possible for items to be scrambled in a limited fashion later, due to the attacks of Medusa Baby monsters, which act like minor Randomizer items. And once scrambled, the danger of opening Randomizers themselves reappears. But identification is easier in TJ&E III, and with careful play it's possible simply to never be hit by a randomization attack. So to use some jargon, nerfed object ID, and, since bad presents are limited in how badly they can mess you up because of the absence of permadeath, tensionless trial ID.

- The game objectives are more about fulfilling missions than the primary goal of collecting albums. The quest structure makes you spend a lot of time doing arbitrary things as makework to pad out the length; and the length has to be there because the game is basically unloseable, since the play cycle goes between a hub and levels instead of between individual, challenging games. There are games that do this successfully (like Mario 64 for one), but they all have a lot more play variety; each Power Star is a completely different challenge from the one before. Lack of essential challenge leading to unnecessary length.

- The original ToeJam & Earl was a surprisingly pacifist game. The guys have no attacks on their own; all their weaponry comes from occasional random presents, and have time limits. The game is designed so that you don't need to kill anyone, but there's still a lot of enemy opposition to deal with. The Xbox game gives players a melee attack with a good range, and "funkify notes" that can attack at a distance. The latter is limited, but common. To summarize, the player is overpowered relative to the enemies, which also takes further weight off of the item identification system, since the player doesn't need to rely as much on presents to survive.

- This is a digression from our focus on roguelikes but it has to be said: the theme was dated, even relative to its release date.

Even the original wasn't really about what it said it was. ToeJam and Earl's text captions presented a mixture of funk cliches and surfer speak as might be viewed by a fourth-grader, but it worked because it was an extremely silly game filled with Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy style humor. (Seriously, read the Genesis game's manual, which includes illustrations and funny descriptions of all the game's enemies. It's great!) The best thing about Panic on Funkotron is that it kept the original's tone exactly right while managing to fill in the gaps about the duo's home planet. The terrific music was the icing on the cake.

TJ&E III mixed in an intro showing off a truckload of cliches, including some surprising innuendo, for a whimsical cartoon game anyway, about ToeJam's "third leg." It's possible this was added due to (somewhat justified) self-consciousness about appropriating black culture. I'm more inclined to blame Microsoft's desire to differentiate their nascent Xbox console from the Gamecube. Now I admit, I am not a terribly funky person. So, I present this video that contains the game's intro, so that you may judge for yourself. Due to the racial issues involved, I do not know if the best route was to return to the original's fourth-grade concept of funk. The Dreamcast beta that's surfaced doesn't have the intro, and the theming seems less intrusive in it, so it could have been another thing added by Executive Meddling. I have little inside knowledge of this. (I do have a tiny amount, however, from an email exchange I had with co-creator Greg Johnson several years ago. I don't remember much of it at the moment, but may drag it out for a later column.)

Anyway, one way to go could have been to keep the funk in the game's music and the occasional nod, and increase focus on Hitchhiker's Guide depictions of dangerous, unfunky Earthlings. There, that concludes the non-roguelike portion of this essay.

IV. The Funk of the Future

Interestingly, TJ&E III's development started on the Sega Dreamcast, and in 2013 a disk of a playable beta surfaced on the internet, which you can burn to a CD-ROM yourself and play. It can be found without a huge deal of trouble through web searches. Here is video of the game. Here's an Escapist blurb about it. I've not played it yet, but will soon and report back for a later column.

Take particular note: most of the qualms I mentioned above don't apply to the Dreamcast beta. One could take this as indicating great things for the Kickstarter project. But also of note, just remaking the original game probably won't be enough anymore. Of course, roguelikes have progressed somewhat since the Genesis version of TJ&E. There is a world of new concepts to borrow from, in recent games like Spelunky and Brogue, heck, even from Mystery Dungeon and NetHack. Particularly, the SNES/DS Shiren the Wanderer paradigm of a "meta game" that advances slightly as the player plays the main game.

There has never been a better time to be a roguelike player. Or, to be a roguelike developer. The fact that, of this writing, the project Kickstarter is one day old and already approaching half of its $400K funding goal is solid proof of that. Only time will tell if ToeJam & Earl are ready to walk up and stand alongside Spelunky Guy at the forefront of the genre, or if they'll be content to remake (or even wreck for a third time) a 24-year-old game. That said, I think Greg Johnson has a good eye for the game's requirements, and wish him all the best.

Here is the link to Greg Johnson's Kickstarter for ToeJam & Earl: Back in the Groove.

The corporate site for ToeJam & Earl Productions Inc. is still on-line. This is its contact form, although I don't know if anyone still reads it.

Special thanks to Dontae Lawrence for assistance with this column.

----------

@Notes –

Here is my list of upcoming topics. If you have something you'd like to hear about, let me know at johnwh(at)gmail.com, or Twitter handle @rodneylives. There are in no particular order, and presence here doesn't definitely mean I'll get to them. They're just what I'm considering at the moment.

Meta:
@Play Review (next time)
Play & Dev topics:
World generation & backstory
On the nature of exploration gaming
What makes a good monster?
Item design: What's important?
Item design: How much is too much?
How pared down can a roguelike get?
An overview of roguelikes on Steam
Ideas on overcoming the existence of FAQs
The role of skill in turn-based games
Gameplay vs. Simulation
On the nature of "knowledge," "skill," and "wit"
The Secret Competition: why players grind even when they don't have to

Reviews:
Spelunky HD
Rogue Legacy
Auro
ToME & its Steam release, Tales of Maj'Eyal
Darkest Dungeon
Catacomb Kids
Pixel Dungeon

Here are some general game finds:

A free game to look into, I haven't played it yet so I cannot vouch for it, is Pixel Dungeon. It's for Android and Windows, but the Android version has in-app purchases.
* http://pixeldungeon.watabou.ru/.

Another one I've yet to play is Escape From Cnossus, playable via web but also as a Sinclair Spectrum game.
* Game
* Review

@Play Resuming Soon

Everyone still reading this --

@Play will be resuming.  Repeat, @Play is resuming.  Update schedule and precise timing hasn't determined yet, but I'm thinking twice a month.

It's looking like I'm resuming the blog here, so if you're still following or have this in your RSS feed then you have nothing more to do.  However, if you're a publisher and want @Play on your site, please let me know at johnwh(at)gmail.com and we can talk things over.

Even if no one bites, @Play will be resuming, here if not elsewhere.  If it does turn out to be elsewhere, then this blog will resume pointing to new columns as they appear.  I'll also be tweeting links to new columns: my Twitter handle is @rodneylives, but be warned I also tweet things that are of no relevance to roguelikes (I have an upsettingly large number of interests).  I'll also be using hashtag #atplay.  I may start a second account just for @Play notices, but am not yet sure what that entails.

I trailed off before because I was coming to suspect that I didn't have much more substantive to say, and so was coming to resort, more and more often, to filler.  But now I think I have more that I can usefully contribute.  The recent boom of games calling themselves roguelikes and quasi-roguelikes means I could probably sustain the column for a good while on the strength of reviews alone, but I've developed my opinions a little more on what makes the games fun, and of course there's at least one very nice newer "classic-style" roguelike out there now in the form of Brogue.  And of course, "roguelike" in its broadest sense is just a word that means a game presents interesting procedural content, and that's something more games are finding it useful to provide.

Anyway, please watch this space.

@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 77: Rules of roguelike design

@Play #77

It's been over two months since the last column, a state that I blame on general poor spirits, personal projects and (to a degree) the twin scourges of Minecraft and Desktop Dungeons. The next column shouldn't take nearly as long, as it will consist mostly of excerpts of one of those personal projects, an encyclopedia of roguelike games. (Which complete document will probably go for sale on Lulu or Amazon or some such.)

I should note that the title, "The Eight Rules of Roguelike Design," was not my idea. I don't think there are only eight, or as many as eight, or whatever. I have eight listed in the column but I think it's fairly obvious from the introduction that I don't actually consider them particularly hard rules, although if you break one you should know what you're doing, certainly. I intended it as a kind of guide to how these games work to provide interesting game choices. Rogue in particular shows a lot of nuance in that area, which indicates to me that the developers must have spent a lot of time devising it.

@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.

@Play 75: And now, more Dungeon Crawl

@Play 75

Getting us back onto our usual beat, this month-half's column concerns the extra game mode packed into recent versions of Crawl, Dungeon Sprint. It features mostly set, human-constructed levels, and features even tougher opponents than is usual for Dungeon Crawl, but in exchange has 27x greater experience gain. Not only is it a much shorter game than Crawl, but it's great for figuring out strategies that work against advanced opponents without having to risk throwing away a six-hour game just to experiment with tactics to use against, say, demon summoners. Give it a shot!

@Play 74: The last time I swear

@Play 74

The second of the two posts about Mayflight is up on GameSetWatch.  I hope it hasn't seemed as obnoxiously self-promotional to you guys as it has to me.  Additionally, this one is more about implementation algorithms and my wanting to document them somewhere for possible later use than anything else.

I spent three and a half months working on the thing, to the exclusion of almost everything else, and I don't think it's really good enough for all the effort I put into it.  That is the great difficulty with the indie gaming sphere: you can work and work and work on something and still have it end up only so-so.

Next time, I absolutely swear, @Play will cover something else.  I'm gearing up to write about Dungeon Crawl's new alternate play mode, Dungeon Sprint, which is suitably infuriating.

@Play 73: Mayflight again

@Play #73, on my own randomly-generated game, Mayflight

Yeah, @Play is back, but it's about the game I've already introduced, which is relevant to roguelikes in both inspiration and implementation detail.  In this column I cover the inspiration part of it; in the next, I talk about how it was implemented, which may provide an algorithm or two of interest to roguelike developers.  After that we'll be back on the usual beat, so if you're annoyed with all this talk about platformers and such you don't have much longer to wait!

What I've Been Working On: Mayflight

My secret project, a procedural exploratory game for YoYoGames' summer competition, is ready to show the world.  It is called Mayflight.  It's kind of relevant here because I used some roguelike design principles in its making, especially in creating its huge game world and your character's ability set.  (I can't post it on Metafilter Projects yet because it's been too soon since my post of my most recent Gamasutra article.  I seem to be using Projects rather a lot lately....)

It's sort of like a Metroidvania in some ways.  It is a platformer, and you explore a big mappable space looking for powerups and fighting monsters.  However, it has no end.  The game world is randomly created every game, and has no edges.  Exploring out several areas, bring up the map and zooming out, then seeing the trail of blue rooms extending off-screen is kind of fascinating.

Also, the powerup/map dynamic isn't the Russian nesting doll setup of ever-increasing exploration spheres made available by finding new equipment.  Instead your character, Aurora the fairy, is weak in ability at the start, but becomes stronger generally in various areas by finding powerups.

Because there's no end to the world, and the powerups increase ability rather than grant new ones, the point of the game changes.  There is a time limit, and the idea is to go as far as you can during it.  Although it starts at only ten seconds, you can extend it continually by finding "sparks," which are scattered around with the ubiquity of Mario's coins.  The game is played for high score.  The two scores provided are raw distance from the starting location upon death, and a more traditional score that generally measures playing ability and accomplishment.

Playing it, it seems to have a nice balance to me.  The monsters are challenging without being overwhelming (at least not until you have had a chance to power up), the constant need to extend your lifespan means there is little downtime, and it's challenging while possible to survive for more than an hour with good play.  I was even able to squeeze a couple of covert pinball references into the game's interface.  I'm particularly proud of the background generator, which is able to produce a wide variety of interesting dynamically-generated looks for areas for relatively little processor time.  I post some of the more interesting screens here.

Anyway, now that Mayflight has seen a public release I can focus more on @Play.  The next column or two will probably discuss the game as an example of roguelile design principles applied to a very non-roguelike kind of game.  Then we'll probably get back to the usual beat.  In particular, Dungeon Crawl has seen a lot of development effort lately, having jumped another whole version number in the past two months!

More screens from Mayflight:

Game Design Essentials: 20 Non-Computer Games

I already posted this to MeFi Projects, but it's relevant here I suppose, especially since one of the reasons @Play hasn't had a column for a couple of months is because I was working on this:

Game Design Essentials: 20 Non-Computer Games

There are certainly many more board games, card games, roleplaying games and others that I could do sequel article, and have been lightly planning one.  Agricola and Acquire would probably be on the list because they're excellent and I have easy access to them, Dipomacy would be on the list because it's the most requested game in the comments to the first list, beyond that I'm still deciding.

Hopefully there'll be another @Play before DragonCon, maybe two.  Watch this space.

Where is @Play these days?

The column was wholly absent for the month of June, for which I am sorry. I've been hyper-engaged with a personal game development that I hope to be able to show the world soon. This isn't entirely separate from the column; while it's not a roguelike, it does involve random content generation and a couple of other design aspects of those games, although they aren't the ones that people usually think of.

I hope to get a new column to you guys soon, and I'll be sure to post about it here when the game is better prepared to meet the withering gaze of strangers....

@Play 72: Review of Chocobo's Dungeon for Wii

@Play #72: http://www.gamesetwatch.com/2010/05/column_play_chocobos_dungeon_f.php

This is one of the most scathing things I've ever written. I played through seven or eight dungeons of this game in preparation for this article, and read through a FAQ on GameFAQs besides. I did not complete the game, which would have taken many hours and eroded my sanity even further.

The paragraphs on moogles are, if I say so myself, some quality, heartfelt bile.

@Play 71: What randomization has to offer games

@Play #71

Hello blog. I can talk to you right?

I'm fairly unhappy with this column. A part of me considers some of it fairly nonsensical. I believe it all and stand by the idea, but to express what is a strongly-held belief like it were fact, I don't think that is what @Play should be.

I'm talking, specifically, about the games-as-art section, which seems to me like a version of one of my Metafilter comments. This is part of why it took over a month for this installment to go up. It was hard to write, and I even started over once, but after I had written so much of it it became something I had to go with just to finally be rid of it.

It's possible that people will accept it, maybe even like it, but I don't think I like it myself. I will say this however: it does I think explain why I can't bear to play many "modern" computer games. They are wed strongly to their storytelling, and more and more the kinds of stories they wish to tell make me nauseous.

Next time I should be able to field another review. Those are rather good topics at least. See you then.

@Play 70: Interview with Roudain Joubert, creator of Desktop Dungeons

@Play #70

Roudain is a lot of fun to talk to, and about as much of a Dungeon Crawl fan as I am.

@Play 69: Review of Shiren the Wanderer for the Wii

@Play 69

The Wii entry in the Shiren series is a game I really wanted to like, but ultimately it tries to hedge its bets too much with lame JRPG-isms. There were times when I was actually shouting at the screen for the cutscene to end. And we're not talking about cinematic Final Fantasy cutscenes, we're talking about those in which 3D models move artificially around their little stage and have an obnoxious little drama. In 2D it was possible to get away with this, but in 3D it hasn't aged well.

Some of the awesome gameplay from past entries in the series is back, but most reports say that the game doesn't really pick up until you've finished the main quest. 24 hours of play time into it, and I'm still not there.

@Play 68: Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup Travel Functions

@Play 68

Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup's autoexplore function is a bit shocking, at first glance, to witness, but is really useful for getting through one of Crawl's huge levels fast and making sure you don't miss anything. Well, anything not behind a secret door or in a disconnected part of the level. This article is a little shorter than usual, but still pretty long relative to most of the other things on GameSetWatch.

This is the last Crawlapalooza article, but probably not the last we'll be seeing on Crawl, not by a long shot. The next article will probably be on Shiren Wii, which I'l still playing though. Most people who have played it say that the bonus dungeons in this one are particularly fun, so I feel giving this game a fair shake means getting through all the story dungeons first, which are taking rather some time to complete.

Shiren for Wii Initial Impressions

I'm going to save a full review for the @Play article but so far after three and a half hours....

It's rather easy. I completed the trainer dungeon and the first four "real" dungeons and have yet to die. Maybe I'm playing extra carefully because I'm used to the SNES and DS games, but I have had relatively little difficulty so far. My ally got knocked down to 2 hit points in a boss fight once, but I had plenty of healing herbs by that point. And Recovery Staves, which heal for about 30 damage, are extremely common in the early game, although they have the drawback that you can't use one on yourself, you must hit an ally with it.

Hopefully the challenge will kick in soon, but the whole reason I gave up on Pokemon Rescue Team was that it was dreadfully boring in the early game. At least I know that building up a character isn't required up to this point; I have entered no dungeon more than the first time I entered it, and I haven't used the grind "portal" dungeon for item enhancement at all.

Atlus, Shiren and roguelikes

Please excuse a small editorial here, but I have a bit of a bee in my bonnet 'bout this....

People on the internetz, in prime internetz fashion, have been saying that Atlus has claimed that Shiren the Wanderer on Wii is not a roguelike. Atlus has not actually said this. The quote from Kotaku is:

"We're not referring to it like a roguelike because a lot of people have a negative association with the term," Aram Jabbari explains. "They are seen as extremely punishing. We don't want people to think of this game as falling into a certain category and then dismissing it."

Choosing not to call something a thing is not the same as saying it's not, guys.

But on the other hand, Atlus is dropping the ball on this one. All of the people who are interested in Shiren the Wanderer are so because of its roguelike characteristics. Everyone who buys the game expecting something like Final Fantasy is going to be disappointed.

The people who are excited about the game, its guaranteed audience, are so BECAUSE it's punishing, and a lot of fun for being so. This is exactly the same kind of ad campaign that got Sega a lacklustre response to their DS release of the original game. This kind of bait-and-switch is the epitome of short-sighted marketing.

I don't think I am speaking incorrectly when I say that roguelikes are on their way up in the world. They have a large amount amount of "indie cred," and their star is still rising. I'm not saying that they will challenge the likes of Grand Theft Auto, but I do think their popularity is growing.

If I were in charge of the Shiren ad campaign, I would not shy away from calling it a roguelike. But what I would refrain from calling it is a role-playing game! It is forgotten that a lot of people in the U.S. still have a negative association with that term, probably more than have a negative association with the word "roguelike," which is still kind of niche really. They may even have good reason to dislike CRPGs: the primary exemplar of the genre remains a kind of excessively anime-influenced trash fantasy quest game in which grinding is common and expected.

What roguelikes are, more than a straight role-playing game, is a turn-based tactics game with a single player unit. If people were to look at roguelikes in those term, I think, they would be a lot more accepting of both their difficulty (tactical wargamers are more accepting of challenge) and permadeath (since it is more obviously cheating to restore back to the middle of a battle). If Nintendo can continue to afford to localize the Fire Emblem games, which are still fairly obscure in the U.S., I don't see how Atlus can go wrong with Shiren if it's presented in a similar light.