How to make roguelike games in Rust • Hacker News Board

Re: How to make roguelike games in Rust

#11

Post by thegeekpirate » Sat, Jan 11, 2020, 4:49 PM UTC

babuskov wrote: post #10

kris-s wrote: post #3

Are there commercially successful roguelikes that use ascii art only? Dwarf Fortress is the only one I know of and it's getting an official makeover for the Steam release.

I don't know about roguelikes success (Cogmind comes to mind), but I can tell you that ASCII games can be successful if you have a good idea. For example, I spent about 2 months making Rogue Bit just over a year ago: https://roguebit.bigosaur.com/ And it sold over 25000 copies so far.

Just to add on to the "not a roguelike" list (it's an adventure game), Stone Story RPG (https://store.steampowered.com/app/603390/Stone_Story_RPG/).

Re: How to make roguelike games in Rust

#12

Post by umvi » Sat, Jan 11, 2020, 5:08 PM UTC

thegeekpirate wrote: post #11

babuskov wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about roguelikes success (Cogmind comes to mind), but I can tell you that ASCII games can be successful if you have a good idea. For example, I spent about 2 months making Rogue Bit just over a year ago: https://roguebit.bigosaur.com/ And it sold over 25000 copies so far.

Just to add on to the "not a roguelike" list (it's an adventure game), Stone Story RPG ( https://store.steampowered.com/app/603390/Stone_Story_RPG/ ).

That's not really ASCII art. I mean it is, but iirc it's custom shader code in Unity made to look like retro style ASCII art. So it's actually way more difficult to make than a grid of ASCII characters.

Re: How to make roguelike games in Rust

#13

Post by billfruit » Sat, Jan 11, 2020, 5:26 PM UTC

kris-s wrote: post #3

Are there commercially successful roguelikes that use ascii art only? Dwarf Fortress is the only one I know of and it's getting an official makeover for the Steam release.

Caves of Qud comes to mind.

Re: How to make roguelike games in Rust

#14

Post by giancarlostoro » Sat, Jan 11, 2020, 5:28 PM UTC

umvi wrote: post #12

thegeekpirate wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to add on to the "not a roguelike" list (it's an adventure game), Stone Story RPG ( https://store.steampowered.com/app/603390/Stone_Story_RPG/ ).

That's not really ASCII art. I mean it is, but iirc it's custom shader code in Unity made to look like retro style ASCII art. So it's actually way more difficult to make than a grid of ASCII characters.

Depends if its easier for you to do 3D. I remember when I found thr ThreeJS ascii shader I had a bit of fun with it...

Re: How to make roguelike games in Rust

#15

Post by planetsmashr » Sat, Jan 11, 2020, 5:38 PM UTC

kris-s wrote: post #3

Are there commercially successful roguelikes that use ascii art only? Dwarf Fortress is the only one I know of and it's getting an official makeover for the Steam release.

DCSS isn't commercially successful, but I think it has the potential to be if it went that direction. The tiles version is probably most popular though:

https://crawl.develz.org/download.htm

Re: How to make roguelike games in Rust

#16

Post by empath75 » Sat, Jan 11, 2020, 5:50 PM UTC

kris-s wrote: post #3

Are there commercially successful roguelikes that use ascii art only? Dwarf Fortress is the only one I know of and it's getting an official makeover for the Steam release.

Replacing ascii with sprites is easy to do later.

Re: How to make roguelike games in Rust

#17

Post by AlchemistCamp » Sat, Jan 11, 2020, 6:11 PM UTC

I recently made one in Rust [1] with Tomas Sedovic's tutorial with libtcod and he suggested this one as a good next step!

I'm also excited to see that this one looks wasm compatible.

1) https://youtu.be/UKpDNnfiId0

Re: How to make roguelike games in Rust

#18

Post by boomlinde » Sat, Jan 11, 2020, 6:16 PM UTC

kris-s wrote: post #3

Are there commercially successful roguelikes that use ascii art only? Dwarf Fortress is the only one I know of and it's getting an official makeover for the Steam release.

Several commercial versions of Rogue were sold in the 80s.

Re: How to make roguelike games in Rust

#19

Post by Pamar » Sat, Jan 11, 2020, 6:35 PM UTC

Ask HN: are there any roguelike games that can be played (collaboratively) by two players on remote connection?

Mac OS would be a plus because both me and my friend use mostly Apple stuff at home.

Re: How to make roguelike games in Rust

#20

Post by flafla2 » Sat, Jan 11, 2020, 6:39 PM UTC

umvi wrote: post #12

thegeekpirate wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to add on to the "not a roguelike" list (it's an adventure game), Stone Story RPG ( https://store.steampowered.com/app/603390/Stone_Story_RPG/ ).

That's not really ASCII art. I mean it is, but iirc it's custom shader code in Unity made to look like retro style ASCII art. So it's actually way more difficult to make than a grid of ASCII characters.

Although I get where you’re coming from, I disagree with the assertion that this makes it “not really ASCII art”. At the end of the day modern terminal emulators use a graphics API at one point to render characters on the screen. You wouldn’t say that iTerm2 isn’t a “real tty” because it has a metal backend (in this case, iTerm2 is also using a custom shader to render ASCII/unicode — more complex than this game of course). Where do we even draw the line? Is ASCII art only legit if it can render natively in a traditional terminal? How about only one without hardware acceleration? POSIX compliant? Further down the rabbit hole we could draw a line in the sand at tty’s with no window manager.

It would still be trivial for the developer to add an “textshot” feature to export a frame to .txt, so I’d still qualify it as fitting the ASCII art aesthetic.