Roguelike Celebration is a great small conference about roguelike games, featuring talks by game designers, fans, and others.
Videos
All of the previous years' talks are available on YouTube; a few talks from 2018 have already been added on the Roguelike Celebration channel.
#roguelikecel organizer Noah Swartz
Blog entries
Here's all the other entries I wrote about this year's conference, using the #roguelikecel tag:
Day 1
Josh Ge on building roguelikes
Santiago Zapata and Andrew Averson
Day 2
Desktop Dungeon and ADOM architectures
Leif Bloomquist and Colin Liotta
Max Kreminski on "Gardening as a Mode of Play"
Lightning talks
Alexei Pepers speculated about connections between chaos theory and procedural generation. You can measure outputs of procedural generation and plot them as a way to evaluate their expressive range, and the output sometimes may be self-similar.
Kawa talked about death in roguelikes, how it is an "Extraludic" element. Death and the way games deal with character death can be used as:
- Setting -- what is important about your death?
- Improved Play -- learn something; many games provide a record of everything you did
- Storytelling -- YASD, screenshots, BoatMurder
Ignacio Bergkamp, a tabletop DM, gave a talk on a similar theme: he gives his players the opportunity to "describe your own death". Changing the event to a narrative one, and giving a player who sees it coming an opportunity to make their loss an interesting one.
(Thanks to Slashie for the identification of this speaker!)
SquidPony (not pictured) talked about https://github.com/SquidPony/SquidLib, a Java library for making roguelike games.
Kate Compton showed her next project, "Chancery" (previously Bottery), a framework for conversational bots (or text adventure games!) based on a state machine model, and on her earlier invention Tracery. She attempted a live demo. (I previously wrote about some of Kate's bots, and got a Tracery sticker from her for my laptop.)
Thom Robertson showed a demo of his procedurally generated whales. "Faces are hard, alien spacecraft are easy, what about whales? Or at least space whales?"
More Fun
The creators of Caves of Qud (and its first playtester) did a live game with audience input. Unlike last year, we got through character creation in only a few minutes, and actually completed a quest!
The conference descended upon an unsuspecting local bar (21st Amendment) for dinner and drinks. Fortunately, their outside tables were open.
