As mentioned in the article, the r/RoguelikeDev summer code-along event[1] is a fantastic way to complete a basic roguelike. It provides both a bit of a push and group accountability that some people need to get started and maintain momentum. Unfortunately it takes place just once a year during (northern hemisphere's) summer break because that's when a bunch of young people have more time on their hands to do stuff like this. :)
And https://bfnightly.bracketproductions.com/ is a great tutorial, not just at being a step by step guide but by introducing new ideas (for example, it has a chapter on wave function colapse for map generation [0], among other things)
I’ve been playing roguelikes since the mid 1980s, and from that perspective it’s hard to overstate Josh Ge’s contribution to the genre. Cogmind is just incredible — an absolute masterpiece that he is continually evolving. And Josh has likely written more for and about the genre than anyone else in history.
This is a guy who’s put over ten thousand hours into his seminal game, and to the genre overall. I feel like Josh — along with Tarn and Zach Adams (Dwarf Fortress) — have by sheer force of will translated roguelikes into the current era. (And yes, FTL and Spelunky are awesome as well — just farther afield.)
After finally purchasing RimWorld, I don't see the point in playing most other games. The vanilla game is incredible, but with mods and scenario customizations I can basically create any kind of top down game I want: start a game playing it one way (super peaceful like the Sims) and flip on a zombie mod once I get bored.
We need a law akin to Godwin's: if any online discussion continues long enough, someone will almost certainly argue about the definition of "roguelike."
When I think of a "roguelike", I think of a game that is played in "runs" where a run is typically 60 minutes or less, but completing a game round is not completing the entire game, as it will take several runs to unlock all the features and content. You are also generally not expected to be able to complete a run to the final boss in your first several attempts.
Hades, FTL, Vampire Survivors, Gunfire Reborn, and Crypt of the Necrodancer all satisfy these.
RimWorld is not at all a roguelike because a "run" can easily last hundreds of hours.
The classic roguelikes can take many hours to complete and do not have any kind of between-run unlocking. By some common definitions, unlockable content makes a game not a roguelike. I wouldn't go that far, but I'd never call Vampire Survivors a roguelike, either.
It's hard to say because the terms end up shifting to mean various things as the genre solidifies. I personally like using roguelite for games such as Hades, in which case the operating features are procedural generation, permadeath, and metaprogress with each run
I’ve used roguelite the same way. It’s definitely my preferred model for the space, mostly because I’m bad at games, so the meta progress gives me the feeling of progression without nearly so much work!
The design concept is absolutely perfect for working adults. Instead of having a session where you make slow progress on a very long adventure, you get an actual self-contained experience while also making some headway towards a larger goal each time.
The strict roguelike fans would argue that these are in fact roguelites, since there is some (small) amount of carryover between runs. The more orthodox view is that every run starts from zero.
I don't think most roguelike players would describe those games as roguelikes, though.
The quintessential roguelikes are Nethack, Moria, Angband and AdoM. You're a @ fighting monsters represented by other ascii characters, in an environment (usually a dungeon, though AdoM expanded that) represented by ascii characters. Procedurally generated, turn-based, super deadly, very tactical, with an almost infinite amount of stuff you can find, use, or do. Playing all the way through the end is nearly impossible, would take many hours on a single run, but years to learn and master the game to the point that you can actually make it that far in a single run.
I can understand adding some graphics to the game (though I'm personally not a fan of that), and AdoM certainly showed how the genre can be stretched from a single dungeon to a landscape with multiple very different dungeons, but the further you move away from this core, the less roguelike the game becomes. Because it simply becomes less like the original game rogue (which nobody seems to have played).
I suppose 'roguelite' is a more suitable name for games that take some of the roguelike elements but not all of them, and make it into something completely different.
Why do you think a group of people who never played a roguelike (a term with an established meaning for decades) should be the ones to redefine what a term means?
The only people who use "roguelike" so loosely are people who never knew what it meant in the first place.
You seem to be under the (imo mistaken) impression that language is prescriptive. The idea that we define a term and then people will either use it "correctly" or gave stigma for being wrong.
Imo, language is descriptive - people use a word a certain way and the definition evolves to meet that usage.
Just like how "literally" means "figuratively" in some contexts. You might feel that's wrong, but fundamentally the language is being used that way.
Words can't just mean what anybody wants, whenever they want. Otherwise communication becomes impossible.
Define roguelike. You tell me what you think it means, and we will see if that definition is applied with consistency.
> Just like how "literally" means "figuratively" in some contexts. You might feel that's wrong, but fundamentally the language is being used that way.
Congratulations, you have discovered sarcasm. The meaning of literally is not different because people employ sarcasm. It means that they are being sarcastic. You literally can't be sarcastic if a word like "literally" doesn't have an agreed upon meaning.
Literally isn't always used in a sarcastic tone. "That was like, literally the biggest breakfast anyone has ever eaten!" Means it was a very large breakfast.
And words can change meaning to whatever is understandable. Definitions follow usage, not the other way around. Merriam Webster didn't write "yeet" down and then a bunch of teens started using it.
A roguelike prominently and predominantly features some combination of most of the following:
1) Run based (re)play, typically starting from a weak state and moving into a strong state. Then restarting at that weak state many times.
2) Randomization of the run in upgrades, powers, environment, or choices. Thinking on your feet and dealing with the random. Typically, environmental randomization is necessary.
3) Permanent death within a run. No save scumming - if you die in a run you'll have to start another run
4) Some sort of meta progression, whether that's a home base the player returns to, or just the increased knowledge of game systems (like in Nethack)
5) A community consensus that the game is a roguelike.
6) Emergent gameplay from multiple overlapping systems, often interacting in unexpected ways
7) Exploration or selecting paths through an environment where progress in the game usually requires leaving familiar areas and entering unfamiliar ones
So rogue and Nethack meet all of those, absolutely. But so does Hades and Spelunky and binding of Isaac and Hades and FTL. Some games have roguelike elements, but are probably not roguelikes, say Inscryption.
Four out of seven is MOST. "Parts of 2" is all that is required, because you used OR. And realistically, it meets 1, 2, 3, 4, and 7.
"Community consensus that it is a roguelike" is not a real definition, anyway. Did you think yourself particularly clever for coming up with that one?
Anyway, thank you for proving my point. Your inability to adequately "roguelike" demonstrates that, as I have been saying, it doesn't actually mean anything the way people use it.
The issue is not with players categorizing a game as a roguelike (or not), it’s developers categorizing their game as a marketing tactic. The way discovery works on a platform such as Steam, developers are incentivized to tick as many boxes as possible on the genre list in order to get their game seen by as many players as possible. In effect, this self-categorization lets developers dilute the meaning of genre labels in order to make money.
Roguelike just happened to be one of the genre labels with a long-standing and passionate community. Now the community members are everywhere speaking out against this dilution. This is not gatekeeping — anyone is welcome to play roguelikes — it’s preservation of the genre’s distinctiveness.
Gatekeeping pertains to people, not things. If you have a rock n' roll club you're allowed to say that "Happy Birthday" is not a rock n' roll song. That's different from saying "people who like the Happy Birthday song aren't allowed in the club", which is gatekeeping.
"Roguelike" is nowadays commonly defined by having a meta progression system (unlocks). Scroll through reviews of a game like Noita or DCSS (Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup) and you will see some people complaining the game doesn't have (enough) permanent unlocks.
No one really knows what a roguelike is, yet it is repeated ad infinitum. If the general populace doesn't really know what a roguelike is, why not describe it with proper wording like:
mostly shallow content sold as something shiny in a repetitive way, lack of original story/background, time vampire if no proper checkpoint/save system in place.
The best egregious example of terrible game design is the game called Returnal where the game designers sentenced the player to recollect most of the items/loot upon failure because who knows why. This isn't a problem in itself if done properly, but why going through the same area again and again, why collect the proper weapon again if you fail at a boss, is just plain stupidity or malignancy.
So in essence a childish idiot sentences you to replay his "super creation" multiple times, because he thought that's cool. thank you.
you, the gamer, will come into this equation with your most precious resource: time. how do you want to spend your time? by repeating the same BORING shit or progressing and experiencing new, stimulating areas while a story is told to you?
That game is pure crack. Its an easy way to kill 10+ hours. something about resource management skinner boxes. stardew valley and cities skylines have similar effects too.
It still blows my mind that a game genre I thought was the most niche of niches, that I played routinely in the early 2000s, has become one of the major influences in modern gaming today.
Shoutout to ADOM, a game I spent countless hours playing.
The only real influence is the concept of permadeath. People often claim that games like FTL are roguelikes, but other than permadeath, they have nothing in common with Rogue.
That's unfair to FTL and the advancement of rogue-likes and perhaps more importantly, rogue-lites.
It's not just "permadeath", there's also the seeding and randomness of each game . (No-one would argue that Super Mario is a rogue-like).
Additionally, and while this is stretched to some degree in games like Hades, there's the discrete-time based nature of the games compared to a game like Isaac for instance.
Then with rogue-lites there's also a layering of meta-progression on top of the game loop progression.
Saying that roguelikes are "just" permadeath is misrepresenting the genre entirely.
And the nature of words is that you might conclude that rogue isn't necessarily the quintessential rogue-like game, but that's okay.
I'm not saying that roguelikes is "just" permadeath. I'm saying that this is the main game feature that is shared by roguelikes and FTL. And randomly generated game world is so common that it can't even be considered as some unique roguelike feature.
The most important concepts which Rogue contributed to modern games are:
- Abstract/symbolic representation over realistic/literal graphics
- Systems (without documentation) as a primary aspect of play
- Procedural content generation
- Permadeath
Permadeath is the least novel of the concepts, but it is key to the effectiveness of the others. Permadeath adds drama and stakes to the player's experiments with the game's systems, and adds importance to the results of the procedural content.
- Meta-progression where (most of) the unlocked ships are strictly worse than the starter ship
To elaborate on this, most games tend to have unlocks or game modes that are overpowered, giving you a "victory lap" on subsequent playthroughs. Roguelikes tend to give you interesting unlocks that can still be powerful, but tend to be a lot harder to play than the original. (This is not a hard and fast rule, more of a rough idea.)
This is not exactly true for FTL. While the starting ship is good, the most OP ships in the game are Mantis and Crystal ships that have 4-person teleporters. Teleporting beats every other strategy. Especially teleporting with Mantis crew or Crystal crew, who can lockdown rooms.
That said, I think most players will find it interesting that the weapon they started out with is generally considered to be strongest in the game. One can argue details about Flak I or beams, but the humble Burst Laser II is right up there.
FTL is quite an easy game once you figure the things out, and it's quite easy to adapt your play style to whatever gear the game is sending your way. Still, I consider teleporting-oriented ships to be the most powerful because you get significantly more scrap if you board enemy ships and not blow them up.
Regarding Engi, they are not particularly difficult. For me, the most problematic were Rock ships which are based on using rockets, and, of course, stealth cruiser without shields.
You've basically debunked your own theory here since nobody calls checkers or anything like checkers a roguelike.
Roguelikes almost always involve building up a character or deck or cards or whatever by acquiring more stuff that changes the gameplay, and it's the loss of this unique thing that you've built that is relevant to "when you lose you start over."
Additionally, roguelikes are almost always heavily randomzied, when you start over you get brand new decisions to make.
"When you lose you start over" certainly is a roguelike characteristic, but what losing means and what starting over means is strongly similar among roguelikes and not similar to losing or starting over in checkers.
Deck of cards? That does not sound like a roguelike at all to me. Maybe I'm a purist, but when I play a roguelike, I expect to be a @ fighting o-s in between walls of #s.
What I contend is that "when you lose you start over" is the ONLY defining characteristic of what people lately call a "roguelike". And it's not even applied consistently!
The term is self-descriptive. It means "a game like Rogue".
Lately, the term has been latched on to by people who don't know what it means. They latched on to it probably because they thought it sounded cool, or saw a game on Steam with the "roguelike" tag that was fun. Let's examine just how many genres the term encompasses:
Vampire Survivors (https://store.steampowered.com/app/1794680/Vampire_Survivors...) is another arena bullet-hell game and there is almost no impactful randomness. You have a very high degree of control over what your build looks like. It's tagged as a roguelike.
The Van Game (https://store.steampowered.com/app/2081860/The_Van_Game/) is a game about traveling to national parks. It's self-described as being inspired by the Oregon Trail. Was the Oregon Trail a roguelike? The Van Game is sure tagged as one.
Caves of Qud (https://store.steampowered.com/app/333640/Caves_of_Qud/) is a roguelike. Like, an actual one. It's tagged as roguelike AND it's also tagged as "traditional roguelike". Which is yet another indicator that the term simply doesn't mean anything of significance anymore.
Why does nobody describe action RPGs played in hardcore mode (e.g. Diablo and Path of Exile) as roguelikes? They fit both of your criteria.
How come roguelike is not associated with games like Fortnite or PUBG? Again, both games provide a good deal of randomness and character building.
We have games from nearly a dozen genres that are described as being "like Rogue". Some games have a lot of randomness, some don't. Some games described as roguelike _don't even feature permadeath_. And some very popular games with impactful randomness and character building ARE NOT described as roguelikes.
I always really wanted to get a trident of the red rooster and even with a guide was never able to do it. Maybe I'll give it another shot! Thanks for bringing back some lovely (frustrating) memories.
Uhh, I really don't think it's a good advice for gamedev.
I really miss the times when games were polished since v1.0. Random crash on boss fight? Hey, it's an early access / beta / v0.0.1 / we were in rush, forced by some non-sense deadline set by our kickstarter campaign (or ego). Wait for the updates!
> Uhh, I really don't think it's a good advice for gamedev.
It is, but it leaves out a crucial bit of information, namely who is the audience to whom the game is released. It's important to get feedback early, especially gameplay feedback. At the same time, failed releases to the general public do little to inspire confidence or provide the valuable kind of feedback required in the early phases of development.
One potential downside to releasing early is the risk of a hardcore fanbase coalescing around the game, that knows every system and exploit in and out. As a result they then scream for the game to be harder, harder. And as such devoted and vocal fans for so long, the devs may be overly inclined to listen to them, to the detriment of the new/less experienced player experience.
Among others, I think Risk of Rain fell prey to this, but I may be thinking of a different game.
Risk of rain on higher difficulties was always very hard from when I first played it early on, but that's part of what makes it fun for me. I really enjoy a roguelike where you don't win every time; something about the challenge makes a deep run much more satisfying.
Classic roguelikes like Nethack are also incredibly hard to win.
Most "early access" games I've played were about as bug-free as I'd expect from an old-school v1.0 launch: you'd occasionally hit an obscure hardware combo that caused crashes, etc. but it very definitely "worked on their device"
When done well, it's about putting the concepts and mechanics in front of players, so that they can provide feedback. Maybe the magic system you have in mind is super confusing. Maybe you wrote a throw-away portion in a way that makes everyone think it's going to be central to the eventual plot.
With a small group of friends, you get a lot of bias - you'll build the game your friends enjoy. The easiest way to find out how a commercial audience reacts is to expose it to a large number of players.
Obviously there are BAD early access games that ignore this advice, but I've also played well-established games with numerous patches that are still full of bugs too.
With modern-day development practices (think: modern, 'safer' languages, game development frameworks and automated testing), these things are much less common. You don't wait to fix bugs and work on stability until the last moment anymore, you create an MVP / POC and take it to early access and/or Kickstarter, then work on that basis.
Roguelike games usually draw me in, but you've populated your Steam page with what looks like mobile resolution videos. Mobile ports on PC are rarely appealing, the strong exceptions exist of course, but it may be to your benefit to show some videos at native PC resolutions.
I've been a patron following development for some time, the game's really good and the devlogs even better. It lacks the variety of DCSS but is so much better.. put together. Modern, convenient. Has a twist. And sci-fi theme!
Sudden feelings of guilt as I think "I should really give a few weeks of love to my unfinished roguelike." Maybe I'll get to it over this year's holiday season. Need to finish the multiplayer, the vendor buy/sell system, and compose the music score and I can say "done."
Having shipped a goodly number of video games, both as part of a team and as solo developer over a 20+ year career in professional game development, and a further 20 years as a hobbyist developer since leaving the game development industry, I strongly disagree with your statement. And based on the fact I am more than capable of composing my own music score, and really, I'd simply be pulling from my back catalogue AKA raiding either of my soundcloud accounts or my "abandoned ideas" directory, for several of the pieces, I don't think I should outsource one of my competencies.
I understand what you're saying, but why would I want to outsource what I find enjoyable? I _like_ making games, and all the different creative and technical aspects of it. Why outsource my fun?
Roguelike games are one of those major events that happened that I completely missed. It's hugely popular and I still don't know what a roguelike game is. lol
These days it usually refers to games that have permadeath + procedurally generated levels, so every time you die you start the whole game over (but an entire 'run' isn't very long, less than two hours definitely, often less than one). Sometimes there's "meta progression" that does actually persist some unlocks or upgrades in between runs.
Originally rogue likes were that, but specifically in the gameplay genre of turn-based dungeon crawling RPG's. These days they can be in other genres: twin stick shooters, card games, action platformers, etc.
While runs are typically short, it is not always the case. What makes permadeath more acceptable is that thanks to procedural generation, your next run will be different from your last one, avoiding the repetition that can make starting over such a bad experience.
It is such a great combo that permadeath and procedural generation are most often seen together, the roguelike/roguelite formula.
Permadeath is very engaging, try playing a game in "hardcore" mode if it is available and you will see what I mean, it plays with your emotions like nothing else. Problem is, once you are dead, starting over is a tedious experience, same levels, same story, no more surprises, etc... That's where procedural generation comes in, giving you new levels and maintaining the level of excitement on every run. The sense of progression comes from going further and further as you get better.
In the same way, procedural generation is great but for a single run, it will never be as good as a handcrafted environment, it really shines when you do multiple runs, and a great way of making people do multiple runs is, you guessed it, permadeath.
Right, roguelikes in a lot of ways are similar to ye old arcade and console games that were short on content but were very challenging; the 'content' was effectively that you had to die a whole lot and reset back to the beginning of the game, gradually getting further each time as you got better.
Contra for the NES would be an excellent example of this. The whole game lasts less than an hour for even a moderately-paced run, but it's quite difficult if you're not used to that specific type of game, so in practice it'll take much longer than that for most people to beat it, as they have to restart multiple times. Same deal for Super Mario Bros 1.
Roguelikes are the same kind of loop, but with the improvement that the levels are somewhat different each time. They're still usually similar enough in style/theme/enemies that skills carry over from run to run, but you at least can't just brute force memorize everything. You have to Git Gud or you'll be stuck forever.
I _think_ that the meta progression is the sticking point that determines whether the game is a roguelike or a roguelite, roguelite being the one with the meta progression.
It can be, but I've also seen the definition of, "a roguelike is a turn-based dungeon crawling RPG, a rogue-lite is when the game mechanics are some other genre".
Huh. I was programming my Ataris at that time and have worked as a professional programmer for decades, but I never heard of "Rogue" until seeing some posts about it on this site.
"Roguelike" is one of those irritating, smugly obscure terms that keep surfacing in HN post titles. What doesn't help is the failure to capitalize "Rogue," which would at least provide a clue that this is a reference to a particular work.
As the name suggests, rogue likes are games like rogue which generally implies a procedurally generated dungeon, aerial view which might use ascii graphics, a gameplay loop involving going through floors killing monsters while collecting objects and levelling up a character and permanent death. They are fairly obscure games and not really popular.
What has become really popular and was introduced by roguelikes is using procedural generation in games. When it’s done well it does wonder for replayability.
> They are fairly obscure games and not really popular
Nah come on. They are incredibly popular since the indie revival age (~2005). Arguably one of the most popular indie genre. Spelunky, FTL, The Binding of Isaac, Rogue Legacy, Slay the Spire, Darkest Dungeon just to name a few. Hades, which is pretty much an AA rougelike.
Recently the biggest hit is Vampire Survivors [0]. Top 50 game on Steam with 20-35k players.
You're using the strict sense of the definition and being overly pedantic. All of those games have the concept of "runs" where you encounter procedurally generated environments and empower your character with proceduraly generated items. That is quite literally the gameplay loop that was borrowed from Rogue. "Roguelike" is a genre descriptor much like "FPS" is a genre descriptor. It doesn't have to tell you what the graphics look like or how the game is played--no need to gatekeep the term.
I think every single aspect of the traditional roguelike definitions can be bent, even permadeath, but procedural generation is the exception. Different runs need to give you different situations and different choices to make, and procedural generation is the only way to do that.
Yeah, without procedural generation, it becomes just like any other game where you just have to learn the right path to take. Because these are very hard games where you're most likely never going to see the end, the start already needs to be interesting and different every time.
Diablo started out as a graphical roguelike, with turn-based combat and permadeath. David Breivik says they removed the permadeath when they decided to go realtime (good call). I personally wouldn't call Diablo a roguelike but it's a very close relative. When it came out people commented that it was basically big budget Angband.
Vampire Survivor and others like it are starting to form their own sub-genre. There are so many bullet-hell roguelikes just like it coming out these days. Making a clone seem like a great first game project.
I had the exact same thought: a Vampire Survivors clone seems like a genuinely great first game project. The core gameplay is really simple but actually fun (unlike making a Pong clone or whatever), and drawing hundreds of sprites and particles on-screen forces you to learn how to use the GPU and collision detection properly.
We did land on a genre name for them, it just happened to be "roguelike". Now, there's a historical definition of what a roguelike is and the current definition and the are related, but not the same.
Language evolves, and often the root etymology of a word becomes not quite accurate. One can stand on the shore and tell the tide it is wrong for coming in, but that's not going to stop it. You can tell people to not evolve their language, but it'll still evolve.
So you're saying that there's two different genres of games that happen to share the same name? A bit like "hard core" music, I guess. Except "hard core" has a meaning outside those genres, whereas "roguelike" explicitly refers to the first game of one of those genres, and I don't think the other genre ever had a game by that name that defined it. So it's basically just trading on the name of another genre.
It's not that I don't think roguelike should be used except in strictest interpretation. It's that the current "genre" isn't a genre, it doesn't describe how you play the game, it doesn't describe what you do.
How does it not describe what you do? Every Roguelike has a specific goal/win condition that a player is trying to reach with permadeath and procedural elements.
Even then, most video-game genres are even LESS descriptive than "Roguelike". If a game is a "shooter", "simulation", "action", or "roleplaying" game, it's quite hard to tell what those things really mean. It turns out that "Roguelike" has actually become one of the most descriptive terms when it comes to game mechanics in recent years.
> How does it not describe what you do? Every Roguelike has a specific goal/win condition that a player is trying to reach
"Goal/win condition" describes what GAMES are. Games have win conditions. That is what makes them games.
Darkest Dungeon is tagged on Steam as a "roguelike" (and generally discussed as such from what I have seen). It doesn't feature permadeath. Your entire party can wipe in a dungeon and you go back to town.
Yes, one Tetris implementation ends. Most are play till you lose.
But there are whole genres of games that you can't win. Minecraft creative mode, the Sims, most MMOs, Cities Skylines, etc etc etc.
And Wikipedia considers progress quest a game, I consider it a game, and the author considers it a game. It might be fairly called a zero player game, but I think it's reasonable to apply the label game.
> But there are whole genres of games that you can't win. Minecraft creative mode, the Sims, most MMOs, Cities Skylines, etc etc etc.
These are all games that you set your own goals and achieve them. When the player runs out of goals for themselves, they stop playing. Sounds like a win condition to me. Just set by a different person.
> And Wikipedia considers progress quest a game, I consider it a game, and the author considers it a game. It might be fairly called a zero player game, but I think it's reasonable to apply the label game.
I could find a whole bunch of people to say the earth is flat. So what?
I don't consider it a game. What makes the author any more right about that than me?
Game does have a definition. They are unique from other media in the use of input and visual output. But "game" is a huge, ambiguous umbrella term that encompasses a ton of experiences.
It's a bit like "story" or "song" or "movie" - there's a lot of stuff that could accept those labels, and some of it is going to be real avant garde.
Game genres are weird, like there are "horror" games and "first person shooters" and "visual novels". The genres either describe the experience, what the player is doing, or even the medium the game uses. It's such a random smattering of taxonomic ideas.
Horror games have a defined sense. On FPS', Deus Ex it's an hybrid FPS with RPG and stealth mechanics. No one would call DX an RPG.
No amount of calling "roguelikes" to "roguelites" will make them "roguelikes".
Ever.
You seem really angry about this... Language and culture change over time, it's unavoidable. You can either roll with it or become increasingly out of touch.
It's fine for you to hold your opinion, it's just that the rest of us are going to move on with our lives.
Same, and even though I've tried them later on, I can't get into 'true' rogue games.
That said, elements of the game(s) are now found in a ton of popular games; a big one nowadays is Hades, which is a roguelite in that the levels are only semi-random, but it has a high replayability value, even when you make it to 'the end'.
There's other games out there that just use procedural / semi-random generation; Diablo and Diablo 2 were big 20 years ago, Bloodborne was big 5ish years ago and they're still making discoveries in the randomized dungeons (with some number manipulation though, has to be said), etc.
Recently I wondered what the name of the site formerly known as gamasutra is. Maybe it's just my bubble, but it feels just dead since the renaming :( A pity.
I miss devmaster and flipcode, both coming from the age of people writing their own engines. Unfortunately ever since Unreal and Unity went mainstream, the community of amateur game engine developers shrunk considerably.
Btw, speaking of roguelikes, everyone knows ADOM, and it's great, but the one I loved the most was Ragnarok (1993) [0]
It is bloody hard, but where else can you find corpses of your previous attempts, and with some of your gear [1]? Where else can you grow fingers? Where else rings on your fingers will cut off fingers if you morph into a giant? Where else you can switch bodies with other monsters?
[1]: I have developed a whole strategy around it. Scribe player class is extremely difficult to survive in early game, but they possess a very rare item in their inventory: stylus, which allows rewriting scrolls, an extremely important thing. So die as a scribe many times, then start as a blacksmith, and pick up a stylus from your previous character's body..
On roguelikes (true roguelikes, not gatekeeping, my first roguelike was
Angband but it was meh, then Nethack with the Falcon's Eye UI, then I switched to console in 2005 or so)
there's Nethack/Slashem if you like thinking out of the box, DCSS if you like compat, Tome < 4 if you like LOTR and wandering around several towns, ADOM for combinatorics explosion.
Josh is a great guy who's made tons of contributions to the community, not least of which is his REXPaint ASCII editor: https://www.gridsagegames.com/rexpaint/
is "roguelike" going back to its intuitive meaning of "similar to the game rogue" or is it still the new meaning of basically any game with procedure level generation.
1. Disclosure: I'm the host