GameDev News for 15 November 2020: roguelike edition

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Hello, everyone! I tried resuming work on my new roguelike this week, with little success. Instead I turned my attention to the site again, and at long last made an arcade game section. I thought there would be more links, at least, but oh well. Now I know which game genres to give more attention. And having dedicated pages for each genre I made a game in, that's a nice touch.

I also played around some with compilers and virtual machines trying to figure out some stuff, but I'm not even sure how best to sum it up. So instead, let's look at the news. Not that we have many this time:

  • First, What “Roguelike” Meant, an unusual history of the genre, starting around the time it began to be recognized as such and given a name. Expect lots of cane-waving and cries of "get off my lawn!" It's worth a read anyway for the different perspective.
  • Then, Exploring the Concept of a Terminal Roguelike “Overmap”: a clever solution for creating minimaps in a text-based roguelike that obeys a strict character grid, by using a kind of 4x zoom. Obviously that's not much, and not nearly as useful as what you can do in a graphical game. Like I did in mine, very easily, and to great effect.
  • And from Tumblr of all places, Game Design Fundamentals: Granting sight beyond sight, an illustrated write-up about how to balance your need to showcase fancy graphics against the players' need to see what's going on in the game they're trying to navigate.

Last but not least, Mark Johnson chronicles his adventures in migrating old Python 2.7 code to a newer, supported version of the language.

Imagine if civil engineers one day decided to "upgrade" every road and make them all wavy, and when carmakers complained about having to put square wheels on existing cars that were working just fine, all they'd hear was "upgrade! progress! how long should we keep backwards compatibility?"

For as long as it takes, techie. You wanted to be important, after all.


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Tags: meta, roguelike, graphics, game design, programming