The next game in the line-up was one of several added after the first post. It is not even a roguelike, but I have been generous enough to offer it tentative inclusion in the category 'roguelikelikes', although in this case that could be a little unfair. (Edit: since the developer announces releases at rec.games.roguelike.announce, perhaps it is fair enough)

Slot #3: Privateer: The ASCII Sector
The link explains it pretty well, but my understanding is it's a free-form space-based game in which your character attempts to accrue wealth by means fair or foul. As far as I know it is an extremely open-ended game, so perhaps I better hope it is easy to die or this could take a while.

My first challenge is deciphering the control scheme. Neither '?' or 'F1' produce help screens; nor is there a control configuration screen in the game menu. So, trial and error. Most buttons I push seem to be either movement or 'do nothing'... with a little testing I discover I am the green flashing dot at the bottom right of the screen, and the green # next to me is my ship.

Aha! 'h' for help. Going to use that a lot for a while.

Bumbling around town, I find a ship dealer who offers me a ship I can't afford (incidentally... how much cash do I have?) and a commodity market that looks daunting, complete with handy local and global price graphs. Chatting with random NPCs, one of them offers me a job. Since I am feeling tentative about trade and quantities I take that up and hope I meet the deadline for delivering the item I'm given. So I race back to my ship and enter it, which brings up a cute little interior screen. Apparently like everything else you aren't actually controlling your ship until you enter the bridge and access the computer there.

There is a little animation of taking off, and suddenly space with planet below! There's a battle going on and space controls are different to walking controls, so I panic and fire off a few random shots accidentally. Fortunately no one is shooting at me and the battle dies down after a few seconds.

After some poking around at different screens I work out broadly where I am supposed to go and set off in the wrong direction. Work this out and fix it after a couple of minutes, and fortunately I was only slightly wrong instead of very wrong. Eventually discover the autopilot button makes tedious travel go faster and arrive at my destination.

Well, at the jump point which takes me to my destination system. There is a fun animation effect and suddenly am there. I flail around looking for a planet to make my delivery at, wondering how I land, when I realise maybe I am supposed to delivery to one of the ships floating around the jump point with apparently nothing better to do. I flip between local targets until one registers with the name of my goal and I hail em, announcing my possession of an item for em.

This prompts the other vessel to come along beside me, cueing a couple of minutes of panicked searching for how to actually deliver the item. On the manifest screen 'transfer' is greyed out and doesn't do anything... do I press 'jettison'? Surely not. Fortunately simply being alongside each other seems to do the trick, as I receive a Mission Complete pop-up without doing anything particular.

At this point I feel in need of a break and choose to Quit the game... which unfortunately does not save, thus abruptly ending the brief career of Millicent Skade, Privateer. But next time...

Next time I will do better, or be unlucky. However I have also acquired myself a PS/2 / USB converter and now have a proper keyboard and mouse at least occasionally attached to my laptop. Which means by my own rules I should probably put this Roguelike Roulette on hold until I've finished with those other games I was going to play. Probably no more frequently played, but I hope I will have fun writing something about those too.

I also played a few more Angband games to entertain myself before starting up Privateer: The ASCII Sector, mainly because it was fun and quick and saveable. I learned that the monster memory seems to be linked to character - when beginning a game you can load an old file and (if that character is dead) play eir clone or roll anew, or start a new character file, and information on things encountered seems to be tracked separately in each character file. Most of those time-passing games were very short-lived, but a clone of the character I wrote about last time, Sellisrekh the dwarven paladin, became the new top scorer.

She had a slower game than her predecessor, mostly because carrying many items meant many returns to town to sell and clear items. She took to selling one item from unidentified stacks to learn what they were without risking use - mainly I was worried about discovering something that would permanently curse or damage my gear, but that didn't happen. She found helpful wands of Magic Missile and Slow Monster, but also Heal Monster and Haste Monster (neither of which could be turned on herself), and tried to make potions of Sleep, Confusion and Poison useful by hurling them at her foes, but those seemed to only do small damage and break, no helpful magical effects, so she just dropped them. She was fortunate to find early a magical sling and magical stones to fire in it.

I have been quite enjoying the pseudo-ID system in Angband. Despite my caution described above, current design goals among the developers include making ID-by-use non-fatal and minimising the use of identification magic. When an item is carried around for a while (armour, ammunition and weapons only I think - as far as I am aware scrolls, potions and food are never cursed) the character eventually gets a feel for it. If it feels ordinary the item is immediately identified as a regular one of its kind. If it feels magical, one can use it to discern more clearly its properties (and probably before getting that feeling too). Most of the magical items Sellisrekh found had negative enchants, but weren't 'sticky' like I am used to for negatively enchanted items in roguelikes, and could be removed - I believe a distinction is being made between negatively enchanted and actually cursed. The only cursed item Sellisrekh found were Arrows of Backbiting, which were quickly rid of, and most of negatively enchanted items could be sold still.

As I said, she found a sling with good enchantment, and usefully magical and non-magical stones to fire with it too. Later, she defeated the hobbit Bullroarer and found an even better crossbow too. The quiver system was interesting, and seemed to provide space for holding ammunition separate to the main inventory, which was very handy, as well as being smart about which weapon was being used and which ammunition worked well with it (this quiver design was imported from NPPAngband). Bullroarer also dropped the war hammer Sellisrekh used the remainder of her life. That one turned out to be an 'ego item' and got a pseudo-ID of {special} and on use was found to be even better than the dagger she'd been using (because daggers are fast, the two attacks she got with that were better than the single blow she got with her original broadsword), but even after that use-testing it was still described on inspection with "You do not know the full extent of this item's powers".

After a while I felt I was getting the hang of Sellisrekh and needed only pruning of which items seemed essential to keep around so as to enable longer dives (probably potions of Frost Resistance and scrolls of Treasure Detection would be the ones to go), but despite being pretty full on inventory decided to take the stairs down one more time and read the Scroll of Recall from there so as to have a new base depth to return to. That put Sellisrekh on level 8, the same depth the first Sellisrekh had perished at. Of course the level feeling there was "You feel there is something superb here", so we went exploring before returning to town.

Roaming around, Sellisrekh chased a wounded lizard into a room and an orc stepped out into the corridor behind her from a side door. That's new, never saw an orc before. Apparently they come in groups. Then a snaga followed it; snagas, apparently, being another kind of orc. It seemed judicious at this point to kill the lizard at range rather than be attacked from two directions.

Another snaga. Huh. Sellisrekh casts Detect Evil and becomes aware of, in addition to those visible, another 92 orcs in a chamber just north. Right, Angband also gives level feelings like that for out of depth monsters, as well as good items, and our first encounter with any orc seems to be via orc pit. Last stand time?

Sellisrekh Blesses herself, drinks a potion of Speed and another of Heroism, and makes sure to be wielding her best weapon. She also puts on a ring she'd been carrying for ages with no hint to its quality, and quickly identifies it as one with a very bad Dexterity hit before removing it. Even so buffed up and enhanced she's brought down to half health before downing just the first orc sighted, and more are pouring in through the room behind.

The Word of Recall scroll is read, then fighting continues while waiting for it to take effect. Sadly Sellisrekh fights one more round when she should have read a scroll of Phase Door for a chance at safe teleport, and she is brought down. Looking over identified possessions post-mortem, it turns out the hidden property of that war hammer was dragon-slaying. Not very useful at any depth she'd achieved.

A long while ago, reading the dc20 Modern System Reference Document I was struck by the section on Incantations.

To me it seemed an excellent system within the rules for opening inter-planar travel to low level or non-magical characters. I tend to regard that as important, so I set about designing 'Incantations' to facilitate that sort of travel. Normally the designs include construction of a specific ritual chamber or other structure / prepared area in which the incantation itself is to be performed. A sort of symbolic machinery, is what I was going for.

Alright. Well. So I was recently pondering a bit of story design and wandered onto this topic of inter-planar ritual machinery again. In D&D style cosmology (or among my preferred version[s] thereof) I'd been designing tools for characters to travel from the 'Prime Material' plane, the place where your standard pseudo-medieval fantasy adventure takes place, to the numerous elemental, ideological and transitive planes of that cosmology where its unworldly beings dwell. Angels and demons and djinn and such. But this time, this time I wondered about a machine made to facilitate transport between different layers of the material plane, something that could be tuned between destinations, between different layers. Where those other planes are like conceptualisations made manifest this would be... not quite visiting alternate histories, but travelling to other planets that may be similar or different but at least abide by (usually?) the same physics.

I wondered if that could be a fun game, being of a civilisation with little or no magic, that builds or possibly finds such a device relic and sets out to explore with it. I suppose it could be called something like Planegate: SG1.

Past time for a new one of those. Next game on the list is venerable Angband, which turns out to be younger than I was expecting, only beginning development in 1990 according to Wikipedia. It is the first example on this play-through of what are called the 'major roguelikes', the iconic examples of the genre. Ancient Domains of Mystery probably should have shown up first, if I were being thorough, but what I've read about it has never quite been interesting enough for me to take up the game and play, and I try to stay out of the business of playing games I don't want to. Anyway, the objective here is to descend 99 levels deep into the dungeon, defeat Sauron, then defeat Morgoth on the hundredth level.

Unlike AliensRL, I've played this game before, sort of. Last time I played was about a year ago with 3.1.1.1626 beta; this time around its the 3.1.2v2 beta and I don't know what's been changed in the meanwhile. Identification, pretty sure, don't know what else. Not going to duplicate the changelist here and probably not expert enough to notice much of it in play anyway. Let's find out!

I like to play randomly generated characters in these. It feels fun trying to work with what I get and see how well I do. In this case I had to be even more random than recommended, because without a right arrow key I couldn't work out how to make the point based ability assignment work.

Kay, that's a surprise. The first game screen I see actually is different. At least, it's brown. The '@' symbol represents the player character and the 't' is one of the townsfolk. Those brown blocky things with the numbers are the shops in town.

The first thing I do is read the controls, set some options (mainly to enable more visual information cues) and inspect my gear. No armour, already wielding a sword and light source. I hope I will think to use that protection from evil scroll at some point. Possibly should try and learn another prayer from the prayer book to start and see about buying another Word of Recall... wouldn't do to lose my only escape scroll to an unfortunate incident. On second thought, those cost nearly my entire cash supply. Hopefully I can reach an interesting depth and make them more worth the expense, or have more available for other things. That may not be wise, we'll learn.

My god decides I'm learning Detect Evil for my first spell. Should make it easier to know when to use that scroll. It seems that snake (represented by 'J') is not evil, merely asleep. I back away, exploring, but come to another large white snake blocking a corridor and decide to kill it. As battles go that was simple, but the path it opens takes me to a large brown snake and a pack of jackals, at least three but possibly more. How could I not risk such an ignominious end?

I think the monster knowledge feature has been beefed up. The personal encyclopaedia that fills in as you observe monsters over successive plays, this was a fresh install but the creatures I've seen so far have more detail already than I think used to be accumulated over several encounters. Perhaps I am misremembering - it starts with only dungeon depth and experience value, but I had to wake the white snake to find out they move erratically.

Ow. Merely walking into the room and out cost me nearly half my health and got me an ongoing wound. There were... many jackals. Lots of loot too. I was a bit careless, overconfident. Best rest and hope they come to me. As I recall, jackals can be annoying that way. But easy to kill. 13 dead jackals gets me level 2 and a bit of relief. Clearing out the rock lizard, another snake and the loot for that room gets me a bit of safety. Am rewarded with the prayer 'Cure Light Wounds', which is to be cast immediately. Two down staircases, but I think I will keep exploring this level a bit longer.

I discover two useful things: as a dwarf I can see at least some invisible things, as I had no trouble defeating the clear icky thing, and I'm either lucky or not bad at spotting traps. Looking at the character screen, probably lucky.

Forgot how vast Angband's dungeons are. Much huger even than AliensRL's multiscreen towers.

There's a grey mould here. Avoiding that. Have lost many characters to stubbornly attacking immobile fungi.

... and then I go and stupidly attack a grey mushroom patch, falling victim to its confusion spores (they do health damage too).

Eek! The next room contains a scroll, a potion and a white worm mass asleep at the far end. Running over to kill it before it can wake.

Phew. Only multiplied once. And now I know the Bless prayer. Time to try some identification. Picked up 6 gloopy green potions earlier, so let's drink one of those.

Turns out Sellisrekh the gallant paladin has 5 potions of Cure Light Wounds, 1 potion of Heroism and 1 grey speckled potion of I don't know what that does.

Hurrah for pseudo-ID. Turns out both the robes I picked up are magical. I have no armour yet... dare I put one on? One of them gives an armour penalty, the other an armour bonus. Despite my fear, even the robe with the negative enchantment is removable.

Angband soldier ants are indeed easy to carve through. Time to head down.

Level 2: Took a while to find a way out of that doorless room, only to be confronted by a novice mage. I tried blessing myself to be safe but failed. Fortunately the mageling also failed at blinding me, and now only one of us still lives.

Another novice mage. That's a worry. I remember them being a little deeper. Then again, I remember them being significantly tougher.

Note to self: beware salamanders. Don't want to get any of my stuff burned.

You know game, nobody needs that many jackals. And hiding another worm mass amongst them is just cruel.

Find another grey speckled potion, quaffed one, still don't know what it does. Found a stack of light blue potions... those turned out to be poisoned. Maybe I can dip my sword in it to poison the blade? Better not try it - not very paladinly. (ed: there is no command for dipping anything into anything anyway)

I seem to have killed one of Farmer Maggot's dogs. Not my preference, but if people are going to code them into the game as hostile...

Ack! Blubbering icky things! No can has eating my food.

Close fight with Farmer Maggot's other dog and a novice ranger. Time to head down again, I think.

Level 3: 4990 turns and I'm getting hungry at last.

There are floating and radiation eyes here. Avoiding those.

Scroll testing! "in pro vit" = Deep Descent. Suddenly am on level 5. Never encountered that scroll before.

Level 5: "fuludo sertus" = no noticeable effect. Better be cautious down here.

Found a sleeping rot jelly. Going to leave it there.

Torch is running out of light. I feed it one of my other torches.

Unknown (grey) snake, unknown (grey) icky thing. Welp, I better engage something if I'm to be down here.

Oops, didn't mean to slay that novice warrior in one hit. Becoming increasingly convinced dwarves have a treasure-sensing ability, and me without a digging implement. Went back to fight the radiation eye, confidence bolstered by it draining mana. Sadly, they still drain strength too. Hope that can be restored soon. But won some leather armour, to be identified. Probably should return to town, being at the limit of inventory capacity, but let's risk another step down.

Level 6: "This place seems reasonably safe". But I'm in sight of a salamander and a soldier ant!

Nearly killed by a swarm of novice warriors, then even more nearly killed by a green naga. Throwing a sleep potion at it didn't work, so I enacted an emergency plan: read another scroll of deep descent, then read the word of recall scroll to get back to town. It actually worked pretty well. Had difficulty resting in town due to annoying townsfolk, so I killed them and bought some replacement words of recall.

Read one of those, taking me back all the way down to dungeon level 8. Still at the point of full inventory and use-testing items to clear space for new finds. I suspect the game had a theme in mind, because I found myself in possession of a wand of light, a staff of light, and then a rod of light. Considering I can already cast the spell Call Light, that didn't seem so helpful.

Well, death comes to us all. One of my scroll-reading experiments turned out to be of summon monster, and one of the monsters was a strength-draining jelly. C'est la vie; you die and you learn. Or not. I think that's what killed my last character too. Cause of death: a variety of self-induced complications.

Because it was late and not suitable for starting anything else before sleep, I ended up running a few other random short-lived characters. Mostly mages with a dearth of intelligence. At least one of those also died to summon monsters. Sellisrekh is one of my longer-lived characters.

Probably because I have been reading so much about them again, some weeks ago the idea came into my head that someday, when I am much, much improved in my programming ability, I might try to make a roguelike game of my own.

Not with an expectation of popularity, or whatever, but because as a long-term goal I think it is difficult yet something I potentially could do. I'd like to try it. I want to become able to do such things. So I'd better work harder on developing my skills and finish those other projects of mine, right?

My first idea was to try and make some sort of World of Warcraft roguelike, mainly because I'd been saying for a while that if such a thing existed I'd play it, but also because a lot of the pieces of such a game seem to already existed. There are roguelikes with overland areas and multiple dungeons, ones with NPCs who give quests, and there is even an (under development) version of Diablo, which I believe has a similar random item scheme. Not that this would make such an undertaking anything near trivial for me. Most of the features mentioned previously are found in variants of the Angband codebase, which presumably are relatively easy to transfer across games (since I witness developers of those games speak of doing so and having done so), but DiabloRL at least runs on a different, closed engine, albeit one whose descendent is intended partly as a tool for easy roguelike making by others.

Anyway, even if those parts were easy, making it into the game it is supposed to be would still be a project of years. How does one convert a game designed to feature death as a painless, minor and frequent setback to a genre which has permadeath as a core mechanic? Or a game designed around multiplayer interaction, especially when it comes to defeating bosses, into something fit for solo play that still feels somehow like its inspiration?

I suppose one could compromise by making the spirit healers impose a harsh and permanent penalty, without the option of running to one's corpse in order to recover? But then why would anyone play a class other than shaman or warlock? Recent reading about the release in English of Shiren the Wanderer on the Wii suggests the idea that perhaps experience and items achieved in a dungeon cannot be kept unless it is completed (and survived). Surely a large part of the problem here is that I don't have a well-defined design problem or goal to work to, and am just speculating wildly about what such a game could be. That seems fine to me, as far as I know such wild speculation is a workable way to build a pool of ideas from which more coherent conception and design goals can be constructed. What can it be? What should it be?

Well, attempts to emulate the multiplayer aspect shouldn't result in players having to grind and maintain large stables of near-equal level characters to tackle dungeons a la Pokemon; I'm almost certain of that! Anyway, in the hypothetical future where actual coding work on this game happens I'd best start with something simple, probably something much simpler than making a basic demo Elwynn Forest to romp in, but the idea serves to say 'start simple'.

And I should probably make an actual development document for such ideas sometimes, but first I'm making a post because (right now) I enjoy being creative publicly and think maybe it is a good thing to do so. So, ideas and conversions and such?

Resting in inns / cities: get rid of, probably. That mechanic was aimed at decreasing addictive play by rewarding taking breaks. I don't think any game made by me is going to have that problem.
Flight points: Excellent idea for dealing with expansive overworld in my opinion. Unlikely to have flight animations but still! Free 'portation between visited zones. What if that could be integrated into some kind of save point mechanic? Let's not get carried away.
Hunger mechanic and food scarcity: "Drat! I could've taken the Lich King if only I didn't starve to death three chambers away."

Anyway, those are relatively superficial questions.
Classes and races: Obviously got to feel like the originals but how to do it, I don't know. Especially with the being built for inter-class synergy.
Multiplayer aspect and 'group' quests / dungeons: don't know. Maybe just build for a solo PVE experience - I don't intend to try for actual multiplayer, but if I could find a clever way to simulate it that would be great. Maybe some sort of limited cooperation like the original game's Dungeon Finder interface? Laugh now; me pulling that off is funny. And now I laugh again, because what if you could at points activate such a task-focused queue and be given temporarily a handful of random NPCs to assist you for something, working like NetHack's pets or Crawl's summonses?
Talents: presumably, might not require much innovation
Professions: someday maybe?
Quests: probably reduced to 'enter dungeon X and kill entity y'

And from the other side, it would certainly be turn-based and rendered in ASCII because that and random playing area generation is the point. Oh! What about randomised items for identification? Items don't play thaat much role in the game, so probably more would need to be added (and some that aren't good!) for having to identify them to be a worthwhile aspect of play. Which leads to... what is the scope? Is it meant to be a grindy, lengthy process like the original, or something quicker and simpler? And I don't know the answer to that.

All of which brings us to the other thing: the WoWRL idea ended up being a bit superseded a few days ago by a new inspiration. I was watching a Korean period martial arts film, English title Shadowless Sword and thought it would be a lot of fun to make a game in which the player character could do things like the characters in that film, or similar films... you'll need to use your imagination, it's just ASCII and text.

But it seemed an immediately compelling idea: make a roguelike game in which the focus is the combat itself (although to impart motive energy and some sort of sensibility probably there will need to be some sort of quest or goal, which will likely take on an importance) and the player is encouraged to pull off impressive feats with eir character.

I envision it as being that most enemies in the game would fall into the category 'mooks' and be little threat to the main character, tempered by frequent bosses with similar abilities to the player character. Perhaps a system in which skilfull or impressive stunts are rewarded, and thus faced with a boss or mini-boss opponent the player can use the swarms of mooks to build up some sort of luck (or whatever) bonus in order to pull off still greater feats and defeat eir foe?

I was thinking at character creation one would select from among a set of skilled-combat archetypes as character class, then be encouraged to specialise within that archetype by developing skills within that archetype's range. So I have been trying to think of character concepts which could be useful and fun to play in such a game. I don't, when it comes to it, know enough about that area of fiction to embark on a categorisation project, but perhaps I can learn and work from what others have done and know. Or how much distinction to make between styles - I was originally thinking you'd have wuxia-style character and... what else?

The film I saw isn't a wuxia film, I think, because that seems to be a specifically Chinese category, so either despite the characters having similar abilities to those in the few wuxia films I have seen there needs to be some distinction made, or a more general category made. Or I need to learn more to understand better the disctinction. What else?

I suppose the questions are more like: what is the term for the archetype found in many Asian films of the skilled warrior who fights with a variety of weapons and performs feats beyond the ability of ordinary humans? Who fights with a single weapon? Who fits with no weapon, or improvised weapons? What degree of distinction is useful to make? At the moment to me it looks like the useful distinctions are weapons / unarmed, with an option for specialising into a specific weapon for the former or improvising environmental weapons for the latter. I want to support things like fighting an entire battle with one's sword still in its scabbard (but still being used), or fighting an entirely evasive battle. Often, from what I've seen, important characters' weapons are also important or special, though more often in the sense of cuts through other blades / isn't cut through by other blades and being of high quality, rather than having, frex, a fiery aura. I always have difficulty telling if this is representative of the weapon's or the wielder's quality, but presumably a blend of both.

What else? In the realm of Western character types, Hollywood action films fall short. The characters may be skilled and resourceful, but not when it comes to the actual fighting in ways this game is meant to capture. So instead... swashbucklers and jedi. Yup. The primary criterion is 'character types who do fun and interesting things in battle', so nyah. Those present fun possibilities. The other closest approximation would be superheroes, but I don't want to write a superhero design interface and anyway I think the flavour doesn't quite fit.

I still have the nagging feeling that I'm not making a distinction between some character types who ought to be, and that I'm overlooking adding at least one category, but in neither case do I know what. At one point I thought to add a more directly martial character type like the European knight or the manga / anime character Guts, but in retrospect I think I was reaching and it wouldn't be interesting enough to justify itself.

Talking with people about this led to what could form a design goal for the project: the hypothetical player should find the content portrayed convincingly enough to run with be able to reasonably believe any two character types stand a fair chance with each other.

Would probably be a smaller game than the World of Warcraft one, but I wonder if it would be more difficult to write. It's the sort of thing that thrives on highly interactive environments. Oh! That's another thing - jedi characters probably benefit from having blaster bolts to deflect, but that might interfere with the balance of everything else. I thought about having each class initially begin in its own, segregated mini-dungeon but that's probably a bad idea, a stop-gap solution. Introduce gunslingers as a playable character type? Oh, that's enough, that's more than enough. Let's stop here and work on what's immediate.

Now here's another big question: years from now when (maybe) I've learned enough to actually code such games, will I still want to? Tess suggested if I want to make games I could start with a sprite game for the Android platform, maybe I should look into that.

I need better tags for this.

I should have known they were not yet done with me. More deliveries to make, but I snuck off some time for my own study. Now I have a better wand.

It seems a mage named Arugal is slated for the Forsaken's wrath. The name sounds familiar.

My spells are glitching today, this is going badly. Need to rest.