Название: One-Week Dungeons: Diaries of a Seven-Day Roguelike Challenge
Автор: David L. Craddock
Издательство: CRC Press
Год: 2022
Страниц: 131
Язык: английский
Формат: pdf (true)
Размер: 10.5 MB

Eleven game designers. Eight grand ideas. Seven days to will them into reality.

Every year, programmers around the world compete in the 7-day roguelike challenge, or 7DRL, a weeklong game jam where participants endeavor to design and program a roguelike role-playing game. Their obstacles: day jobs, family responsibilities, sleep deprivation, and visionary concepts too big for 168 hours to contain. Told over a series of daily journal logs, One-Week Dungeons: Diaries of a Seven-Day Roguelike Challengechronicles the journeys of eleven 7DRL participants as they race to build their dream games before the clock expires.

When developers and players say “role-playing game (RPG),” they’re typically talking about a virtual adventure where players control one protagonist or a party of characters, battle monsters, complete quests, increase core attributes such as strength and intellect, and save a world from disaster. Tat’s a broad defnition, so players and developers categorize diferent types of RPGs according to a wide array of subgenres. Te action-RPG, popularized by Blizzard North’s Diablo, emphasizes combat and downplays story and character progression. Massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) support hundreds or thousands of players at once and require an Internet connection to inhabit.

Roguelikes are one of the oldest types of RPGs, and one of the most popular. Created in the late 1970s, roguelike games see players explore procedurally generated dungeons, levels built through algorithms that produce new dungeons every time players sit down to the game. In most roguelikes, characters can only be killed once, a mechanic known as permadeath: upon death, the character is erased, and players start from scratch. Other roguelike trappings include text-based graphics instead of colored 2D or 3D characters and environments; a game structure optimized for a solitary adventurer rather than multiplayer players, like an MMORPG; and turn-based game-play, where players (traditionally represented by an “@” character) and monsters (represented by capital letters) take turns moving and attacking. As we will soon see, many of these iconic elements are optional.