The gigantic poll for teh best roguelike of 2008 has finished at Ascii dreams, and the undoubted winner is…. Dungeon Crawl, Stone Soup!

This comes to no surprise as this “variant” has given Crawl, which was already one of the most popular roguelike, a new breath of life. Congratulations to all the development team!

Following are the 10 first games:

1. Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup: 126 votes

2. Dwarf Fortress: 116 votes

3. Incursion: Halls of the Goblin King: 45 votes

3. DoomRL: 45 votes

5. POWDER: 30 votes

6. Legerdemain: 28 votes

7. GearHead-2: 18 votes

7. Elona: 18 votes

9. Unangband: 16 votes

10. T.o.M.E: 15 votes

Congratulations to all developers!

Time runs out!

ASCII Dreams, Andrew Doull’s blog made famous by its “Designing a Magic System” series, is holding a poll for the roguelike of the year 2008!

The list was taken from the roguelike releases announced on the Rogue Basin news section between January 1st and December 17th 2008 and from the list of Actively Developing Roguelikes maintained by Jeff Lait. There are a record 75 entries this year

It is time to vote, less than 3 days until the poll closes! Go hither!

After going through several months of development, GearHead 2, the FreePascal roguelike of random plots and huge mecha, has achieved a “completable” status! recently released Version 0.5.30 includes this as well as new mecha, new themes, and some adjustments to the combat system.

This mean you can now play from start to end, using the random campaign generator that will make your story be different each time.

Random plots are one of the defining features of the vapourware genroguelike; however after years of experience and development, Mr. Hewitt has become quite a Gepetto on the topic!

To celebrate this milestone, gearheadrpg.com will be holding a competition. Anyone who completes the game (without cheating) by January 31st 2009 and submits their victory file will get a postcard from them!

What do roguelike developers have with postcards? we all know about the postcardware model from Adom, but this is something completely new!

What are you waiting for, board your mecha and drive your way through the Spinners!

libjcsi 0.0.2

libjcsi allows you to develop your Java roguelike to interact with an abstract console layer, from which you can later choose a concrete implementation on deployment. This means you forget about IO and concentrate on developing your game!

LambdaRogue 1.3

This version introduces some features which make the gameplay more interesting, although most things are known from other roguelikes

Z+Angband 0.3.0

This revision is a substantial one: the magic system has been changed and substantially expanded. Briefly, players will now have to choose the spells they want to learn, rather than being able to eventually learn every spell available.

noegnud 0.8.5

This release is a bugfix and engine update release.

SewerJacks 0.8.7

The season over, you have been told in no uncertain terms that you will not be needed next season. Where do you go? What do you do? Football is all you know. You go where all unwanted footballers go, you go to the sewers.

MetaCollider Beta 6

Entelechy changes take place immediately, so you know exactly what items have what effect on your progress in the game

MageGuild 1.0
I am proud to announce the first non-beta release of my roguelike game, MageGuild. It’s been a bit of a bumpy ride, but we’re finally here; big thanks to everyone who helped me test the beta versions.

libtcod 1.4.1b2

Check the full changelog on the library homepage

GearHead2 0.520

The core story has been expanded with two new episodes of the BeanPole campaign plus one bonus episode. A large number of mecha have been added, including many updated GH1 models for the Pro Duelist Association and new battroids for the Red Mask Raiders and MUGL Enterprises. Oh, and there’s also the general production model of the Gladius, in case anyone’s interested.

Rogue83 0.6

After over a month of waiting for it to be approved onto ticalc.org, a most terrible fate befell me. My batteries died!

Unreal World 3.11b

Introducing for example: tile-graphics overhaul including overlapping, trap-system overhaul, improved NPC behaviour/communication/AI

Legerdemain 1.0.0

There’s never been a better time to give it a try.

Hokuto No Rogue 0.3.0

- Added Kazan Kogai Koho technique. Absorbs all damage.
- Added Suieishin technique. The character learns the attack he has been hit with.
- Added Goshi Retsu Dan technique. Explodes opponent hands.

Twilight

The game is called Twilight and is a multiplayer roguelike.  That’s right, you can start a new character, grab some friends, and go adventuring across a pretty large world killing all kinds of monsters and collecting a wide variety of items.

So, here they go again, the hardcore conquerors of everything (even the kitchen sink) will meet again in a turn based, indirect interaction, world-wide, smash-out.

On Halloween, at midnight Pacific U.S. Time, /dev/null’s Tenth Annual NetHack Tournament opens.  As with past years, the Tournament is open to anyone who’d like to play.

This year is the Tournament’s 10th anniversary; it’s been suggested that this makes it the longest-running gaming tournament on the Internet, and we’ve been unable to find any older ones out there so that may very well be true.

Click friend and enter!

A young talented hacker desires fortune. He has a plan how to earn it but it needs time and is going to take a lot of work. Unknown and underequipped but slowly making himself someone in this world.
Money is earned by completing contracts. A client demands that a number of objectives is met upon leaving the target system. Then you get paid, sell any additional valuable information you gleaned “by the way” and your reputation gets slightly changed. If the contract was challenging you also receive skill points.

Read full review

Yay! It is been a month and it is time for a new exciting releases wire. I have been impatiently waiting for this date to come so I could post!

Quarker 0.03d

There’s no menu for loading games, just type in the name of the character to load.

Privateer ASCII Sector 0.4.4

Your risk of being scanned at a nav point is now based on: your confed and militia standing, how often you’ve been caught smuggling in the past, how controlled the nav point is by confeds and militia, and whether or not you’ve just attacked or destroyed any pirates, retros or Kilrathi at that nav point.

GearHead v0.5.11

High performance engines are designed to provide maximum instantaneous power to the mecha’s body. This improved performance comes at the cost of safety, as engines of this type are prone to going nova if handled roughly. In addition, since most of the energy produced is being directly channeled into the limbs, a mecha with a high performance engine cannot use beam weapons as effectively as others.

Nate’s RL Lib

I know that libtcod offers most of these features, but I think it’s very complicated, and it relies on several other libraries. RLLib doesn’t need any other libraries, and is less bloated.

LambdaRogue 1.2

I just released LambdaRogue 1.2.

Lords of Darkhall 1.2.87

Imbue your ranged attacks with a magical seed, which bursts upon impact. Grasping vines hold the target in place while you continue to destroy it from afar, or deal with closer attackers.

Hokuto No Rogue 0.3.0

Added Goshi Retsu Dan technique. Explodes opponent hands.

Z+Angband 0.2.3

If you aren’t familiar with recent versions of Zangband, they feature a fractal random wilderness with multiple towns and dungeons. Z+Angband further enriches the world by adding farms and inns, independent fragments of civilization outside of towns.

And so it was that several roguedevs met at the historical city of Berlin for the first IRDC on September 2008. There were not many, but it is quality which matters, and we are looking forward for future events.

You can download the videos and related material at http://sheep.art.pl/misc/irdc/

These are some of the presentations:

• Christopher Brandt: How not to write a roguelike - a review of his own experience trying to write DungeonHunter contrasted with his success on Aviel’s Stand
• Ido Yehieli: Description of facing-based field of view, hearing radii, and their impact on UI and gameplay.
• Jeff Lait: Survey of different methods of discretization and its gameplay implications.
• Radomir: Introduction to Python as an effective roguelike platform with examples from Z-Day.
• David Ploog: Remarks on Roguelike Design (Not Coding)
• Mario Donick: Symbolism on roguelikes

The so-called “Cabal of Elite Roguelikers” also announced an official roguelike re-definition, “The Berlin Interpretation”,  based on the current roguetemple definition; you can read and discuss it here

Have fun watching the videos!

Jeff Lait is one of the longest standing figures in the roguelike development universe, for years he has been contributing useful ideas and information to r.g.r.d and developing his own game, POWDER, which has recently become pretty popular.

Check out the interview with the creator of the ever-popular POWDER handheld roguelike!