Incursion v0.6.0

Hmmm, the site’s not updating… testing!

I may be completely wrong, but with the amount of processing that’s done w/ Dwarf Fortress, for example, bring any modern computer to a crawl if it were in modernish graphics? (including pew pew lasers)
But that’s Dwarf Fortress, which is beyond a normal roguelike.
Then again, if you’re just looking for flair, then there are graphical front ends that provide an ascii-less approach. I can’t remember specifically, but I do remember seeing one for Slash’Em that I found pretty cool looking.

Cheese mc cheesealessthanalot you are incorrect.

Dwarf Fortress has a bit of processing to it, but could easily handle graphics. As a matter of fact it is already implemented in OpenGL using a tile based graphics set which some fans have already started producing nice looking tiles for.

The problem is not in computer power, the problem is development time. Even if you don’t count the time to paint the pretty pictures there’s a code impact on having the pictures, you’ve got to handle things differently.

That’s why you don’t have rogue like depths on nice looking games. It just takes too long for most people to do. Especially single developers.

Trav: that’s right on the money.

Coders are the guitar players of the software world: they’re all over the place, and there’s always at least one looking for a group when you need one.

Artists, on the other hand, are like drummers: they are impossible to find becuase they (typically) rely on the most expensive equipment that a group could need, have to be damn good at what they do and achieve results that you can’t get any other way. They’re also never available, as they usually already have a steady gig.

So games like roguelikes are easy for coders to turn out, becuase of the time, energy and availability associated with getting good artwork done for a project.

I’ve heard that there is backlash amongst the “hardcore” players against rogue-likes that have graphics instead of ASCII art. Is that true?

It seems to me that even if you can’t draw there’s no reason a good programmer couldn’t write a few routines to procedurally create the art. Why isn’t there a neon-vector Roguelike?

a roguelike with no option to use ASCII sux. tiles are ugly as hell, i much prefer ASCII art than anything else.

ZP:
A rogue like with procedurally generated graphics would be great.

Particularly if the system was built fairy well because then it could be applied to most rogue likes with minimal effort.

Ton’s of work to get it done though, very tricky stuff. (assuming you want complex graphics that varies from race to subrace to worn & wielded items.

also, I don’t think there’s a ‘backlash’ amongst the roguelike community, but I think a lot of them view a lot of the ugly looking tiles as detracting from the experience rather than enhancing it. Perhaps entering the valley of [damn, I’ve forgotten the word, it’s the idea of when something starts to look similar but is not quite so the small differences throw you off more].

I played Incursion last night and found that contrary to the article it actually lowers the barrier of entry for new players significantly from any other roguelike I’ve played. Ton’s of help, reasonable monster encounters, sensible interface. Read the white paper on his site, this guy has put serious thought into making the game accessible and fun

Tiles don’t have to be ugly, it’s just that typically in roguelikes they are. I think tiled Crawl looks pretty good.

And I think people may be misunderstanding the idea of procedural generation. Having a sprite that changes based on what equipment/stats/etc. are associated with it is not, strictly speaking, procedural generation. To do something like that someone would have to create different sprites for each possible state, or at least give them a different pallette.

Procedurally generated graphics are typically things like fractals, which would be damn cool to see in a roguelike, but probably not what you were thinking of.

Simple, attractive icons (Chess) or artful stick-graphics (Seiklus, Legacy of the Ancients) would work great methinks, and wouldn’t be impossible for a programmer to pull off with a bit of guidance.

Fully fleshed out graphics *can* derail the imagination somewhat.

I know what procedural graphics are, and I know that to write an algorithm that procedurally generates something that looks humanoid with distinct armor and weaponry would be a large challenge.

simple eg.
drawTorso(){//draw rectangle}
drawArmor(){//texture rectangle with armor texture}
drawHead(){//draw circle}
drawWeapon(){//draw a line}

then try re-sizing torso-armor, have a look at programmatically generating the armor textures, figuring out how to draw different weapons.

lots of work high complexity, hard to get right

People is right, the big barrier for adding graphics to a roguelike is the ammount required to mantain and expand the graphics set along the project lifetime.

I think, however, that graphics greatly lower the entry barrier for new players and reduce the chances of a WTF reaction.

There are some ways I have seen work
* Have the tileset been iconic instead of graphically detailed, so you can keep it updated with your punny lack of artistic skills as a programmer
* Take the game to the heavenly stable status, specially in terms on content and only then acquire an artist ally and have him do the work, so the art set doesnt have to be constantly expanded
* Use an existing open tileset (Gervais?), modify as needed, lose originality
* Be a good programmer and a good artist, and a chef, and a god.