Final Roguelike Celebration Post: Videos, Lightning Talks, Afterparty

in roguelikecel •  6 years ago  (edited)

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.

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#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

Bob Nystrom on Architecture

Jim Shepard and Jongwoo Kim

Nethack Source, Fun and Games

Day 2

Tarn Adams and Bryan Walker

Desktop Dungeon and ADOM architectures

Chogue

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.

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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:

  1. Setting -- what is important about your death?
  2. Improved Play -- learn something; many games provide a record of everything you did
  3. Storytelling -- YASD, screenshots, BoatMurder

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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!)

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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.)

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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?"

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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!

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The conference descended upon an unsuspecting local bar (21st Amendment) for dinner and drinks. Fortunately, their outside tables were open.

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