ASCII art + permadeath: The history of roguelike games

Core Traditional Roguelike Values

by @slashie, builder of the Temple of the Roguelike, 2022. v1.3.1 The foundations of this article are the conclusions from my talk at the Roguelike Celebration in 2017. Click here for a brief histo…

» How Jordan Mechner Made a Different Sort of Interactive Movie (or, The Virtues of Restraint) The Digital Antiquarian

One can learn much about the state of computer gaming in any given period by looking to the metaphors its practitioners are embracing. In the early 1980s, when interfaces were entirely textual and graphics crude or nonexistent, text adventures like those of Infocom were heralded as the vanguard of a new interactive literature destined to augment or entirely supersede non-interactive books. That idea peaked with the mid-decade bookware boom, when just about every entertainment-software publisher (and a few traditional book publishers) were rushing to sign established authors and books to interactive projects. It then proceeded to collapse just as quickly under the weight of its own self-importance when the games proved less compelling and the public less interested than anticipated.

Absolum Game

Crafted with passion by the dream team that redefined side-scrolling beat 'em ups, Absolum mixes top-of-the-class combat action with modern roguelite elements

How Memory Safety Approaches Speed Up and Slow Down Development Velocity

Every March, developers worldwide each try to make a roguelike game in less than 168 hours as part of the 7DRL Challenge. Roguelike games are hard, involving procedural level generation, pathfinding, line-of-sight algorithms, and more dijkstra maps than you can imagine.

Generation Next, Part 1: How Games Can Benefit From Procedurally Generated Lore

Mark Johnson is the developer of Ultima Ratio Regum, an ANSI 4X roguelike in which the use of procedural generation ext…

Ncursesw - RogueBasin

The version of the popular ncurses library that handles wide characters, or Unicode, is surprisingly difficult to get working with C programs. This article is intended to be a checklist for developers so that they can effectively use the library.

asciiQuake - Powered by GlyphCSS

Play Quake rendered as a live ASCII character grid through GlyphCSS, with no WebGL or canvas renderer.

Hylics 2

A surreal RPG with a unique graphical style and droll scenario.

Lone game dev builds an explorable cyberpunk city almost entirely out of ASCII characters

Dot dot dot matrix.

The Rise and Fall of the Lone Game Developer – Holy Ghost Stories

In the early 80s, all it took to make a game was a computer, some graph paper, and a lot of determination.

code relay - Fontemon

You read that right! It's a video game in a font! A font as in "Time New Roman". The entire game is enclosed in fontemon.otf, no javascript, no html, all font.

Swaggerfall

Procedurally generated first person RPG with ASCII graphics

Branches - comiCSS

comiCSS Games: games about CSS. Coded in CSS (mostly).