Dredmor the Roguelike

I’ve been trying to figure this out for myself for a while — is Dredmor a roguelike?

And confronted with the obvious (in the midst of recording the Immortal Machines podcast, even; good fun by the way, will post a link when it’s released), I’ll have to concede entirely on this point. To lay it out:

Why Dredmor is a roguelike

  • Dredmor’s gameplay is turn-based with the implicit movement/action-as-a-turn mechanic
  • Dredmor is definitely a dungeon crawler; you explore a dungeon, fight things, loot things, etc.
  • Dredmor uses random, emergent structures for gameplay instead of a linear narrative structures

Why Dredmor is not a roguelike (kinda)

Or: “Why Dredmor doesn’t feel like a roguelike to me”

  • Dredmor has a graphical user interface.

    And it’ll be good, trust me!

  • Dredmor has graphics.

    Animated graphics, even. And tilesets! And spell effects! And monsters can face in multiple directions! But then some games called roguelike DO have graphics, from basic tilesets to even games on consoles like Shirin the Wanderer, Fatal Labyrinth(?), and so forth. I can’t think of a ton of examples, which leads me to my next point…

  • This is subjective, and perhaps core to my feelings on the matter, but roguelikes did not do an awful lot to inspire my part in creating the art and game design of Dredmor.

    Roguelikes are not the games I play the most – that’d probably be strategy games, maybe older RPGs (is Mass Effect really an RPG? … really? I’m going to get myself in trouble here, aren’t I), and once upon a time I played a lot of shooters (everything after Quake1 was downhill, I tell you). What it comes to is that in making my part of Dredmor I was not thinking “how do I make a roguelike”, I was thinking “how do I make the best game possible within the constraints we’ve set for ourselves”. Which leads to …

  • Dredmor is not an intentional, consciously traditional member of the roguelike genre.

    This may be presumptuous of Nicholas’ opinion, but I think it’s safe to say. We got into this not to continue traditions of the genre (though we probably refer to many of them), but rather to make something … a bit different. Funny thing though, we’ve probably ended up much closer to standard roguelike design than we expected.

  • We don’t expect to sell primarily to roguelike players.

    I don’t have statistics, but if I did I expect I’d find that there aren’t actually that many hardcore roguelike players in the grand scheme of things. I think that I’d find that hardcore roguelike players would not be the primary buyers of a commercial graphical roguelike — like how regardless of a very vocal minority, Stardock discovered that the great majority of people who buy strategy games never, ever play them multiplayer (doubtless there are some stats from Valve that support this). Further, why would hardcore roguelike players buy our game when they can get what they want from one of the many free roguelikes? –For a somewhat different experience, I hope. And I do hope they buy and enjoy Dredmor, but from a rational business perspective it can’t be denied that it would not be worthwhile to invest the time we have into a (graphical) product like this and aim to appeal solely to hardcore roguelike players who generally don’t care much about graphics.

  • We want Dredmor to be accessible to people outside of the hardcore roguelike playerbase.

    Most of the reactions I see from people who read Boatmurdered and other stories about Dwarf Fortress is “I love the stories, but I have no idea what’s going on in this game when I try to play it”. With Dredmor, we want to be able to offer something comprehensible to such people.

So okay, okay. I concede that we can call Dredmor a “graphical roguelike” (which I’m pretty sure we already do in the promotional text).

Now: I’ve got a pile of spell animations to finish. What, you want to see one?
Alright, here’s a particularly messy Black spell, “Corpus Burst”:

This is your brain on Dredmor.

Posted in Dungeons of Dredmor | Tagged , , , , , ,
6 Comments

6 Responses to “Dredmor the Roguelike”

  1. Ben McGraw says:

    Actually, it did start life conceptually as a graphical roguelike, and I have the chat logs to prove it. 😉

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    • AdminDavid Baumgart says:

      Hah! I NEVER SAW THIS DESIGN DOCUMENT!

      And bugger; this is what I get for taking on a project that already had its groundwork laid. At least we got over the whole “no numbers” thing.

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  2. Darren Grey says:

    I think you have no reason to be insecure or question your soul over the roguelike issue. Most certainly the game has many of the key fun elements of roguelikes, and many innovative features in its own right. Some judgemental types may dislike certain elements, but the important thing is to make a game that is fun, not to adhere to strict limitations. Besides, only a small minority can be offended by a turn-based dungeon crawler with random dungeons and a one-life option calling itself a roguelike. Especially when it sports giant eyebrows…

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    • AdminDavid Baumgart says:

      Ah, thanks for the reassurance – I do think I’m just about over worrying about it. I don’t want people to project expectations onto Dredmor due to what they think about the genre, I’d rather people take it as its own thing, but this is definitely more than anyone can expect (especially with a game that is, in fact, pretty obviously positioned in the roguelike genre).

      So: Whatever. When people play the game, they’ll see what’s going on. Also eyebrows 😀

      (I wanted to work in some reference to Peter Molyneux, but that’s probably a rambling post for another day…)

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  3. sym says:

    Hey, I really can not wait to play this game, been watching it develop for a while now.. Is there some way I can beta test? I have loooooooots of free time and I really enjoy roguelikes, I’d be an ideal tester candidate. If you would like to contact me, my email is: symnzxx at gmail dot com

    Thanks and keep up the good work!

    { reply }

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