Rogule: A dungeon a day keeps the Balrog away | Hacker News Reader

Rogule: A dungeon a day keeps the Balrog away

rogule.com

305 pointsseventyhorses56 comments

I've been playing this daily for a while. The issue I've found with it is that your health recharges every 100 steps. This creates a divergence between the fun way to play and the way most likely to win. The optimal strategy is to spend a long time button mashing between enemies, and to run back and forth for ages when facing a powerful enemy. I think it would be better if your health didn't recharge (with the enemies rebalanced to accommodate this). This would force the player to actually make smart decisions.

Isn't this a fairly central mechanic in many of the traditional roguelikes though? I know rogue and nethack both have this and it means that finding a safe place to rest for a while is an important part of your strategy. In nethack at least, there are more, faster enemies and you also have hunger to contend with so trying to rest to recharge your HP isn't an easy or boring way to play.

Sure, but in this version there's no hunger, and you can usually face the monsters one at a time.

> Isn't this a fairly central mechanic in many of the traditional roguelikes though?

It's half of the central mechanic. The other half is hunger—if you starve you die, so you need to keep moving to find food. That forces you to balance between moving too fast (and running out of health) versus moving too slow (and running out of food). If you take away half of that equation, the whole mechanic breaks.

Not true .. if you keep walking aimlessly, your health replenishes. I found that I could run in circles enough to replenish my health and kill all the monsters that way

In which game? If you’re taking about this game, then yes, that’s the problem.

Oh, sorry. I think I misunderstood the discussion.

They could also add a rest button? At least the 'proper' way wouldn't be too annoying then.

There is a rest button!

The proper way would be "hold '.' and pray nothing shows up to one shot you"

Speed (low moves #) to win is an important bragging factor in some roguelike communities. Can be part of the score.

Or try adding a time->danger game mechanic like Spelunky.

I find self-imposed rules make things like this more fun. Sure, you could run around and get your health back. Or you could tell yourself "that's not fun" and just...don't do it.

If the mechanics are tuned to assume you'll regain health this way, self-imposed rules add a pointless challenge. You're just "gaming" the game in a different way that defeats the purpose.

And a plug for the 7 day rouge like challenge which just started

https://itch.io/jam/7drl-challenge-2023

With the caveat that I do play a good amount of roguelikes, this one was far too easy. It needs better levels. You should add some algorithms that reject bad level generations. This one was beatable by killing the first two monsters and walking to the exit. Try generating levels until you get one where you need a strategy that is not that simple? Idk.

You can actually just walk straight to the exit, no need to fight anything.

Agreed. This isn't quite like the classic roguelike in which it's a struggle to survive and a miracle to win. In fact it may be unrealistic to expect a "daily" game to have that. This is more about getting a high score and sharing with friends how you approached the same dungeon.

> In fact it may be unrealistic to expect a "daily" game to have that.

Why? Plenty of roguelikes and -lites have daily seeded runs. The genre is pretty much optimal for a "daily" format.

Apologies, I was being too brusque. I mean that this new "Wordle variant" kind of popular daily game which takes about ten minutes, is easily shared with friends and family, and requires hardly any practice/knowledge, is not that well-suited to rogue-likes. I feel that most people playing Wordle variants enjoy getting a daily sense of accomplishment after 10-15 minutes, from day 1. Perhaps I'm wrong!

There’s a subgenre of traditional roguelikes known as “coffee break roguelikes”. These games are specifically designed to be highly compressed experiences without sacrificing the characteristic difficulty of the genre. They happen to be a perfect fit for this sort of daily game. I’m not aware of any that actually do this though!

The roguelite Spelunky HD has a daily seed with a leaderboard. That game can be finished in 10-15 minutes (if you’re really good)!

Wow, so I was wrong. Thanks for the info!

> This isn't quite like the classic roguelike in which it's a struggle to survive and a miracle to win.

Most classic roguelikes are reasonably easy to win provided you know and follow the obscure, nearly impossible to find by yourself and very rigid optimal way to go. That’s why I like to call checkbox ticking games.

You're just playing them wrong. The optimal way to appreciate rougelikes is to spend days reading the source code and constructing a set of spreadsheet models, simulators and research collection of obscure forum posts. Then grind patiently along the extremely boring, very rigid optimal way to go.

No checkboxes ticked.

It is exhilarating.

Ah, the average Eve player. One day they'll even realize it's a game and not an accounting job

"Easy" is not the same as "easy after years of practise".

Or you can walk up to a random monster and get beaten to hell and back. I dunno, that wasn’t exactly a fun experience either.

Hah, I believed the instructions and collected all the mushrooms before exiting.

> You should add some algorithms that reject bad level generations.

How big a request is that?

Clojure - cool, I haven’t seen this in the wild for ages!

https://github.com/chr15m/rogule.com/tree/master/src/rogule

That is wild! I've always wondered with functional programming what it would actually look like to have a game written in it- guess this is my answer.

For a good look at what game programming can be when you fully abstract side effects away, check this out.

https://github.com/rofrol/elm-games

Well that was charming - we'll see if I remember to come back tomorrow, but I enjoyed that in the moment :)

This is the type of thing where I am staying up just to play it again.

I would suggest a simple "how to" pop up, like a question mark button on the side.

4 hours later -- I see a question mark button on the upper left side. It shows a very brief but useful set of instructions.

This is why I sometimes let support tickets “mature” sometimes ;)

The manual ("?", top left) says "press the . key to rest".

The big dot between the cursor keys doesn't seem to do anything. And on mobile there's no keyboard to push a . key.

It's the button in the middle of the graphical arrow buttons. You need to tap it more than once to see your health start to go back up. Similar to other games of the type.

Very cool! I love the use of emoji as icons. I'm surprised more simple games don't make use of them.

I used them for a TUI game. Could've used some Unicode characters too.

I've started using them instead of png icons or svgs and so on. They fit in with typical text very nicely.

Well made! Clever to use Twitter as scoreboard, though there should be some key-based method to verify people aren't fabricating their scores :D

Or posting spam / advertising competing games.

I wonder why twitter hasn’t explored exclusive hashtag write access, coupled with api, as a business model. Maybe if they were less dev hostile.

Love things like this, bookmarked it before I even opened the website.

Just wish there was a dark mode, and that the feedback link had other options besides email.

This definitively needs a few easy maps that can be replayed multiple times as a "tutorial". Otherwise it's too difficult to get casual users. (And apparently too easy for hardcore roguelike fans.)

My suggestion is to keep the oficial daily map with bragging right, and also add a few "tutorial" maps.

It's great that it can be played on a phone by touching the arrow buttons.

it’s the kind of site I could appreciate notifications from. Especially since it’s not demanding my time and attention, and is quite fun and lovely.

Unlike, you know, pretty much every other site.

I wish you could come across the graves or dead bodies of other players where they died and perhaps loot items or something.

This has strong Tibia (the mmo) vibes. Would also love it, although the maps would have to be a bit bigger, or maybe the drop rates smaller.

This would also make it harder for the first adventurers and gradually easier for late comers (more bodies/more loot)

Is it just me or can you just walk to the exit and win? Maybe today's map was just bad?

`Rogule 2023-3-5`

Please zero pad month and day!

An elaboration on Sokoban with influences from Wordle and other modern micro-content

Lovely game, great idea! Would like to see more projects like this:)

I got almost instantly killed by a ghost and a wolf, and I have no idea what I did wrong.

It's quite difficult.

[spoiler alert]

Monster only see in a small radius. In today's map (2023/03/06) go a few steps to the small passage, so you only fight against one ghost at a time. Don't go too low because you will wake up the wolf. Kill both ghost, and pick some price at the top right.

Now go to find the wolf and kill it, and pick the prices there. Try to be as far away from the vampire.

If the vampire chase you, go to the top right and go in circles until your health go up.

The rest is not so difficult.

Thank you for the hints!

I really enjoy the simplicity of the UI and ease of playing.

I wish there was more of this on the web.

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