If you know anyone who is fanatically into roguelikes or you’ve always wanted to try them yourself but have been intimidated by the insane control schemes and ascii graphics, this is a guide for you. The intent for this article is to provide a series of games ramping up towards the more esoteric roguelikes. Anyone who knows how to use a mouse will be able to move up this list. Each one will delve a bit deeper into what makes a roguelike tick, so it should also help you figure out whether the genre is for you without having to commit the time to learning the controls and what the symbols mean in the more complex titles. The goal is to get you to a place where you will feel comfortable picking up Nethack which is about as big, complicated and nasty as roguelikes get.
A quick bit about where I’m coming from: I have been interested in roguelikes for years, had downloaded Nethack many times only to become frustrated by the unintuitive controls. Shortly after beginning games I would get confused and feel totally lost, then would proceed to promise myself another time when I’m more patient I would revisit. These were games I found that got me to enough understanding of the genre to feel more comfortable diving into more complex games. Some people may argue that not everything on this list is a true roguelike. To them I say: fuck off.
1. Desktop Dungeons: You can bust through a game in 10-20 minutes. It’s played entirely with a mouse and is extremely easy to understand. The different race/class combos will give you a different play experience each time you start it up. The different dungeons give it even more variability. It is insanely simple which is both its biggest plus and its biggest minus, but probably the most accessible roguelike I’ve ever played.
3DS Max Exporter and Character Animation
I wrote an exporter for 3DS Max that exports it to my own file type. To test that it was working, I had to add character animating to my DirectX engine (aka skinning). Unfortunately, the actual exporting process is rather dull to look at, so I’ve instead posted a video showing the finished product of the character animation. Skinning is a pretty interesting process. Each vertex is affected by up to four bones, and is assigned a weight by how much they are affected by each of those bones. In a character animation shader, the vertex needs to move relative to its attached bone. This is accomplished by moving the vertex into world space, then using an inverse bone matrix to get the vertex in bone space, and finally multiplying by the bone matrix at a specific time t, to get where the vertex should be. After determining a vertex relative to a bone, you multiply that position times the weight of the vertex to that bone. Finally, add up all the positions, and you have skinning! It’s pretty cool to find as much complexity as there is in something so easy to take for granted.
This model was provided by my Professor Jani Kajala.