[quote=“DG123, post:24, topic:2547”]Yes, but WHY are ascii characters something that show up in roguelikes? They don’t make a game better in any way.
Dungeons of Dredmor for example is a roguelike, and it has full graphics and animation, not to mention sounds and music.
It would be far worse with silent ascii.
I guess I’m just wondering why people make this type of game as ascii to start with instead of just making a flash game with roguelike mechanics…[/quote]
There are quite a few issues here, I’ll go over them briefly.
but first, the most pertinent one:
0. If Cataclysm had been tile-only when Whales retired, I would not have started working on it.
Let that sink in. With all due modesty, if I hadn’t been here at the time, I don’t think DDA wouldn’t have happened. I’m not calling myself out as super-special here, it almost certainly wouldn’t happend if EITHER GlyphGryph or DarklingWolf had not been on board. But if it had been a tile-only game, at least one leg of the tripod would not be present.
- I’m not going to say you couldn’t write a game like Cataclysm in Flash, because people do crazy things, but Flash is not a good system for making something as large scale as Cataclysm, and is severely limiting for doing lots of programming tasks. It does what it does pretty well, but that does not include authoring a large and deep game system. Also I have no idea how collaborating on a flash game would work, and we wouldn’t have the tools we have at our disposal that the C++ ecosystem provides.
1a. Dropping flash from the picture, you can make a tiled game in C++ pretty easily, GalenEvil is hammering away at that, and if I had time/interest I could make a tiling system, it’s not that hard for a good programmer. However, when starting out, I’d have the option of spending more effort for worse results because the tiles woud be the merest placeholders, or spending less effort and getting an ASCII game that looks better running. Not much of a choice.
- Graphics and sound DEMAND polish. If I were to write a graphics-first game from the get-go (and I suspect this is the case with Whales as well), it would probably never get released in the first place, because my taste with regards to graphics far exceeds my ability to produce graphics, so I’d never be able to make a tiling game I was happy with by myself. Due to Cataclysm’s success, we’ve attracted people who are talented in that way, and I have every confidence they’l be able to make an awesome-looking game, but I basically won’t have anything to do with the art direction, because I have little to no talents in that direction. Those artistic types never would have happened if there hadn’t been a successful ASCII game in the first place.
2a. Part of this I think is that successful roguelike authors care deeply about how the game systems work, this is why they tend to be deep and have interesting mechanics. In short, roguelike authors tend to think like engineers. People that make graphical games on the other hand tend to care much more about how the game looks, and spend a lot of time polishing that part of the game at the expense of the depth of the game systems. I’m not saying it’s impossible for someone to be a virtuoso at both, but I’m not, and limiting game authoring to people who are good at both massively limits your pool of potential authors.
- When you first start with any program is when you are absolutely most vulnerable to just giving up and doing something else, ANYTHING that makes the time from when you start to when you have the game playable massively increases the chances of that game never seeing the light of day. Graphics and sounds as a prerequisite puts up a huge hurdle you have to overcome at the very start of the project.
3a. In a community project, there’s a similar learning curve when a new contributor first starts messing with the game where they’re just as likely to give up as keep going, and the more difficult build dependencies of graphics and sound add a hurdle in this dangerous zone, and reduce the number of potential contributors.
3b. Cross-platform text-based programs are hard. Cross-platform graphics and sound oriented programs are SUPER CRAZY HARD. It’s quite possible that if Cataclysm had been linux-only and tile-based, it would have never had a windows port at all.
- People LIKE ASCII. I know you don’t “get it”, otherwise you wouldn’t be asking in the first place, but take it on faith that some people actually prefer ASCII, and even without all the other complications, they’d still choose to use ASCII instead of tiles.
P.S. Yes, THIS is “briefly”.
