Gamasutra - The Heart of the Roguelike Genre

Christian Nutt posted a new guest article on Gamasutra about Roguelikes games.

Over the last year, the roguelike has become the it-genre, particularly for independent developers. While debate remains over what constitutes a roguelike or whether the term should even be used, there's no argument around the fact that both developers and players have come to love these games for their endless, procedural challenges.

This year's best student game in the Independent Games Festival was Risk of Rain; Klei Entertainment sold over a million copies of Don't Starve last year. These are just two obvious success stories that owe a lot to the appeal of roguelike mechanics.

More information.

Another good article that doesn't get a single comment. Anyway I agree with the writer about Rougelike games being easier to make. Thats why we get so many of them.

I stopped reading when he asserted that rogue-likes have become the 'it-genre'. After that myopic statement, I just didn't see the point.

I don't like any of the rogue likes I have played except Castle of the Winds (even though it is considered a rogue like it isn't really the same) so I avoid the genre now. I would rather have more of the rpgs I like then rogue likes.

Well, it seems to me that rougelikes definitely are the "it" genre right now. They have been trending upwards since Minecraft.

I can't help but replace the word "rougelike" in this article with the word "RPG". If you do that, you'll see that a lot of what they're saying make sense for RPGs, too.

Roguelikes are fun to lots of people, I think, because they are relatively new. It's sort of a new trend, or a fad, if you will, to play procedurally generated games.

It also does offer some replayability, when you can start a new game and have a completely fresh world to explore each time. But it also sacrifices hand-crafted-ness, which in my opinion, makes a great RPG.

I think a good RPG can have just as complex systems as any roguelike, so I'm not really buying that somehow roguelikes are more complex.

Overall, I'm not the biggest rougelike fan, I will stick to my RPGs.

P.S. I also don't care for movie/film games too much. It's kind of sad to see that the 2 biggest trends in gaming right now are things that I simply don't care for.

And you guys wonder why I play RPGs from the '90s and 2000s, heh.

Rouge-likes can leave one red in the face.

The only reason they proliferate is because using these templates you can create an infinite game out of almost nothing and it's one of the very few genres that isn't frustrating to play on a touch screen.

I'm a big roguelike fan since the days of the original rogue. They are definitely the IT genre, which is nice, although much like with RPGs it also leads to a lot of games being advertised as having "roguelike elements" when perhaps they shouldn't be.

Most popular roguelikes are not available on tablet, so I don't think touch screens have anything to do with their popularity. What I like about them is how you can keep trying different classes and combinations to see how successful they are, which combined with the random chance of what you encounter and what loot you find can add a huge amount of variability and replayability.

There are four IT-CRPG-Subgenres in trend right now:

1) Rogue likes
2) Survival games
3) Zombie games
4) JRPGs (-> PC remakes)