Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Episode 3: Brogue

Welcome to another episode of Roguelike Radio. This week we will be discussing the roguelike game Brogue, which downloadable from the developers site found here. This week we have Erez Ben-Aharon, Scott Edgar, and John Harris in our longest podcast to date!


The mp3 download of the podcast can be downloaded here, can be played in the embedded player below, or you can follow us on iTunes.







Topics covered this week:
-The beautiful ASCII style in Brogue.
-The different items in the game, and how they interact together in interesting ways.
-The monsters and how they are unique.


Thanks for listening, next week we will be covering DoomRL.

9 comments:

  1. I don't know, the game has a ton of "Ha ha game over" moments in the early game, which is usually a bad idea to hand to a newbie. IDing potions can be summarized as "Drink and hope you don't die from the exploding one".

    The game also has a massive boost to the difficulty once toads and pink jellies start showing up, because if you can't dispatch them in a single hit, you're screwed.

    You are forced to maintain both melee and ranged combat equipment for dealing with enemies like the bloat and acid mound.

    None of those traits make a game particularly newbie-friendly. The final strike against the "newbie-friendliness" of brogue is that is seems to be quite common to get to level 7 or so and still not have any clue as to whether wizard or warrior will be the better option. An experienced player might be able to make an educated guess, but a newbie might as well flip a coin.

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  2. Brogue isn't a newbie-friendly game, yes. Not all games have to be newbie friendly. I mean, take Rogue, which is clearly Brogue's greatest inspiration, it's even harder on early levels.

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  4. Nice podcast, more interesting than the "what is a roguelike" discussions. Hope you can do one with some Crawl Stone Soup devs :)

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  5. Hey guys,

    Could you turn the volume up on next episodes, please?

    I tried hearing this on my mobile phone on the way to work, but it was not possible. The volume is so low that even with the max setting, the slightest background noise (the bus engine, two old women talking) covered it. Completely impossible to hear.

    Thanks!

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  6. Great podcast. Came to visit from mefi. I'd like to hear some oral history of playing the games. Also, as a wannabe rougelike dev...I'd like to hear something about the process. Tips for noobs, stuff like that. Keep up the good work.
    Also, this is kind of a cool idea. Not strictly a RL but it's built in the spirit of the tradition.
    It's called tinyhack.
    http://boingboing.net/rob/tinyhack/

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  7. Was fun to listen to your analysis of Brogue. I totally agree - this is the most beautiful ASCII art I've seen in an roguelike, hands down. The gameplay is quite unique, too, in that character development is oriented around equipment enchantment. Your real decisions lay in how to take advantage of the resources you collect on the early levels to support a particular type of gameplay.

    As for newbie help, use auto exploration the first few levels and hold off on experimenting with potions and scrolls until your inventory is full. You'll want to wear weapons and armor to identify them, and you'll end up getting cursed equipment that scrolls may take care of when you're IDing them. You also don't want to find a scroll of enchantment without anything useful to enchant! Make sure you're standing in water when you try out your potions, too.

    If you end up with a fail of a character, well, at least you're only a few dungeon levels in and can start over fairly easily. : D

    I reviewed this game (with screenies) a year and a half ago (this was before 1.3, so some of my comments are likely dated... I really need to post another!):

    https://roguewombat.wordpress.com/2010/03/05/brogue-gets-it-right/

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  8. @C Tinyhack is great. I don't suppose you saw Tiny Crawl that came out of the Assemblee competition at TIGSource... that mystical compo that blessed the roguelike community with oodles of free tiles. : D

    http://vacuumflowers.com/temp/tiny_crawl_assemblee

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