Roguelike

The term "roguelike" came from Usenet newsgroups around 1993, as this was the principal channel the players of roguelike games of that period were using to discuss these games, as well as what the developers used to announce new releases and even distribute the game's source code in some cases. With several individual groups for each game, it was suggested that with rising popularity of Rogue, Hack, Moria, and Angband, all of which shared common elements, that the groups be consolidated under an umbrella term to facilitate cross-game discussion. By the time it was suggested that a group be created to discuss the development of these kind of games in 1998, the "roguelike" term was already established within the community. This usage parallels that of "Doom clone", a term used in the 1990s that later evolved into the more generic "first-person shooter". ==Gameplay and design==

Drawing from the concepts of tabletop role-playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons, nearly all roguelikes give the player control of a character, which they may customize by selecting a class, race, and gender, and adjusting attributes points and skills. At the start of the game, the character is placed at the top-most level of a dungeon, with basic equipment such as a simple weapon, armor, torches, and food. Following along the role-playing concept of a dungeon crawl, the player moves the character through the dungeon, collecting treasure which can include new weapons, armours, magical devices, potions, scrolls, food, and money, while having to fight monsters that roam the dungeon. Most combat is performed simply by attempting to move the character into the same space as the monster. The game then calculates the damage that the character and monster deal. Defeating monsters earns the character experience points, and after earning enough points, the character will gain an experience level, improving their hit points, magic capability, and other attributes. Monsters may drop treasure to be looted. The character dies if they lose all their hit points. As most roguelikes feature the concept of permadeath, this represents the end of the game, and the player will need to restart the game with a newly made character. Key features "Vulture" sprite-based interface for the roguelike game NetHack What gameplay elements explicitly define a "roguelike" game remains a point of debate within the video game community. There is broad agreement that roguelike games incorporate gameplay elements popularized by the text-based game Rogue (1980), which bore out many variations due to its success; As of 2015, several hundred games claiming to be roguelikes were available through the Steam game catalog, and the user-run wiki RogueBasin tracks hundreds of roguelikes and their development. The Berlin Interpretation set out a set of high-value and low-value factors, basing these lists on five canon roguelike games: ADOM, Angband, ''Linley's Dungeon Crawl, NetHack, and Rogue. The Interpretation was designed to determine "how roguelike a game is", noting that missing a factor does not eliminate a game from being a roguelike, nor does possessing the features make a game roguelike. Games may include pre-determined levels such as a town level common to the Moria'' family where the player can buy and sell equipment, but these are considered to reduce the randomness set by the Berlin Interpretation. In addition, the appearances of magical items may vary from run to run. For example, a "bubbly" potion might heal wounds one game, then poison the player character in the next. • The game uses permadeath. Once a character dies, the player must begin a new game, known as a "run", which will regenerate the game's levels anew due to procedural generation. A "save game" feature will only provide suspension of gameplay and not a limitlessly recoverable state; the stored session is deleted upon resumption or character death. Players can circumvent this by backing up stored game data ("save scumming"), an act that is usually considered cheating; the developers of Rogue introduced the permadeath feature after introducing a save function, finding that players were repeatedly loading saved games to achieve the best results. • The game is turn-based, giving the player as much time as needed to make a decision. Gameplay is usually step-based, where player actions are performed serially and take a variable measure of in-game time to complete. Game processes (e.g., monster movement and interaction, progressive effects such as poisoning or starvation) advance based on the passage of time dictated by these actions. Rich Carlson, one of the creators of an early roguelike-like Strange Adventures in Infinite Space, called this aspect a sort of "clock", imposing some type of deadline or limitation on how much the player can explore and creating tension in the game. • The game is focused on hack and slash-based gameplay, where the goal is to kill many monsters, and where other peaceful options do not exist. Early roguelikes Early roguelikes were developed to be played on text-based user interfaces, commonly UNIX-based computer mainframes and terminals used at colleges and universities before transitioning to personal computers. Games used a mix of ASCII or ANSI characters to visually represent elements of the dungeon levels, creatures, and items on the level as in ASCII art. These games typically included one or two text lines presenting the player's current status at the bottom of the screen, and text-based menu screens to manage inventory, statistics, and other details. The player's character was nearly always represented by the @ character across text-based roguelikes, which had been chosen by the developers of Rogue to stand for "where you're at". With modern computer systems, users developed alternate means of displaying the game, such as graphical tilesets and Isometric-based graphical front ends, as well as interfaces that took advantage of keyboard and mouse UI controls, but otherwise still kept to the core tile-based gameplay. As computers offered more advanced user interfaces, such as windows and point-and-click menus, many traditional roguelikes were modified to include support for having multiple windows. This was useful to not only show the character-based dungeon, but details on the character's inventory, the monster they were in battle with, and other status messages, in separate windows. Having access to multiple windows also allowed having menus to complete more complex commands. More recent examples of roguelikes that have stayed with ASCII art-based displays include Cogmind (2017) and Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead (2013). Roguelites and procedural death labyrinths '' combines roguelike elements with beat 'em up gameplay. With computers and video game consoles capable of more advanced graphics and gameplay, numerous games have emerged that are loosely based on the classic roguelike design but diverge in one or more features. Many of these games use the concepts of procedurally generated maps and permadeath, while moving away from tile-based movement and turn-based gameplay, often using another gameplay genre such as action games or platformers. Other titles deriving from roguelike games are based on the observation that the traditional roguelikes are difficult with a steep learning curve, and a player may never complete these games over numerous play sessions, making these titles difficult to sell to a broader audience. These new games would include elements to reduce the difficulty as to draw in a larger audience. Many games with some of the Berlin Interpretation elements call themselves "roguelike", but bear little resemblance to the original Rogue, causing confusion and dilution of the term. Some players of the Berlin Interpretation roguelikes disliked the dilution of the term, believing that in the 1990s and 2000s, the term "roguelikes" served well to distinguish games that forwent aesthetics to focus on depth of gameplay from games more comparable to interactive movies, particularly games that incorporated real-time gameplay elements which tended to reduce the game's complexity. As such, the term "rogue-lite" or "roguelike-like" has been used by some to distinguish these games that possess some, but not all, of the Berlin Interpretation features from those that exactly meet the Berlin roguelike definition. The phrase "procedural death labyrinth" has also been applied to such games, as they retain the notion of permadeath and random level generation but lack the other high-value factors normally associated with roguelike games. Rogue-lites favor short gameplay runs with victory conditions, in contrast to some traditional roguelikes that can be played indefinitely. The shortness of a single gameplay run in rogue-lites can motivate players to continually replay the game in the hope of reaching completion, making replayability a high-value factor in these types of games. Game journalist Joshua Bycer observed that several games considered as rogue-lites feature fixed events, even if the means to reach that may be through procedural generation, whereas a roguelike game typically lacks this level of predictability. For example, several rogue-lites require the player to travel a fixed number of biomes, each which culminates in a boss fight, such as Rogue Legacy. Associated with their short length, many rogue-lites feature a metagame, whereby achieving certain goals will unlock persistent features such as the ability to select a new character at the start of the game or the addition of new items and monsters in the procedural generation of the game's levels. Alternatively, each run through rogue-lite may be to collect resources which one then advances their character within the metagame, and a player may simply forgo a complete run once they have collected sufficient materials for that advancement. Rogue-lites may also allow the player to enter the random seed directly as to be able to rechallenge the same set of levels or share a difficult set of levels with other players. US Gamer further identified games they consider edge cases of being roguelikes or rogue-lites, as they are inspired by Rogue, and "that stray a bit further from the genre but still manage to scratch the same itch as a great roguelike". These include games such as the Diablo series, ToeJam & Earl, and Dwarf Fortress, the latter of which retains the classic ASCII art-approach to gameplay as traditional roguelikes. Another type of roguelike subgenre is the roguelike deck-builder, in which combat is resolved by using cards or an equivalent object. These games are inspired by physical deck-building games, where the player builds their deck over the course of the game, forcing them to plan strategy on the fly. While the 2014 game Dream Quest is considered the first example of such a video game, the popularity of the genre was cemented with Slay the Spire in 2017. ==History==

Early history (1975–1980) The creation of roguelike games came from hobbyist programmers and computer hackers, attempting to create games for the nascent computer field in the early 1980s, particularly influenced by the 1975 text adventure game Colossal Cave Adventure (often simply titled Adventure, or advent on filesystems without long filenames), and from the high fantasy setting of the tabletop game Dungeons & Dragons. Some elements of the roguelike genre were present in dungeon crawlers written for the PLATO system. This includes pedit5 (1975) believed to be the first dungeon crawl game, and featured random monster encounters, though only used a single fixed dungeon level. It is unclear if these PLATO games inspired the roguelike genre as there is no evidence that the early roguelike creators had access to these games. Concurrent variants Though the term "roguelike" derives from the 1980 game Rogue, the first known game with the core roguelike gameplay elements was Beneath Apple Manor (1978), written by Don Worth for the Apple II; Beneath Apple Manor is also recognized as the first commercial roguelike game. The game, inspired by Worth's enjoyment of Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying, included procedural generation using a modification of the random maze generator from the game Dragon Maze, role-playing elements for the characters, tile-based movement and turn-based combat. Another early roguelike whose development pre-dated Rogue was Sword of Fargoal (1982), developed by Jeff McCord starting in 1979. The game was based on GammaQuest, an earlier title McCord had created on the Commodore PET which he shared locally with friends while a student at Henry Clay High School in Kentucky; the game itself was based on a Dungeons & Dragons campaign he had run himself in the prior years. It was also inspired by interactive fiction Adventure. They created the story of the game by having the player seek out the "Amulet of Yendor", "Yendor" being "Rodney" spelled backwards, the name of the wizard they envisioned had created the dungeon. Toy eventually dropped out of school but got a job at the computing labs at University of California, Berkeley, where he met with Arnold. Arnold helped to optimize the curses code and implement more features into the game. Rogue proved popular with college students and computer researchers at the time, including Ken Thompson; Dennis Ritchie had joked at the time that Rogue was "the biggest waste of CPU cycles in history". The popularity of Rogue led developers to create their own versions of the game, though their efforts were originally limited by the lack of access to Rogues source, which was not released until BSD v4.3 in 1986. These versions would be distributed with source code, and along with the original Rogue source, other developers were able to create software forks of the games, adding in new monsters, items, and gameplay features, creating several dozen variants. most variants of Rogue could be classified into two branches based on two key games, Moria and Hack, that were developed in the spirit of Rogue. Moria-based Moria (1983) was developed by Robert Alan Koeneke while a student at University of Oklahoma, inspired by both Adventure and Rogue. Having access to a VAX-11/780, but without the source to Rogue due to computer administrator restrictions, he began trying to recreate Rogue but specifically flavored with the complex cave maze of the same name in J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle Earth stories. Following Tolkien's fiction, the player's goal was to descend to the depths of Moria to defeat the Balrog, akin to a boss battle. As with Rogue, levels were not persistent: when the player left the level and then tried to return, a new level would be procedurally generated. Among other improvements to Rogue, Koeneke included a persistent town at the highest level where players could buy and sell equipment, and the use of data structures within the Pascal language allowed him to create a more diverse bestiary within the game. Following Cutler and Astrand's graduation, Sean March and Geoff Hill took over the development to see the game through to a public release outside of the university, adding in elements such as giving the player a sense of the rewards and dangers of a level when they entered it the first time. One significant fork was ZAngband (1994) (short for Zelazny Angband), which expanded on Angband and altered the theme towards Roger Zelazny's The Chronicles of Amber. The ZAngband codebase would be used to create Troubles of Middle Earth (ToME) in 2002, which later swapped out the Tolkien and Zelazny fiction setting for a new original one to become ''Tales of Maj'Eyal (2009). The vanilla Angband'' remains in development today by the devteam. in the high fantasy setting, and the use of pre-defined levels with some procedural elements that the player would encounter deeper in the dungeons. Ancient Domains of Mystery (1994), or ADOM for short, derived from concepts presented in NetHack. ADOM was originally developed by Thomas Biskup while a student at Technical University of Dortmund. After playing through Rogue and Hack, he came to NetHack and was inspired by the game but dismayed at the complexity and elements he found unnecessary or distracting. Biskup created ADOM from scratch with the aim of creating a more story-driven game than NetHack that kept the depth of gameplay with a focused theme and setting. Omega, developed by Laurence Brothers in the late 1980s, is credited with introducing an overworld concept to the roguelike genre, prior to the feature's appearance in ADOM. Omega was often remembered for its odd inventory approach in which the player would have to pick up an object, considering it being held, and then moving that object to a bag or an equipment slot. ''Linley's Dungeon Crawl (1995) was created by Linley Henzell and featured a skill-based character progression system, in which experience points could be used to improve specific skills, such as weapon proficiency or trap detection. One fork of this would form the basis for Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup'' (2006). SSI's Dungeon Hack (1993) offered randomized dungeons and permadeath within AD&D 2nd Edition rules. Mystery Dungeon games (1993–onward) Through 1993, roguelikes primarily existed in computer space, and no home console variants had yet existed. Two of the earliest-known attempts were Sega's Fatal Labyrinth (1990) and Dragon Crystal (1990), but which lacked the depth of a typical computer-based roguelike. Neither proved to be successful games. Chunsoft had gained success by developing the Dragon Quest series, a series which established fundamental aspects of the computer role-playing game genre, popular for Western computer audiences, into a more streamlined approach better suited for Japanese players that preferred consoles. With roguelikes starting to gain popularity, Chunsoft's developers believed they could do a similar treatment for that genre to make it better suited for Japanese audiences. Chunsoft's Koichi Nakamura stated their intent was to take Rogue and make it "more understandable, more easy-to-play version" of the title that could be played on consoles. This led to the creation of the Mystery Dungeon, with the first title being (1993) based on the Dragon Quest series. Several changes to the roguelike formula had to be made for this conversion: they had developed ways to reduce the difficulty of the roguelike by using progressively more difficult dungeons that were randomly generated, and made permadeath an option by selection of difficulty level. While Torneko no Daibōken did not sell as well as typical Dragon Quest games, it was successful enough for Chunsoft to develop a second title based on a wholly original character and setting, Mystery Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer, released in 1995. Chunsoft found that they were more creative with how they developed the game without the need to respect an existing property. A primary difference between the Mystery Dungeon games and Western roguelikes following the Berlin Interpretation is the lack of permadeath—in Mystery Dungeon games, player-characters may die or become too injured, resetting their progress to the start of the dungeon, but the games typically provide means to store and recover equipment and other items from the previous run. Other Japanese role-playing games would incorporate random dungeon generation as part of their design, mimicking part of the nature of roguelikes, and were considered roguelike titles when published in Western markets. Such titles include Azure Dreams, Dark Cloud, Shining Soul, and Baroque. The massively multiplayer online role-playing game Final Fantasy XIV added a randomly generated Deep Dungeon that was inspired by the procedural generation of roguelikes. Continued development in Western markets (2002–onward) '', incorporating user interface elements more common to other hack-and-slash games such as a mini-map and a persistent inventory window Though new classical roguelike variants would continue to be developed within the Western market, the genre languished as more advanced personal computers capable of improved graphics capabilities and games that utilized these features became popular. However, some of these new graphical games drew influence for roguelike concepts, notably action role-playing games like Blizzard Entertainment's Diablo (1996). Diablos creator, David Brevik, acknowledged that games like Rogue, NetHack, Telengard and other roguelikes influenced the design of Diablo, including the nature of randomly generated dungeons and loot. Existing roguelikes continue to be developed: a sequel to ADOM successfully received crowd funding in 2012, New roguelikes that adhere to core Berlin Interpretation rules are still being created, including Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup (2006), Dungeons of Dredmor (2011), and Dragon Fin Soup (2015). A subclass of "coffeebreak roguelikes" that could be completed in a short period of time have developed, often derived from entries in the Seven Day Roguelike Challenge; examples include such as DoomRL (2013) and Desktop Dungeons (2013) Some games would also take advantage of the ease of developing in the tile-based ASCII interfaces common to roguelikes. For example, the highly popular Dwarf Fortress (2006) uses the roguelike interface atop a construction and management simulation, and would serve as a major inspiration for Minecraft, while SanctuaryRPG (2014) is a more traditional turn-based role-playing game featuring a scripted story that uses an ASCII interface and roguelike gameplay elements. UnReal World (1992), the game that is considered to be the forerunner of the survival game genre, and which frequently uses procedural generation to create the worlds that players must survive in, was developed by Sami Maaranen and was influenced by roguelikes, with its initial interface being similar to that of NetHack. Growth of the rogue-lite (2005–onward) The roguelike genre saw a resurgence in Western markets after 2000 through independent developers who created a new subgenre designated "rogue-lite", though the games are also sometimes called "roguelike-likes". Indie developers began to incorporate roguelike elements into genres not normally associated with roguelikes, creating games that would form the basis of this new subgenre. Two of the earliest cited examples of rogue-lites are Strange Adventures in Infinite Space (2002) and its sequel Weird Worlds: Return to Infinite Space (2005) by Digital Eel, both space exploration games that included randomly generated planets and encounters, and permadeath. Digital Eel based their work on the space exploration game Starflight along with roguelikes like NetHack but wanted to provide a shorter experience that would be easier to replay, akin to tabletop beer and pretzels games like Deathmaze and ''The Sorcerer's Cave'' that has elements in common with roguelikes. '' (2014) is a multiplayer, brawler-based rogue-lite that has up to four players playing in a mixed cooperative/competitive gameplay to explore procedurally generated dungeons. Spelunky (2008), released shortly after the formation of the Berlin Interpretation, is considered to be a major contribution to the growth of indie-developed rogue-lites. Edmund McMillen, the developer of The Binding of Isaac (2011), and Kenny and Teddy Lee, the co-developers of Rogue Legacy (2012), credit Yu's approach with Spelunky as showing how to distill down the nature of a traditional roguelike to apply it to other gaming genres which they had done for their rogue-lites. Jay Ma and Matthew Davis, the co-developers of FTL: Faster Than Light (2012), credited both Weird Worlds: Return to Infinite Space and Spelunky as part of their influence for FTL. All of these games earned critical praise, and their success has led to a more modern resurgence in rogue-lites since their release. Additionally, many of these newer rogue-lites strive to address the apparent high difficulty and ruthlessness that traditional roguelikes were known for, and newer players will be able to find more help through user-generated game guides and walkthroughs made possible through wide Internet accessibility. McMillen of The Binding of Isaac said that including roguelike elements into other game mechanics can be difficult due to the complex interfaces roguelikes tend to have, but eventually "it becomes an increasingly beautiful, deep, and everlasting design that allows you to generate a seemingly dynamic experience for players, so that each time they play your game they're getting a totally new adventure". Procedural-generated world lets developers create many hours worth of game content without spending resources on designing detailed worlds. • Slay the Spire, bringing roguelike progression to a deck building game • Crypt of the Necrodancer which uses a rhythm game-style approach in a roguelike dungeon • Enter the Gungeon which establishes roguelike progression in a shoot 'em up • Vampire Survivors, a minimalistic roguelike shoot 'em up. • Balatro, a score attack style roguelike based on playing poker hands. • Blue Prince, a roguelike with several puzzle game features as to solve a mystery. Hades, a roguelite action role-playing game, was built to strongly incorporate elements of non-linear narrative into the game, giving the reason for the player to continually delve into replaying the game, and helped to draw in players to the roguelike genre that otherwise had been put off by its high difficulty level before. ==Community==

The roguelike genre has developed with the expansion of both classical roguelikes and rogue-lite titles, a dedicated fan community has come about to not only discuss games within it but to craft their own tales of near-death adventures or amusing stories in roguelikes. Within this community, there is strong interest in developing roguelikes. The 7 Day Roguelike challenge (7DRL) was born out of a USENET newsgroup in 2005 for roguelike developers, informally challenging them to create the core of a novel roguelike within 7 days to be submitted for judging and play by the public. In the spirit of the 2008 International Roguelike Conference, the "Roguelike Celebration" was held for the first time in September 2016 in San Francisco where several past and present roguelike developers gathered to discuss the history and future direction of the genre. It has since been organized again in 2017, 2018 and 2019 in San Francisco, and as virtual events in 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024. ==See also==