Roguelike Celebration 2023 : Roguelike Celebration : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive (2024)

Roguelike Celebration 2023 videos. Archived from the Roguelike Celebration 2023 YouTube playlist, except for the first 3 videos, which are the preview event.

The unedited livestreams are also available on YouTube:

• Saturday broadcast: Roguelike Celebration 2023
• Sunday broadcast: Roguelike Celebration 2023

Roguelike Celebration 2023 was held on Saturday and Sunday October 21st and 22nd, 2023 as a virtual event in our custom-built multiplayer game/chat space. Talks were also streamed to Twitch and YouTube. There was a pre-event social on the evening of Friday, October 20th in the same social space.

Klingons, Hobbits, and the Oregon Trail: Procedural Generation in the First Decade of Text Games

2023-10-21 09:30 PDT

The author of "50 Years of Text Games" dives into some of the very earliest PCG in games from the 70s and the dawn of home computers, from one-liner simulations of cold weather geography to lossy compression of galactic sector maps far larger than 2K of memory could hold.

Aaron A. Reed

Aaron is a writer and game designer focused on helping gamemakers and players tell stories together. He is a multi-time IndieCade and IGF finalist and has spoken about digital storytelling at venues from GaymerX to GDC.

Abstract Space Exploration in The Banished Vault

2023-10-21 10:00 PDT

The Banished Vault features heavily abstracted solar systems, but nevertheless has a large degree of exploration that combine multiple kinds of costs, terrain, and rewards. Designer Nic Tringali breaks down all the various components of the exploration model, discussing how some elements are inverted from typical models, and the ultimate design goals and player experience.

Nic Tringali

Nic Tringali is a game designer at Bithell Games' Lunar Division label. They are most known for The Banished Vault, John Wick Hex, and Sun Dogs, and have a particular interest in science fiction, tabletop and analog designs, and rich interactions between players and game systems. They reside in Chicago.

Fictions of Infinity in Geological Finitudes

2023-10-21 10:30 PDT

In his fictions, Jorge Luis Borges describes the Infinite Library, an infinitely large space which contains all possible books that have ever been, and might ever be written. Procedural generation makes infinite spaces like this possible, while Roguelike game mechanics make infinite spaces like this navigable, explorable and playable. Geological conceptions of oil and plastic problematise these spaces of infinite possibilities and infinitely large time-scales. While the available time of organic beings is finite, sometimes, organic matter returns as oil or plastic- as something that is unable to die and perpetually return into our bodies as microplastics. Can roguelike game mechanics such as meta-progression, permadeath or procedurality inform new conceptions for geology, petrofictions, and nonhumans?

Linas Gabrielaitis

I'm starting a PhD at the intersection of game studies and literature, where I will be exploring geological perspectives within game mechanics. I think rivers are like text, I don't understand what stone is, I want to work on the invention of geotraumatics.

Exploring Pacifist Roguelikes

2023-10-21 10:45 PDT

Combat has always been the core interaction of the roguelike genre but, is there space for games that aren't focused on whacking goblins in the head? Why would we make a pacifist roguelike? And the most dreadful question of all, how do we make sure the mechanics are still engaging and interesting?

Ludipe

Luis Díaz "Ludipe" (he/him) works as Head of Fellowship at Astra Games, a philanthropic organization funding cerebral games. The Fellowship program offers grants and mentorship to promising designers so they can focus on their personal projects. In his spare time, Luis also makes lots of small free games.

Another Stupid Date: Love Island as a Roguelike

2023-10-21 11:30 PDT

The British dating game show Love Island is as notorious as it is popular. The format involves contestants living in an isolated villa and forming heterosexual couples, with the overall winning couple at the end receiving a cash prize. In this experimental lighting talk, I will make comparisons between the design and game mechanics of Love Island and roguelikes. For example, the heavily produced nature of the show, with plotlines and archetypal characters, is much akin to a live game with a dungeon master, a format which roguelikes heavily draw upon. Furthermore, Love Island arguably contains turn-based, procedural and permadeath mechanics in how challenges, recouplings and dumplings are orchestrated.

The talk will conclude with a reflective segment on how Love Island could learn from dating roguelikes such as Boyfriend Dungeon in embracing queer relationships and discussions around consent and mental health.

Florence Smith Nicholls

Florence Smith Nicholls (they/them) is a PhD researcher in Game AI at Queen Mary University of London. In a previous life they worked as a field archaeologist and heritage consultant. They are a freelance game writer and narrative designer, having worked as a Story Tech for the indie studio Die Gute Fabrik. They are particularly interested in creative approaches to games preservation, inspired by a placement at the British Library.

Hunting the Asphynx: Roguelikes, Provenance, and You

2023-10-21 11:45 PDT

NetHack and its associated variants are an incomprehensibly huge spiderweb of ideas: Decades of different programmers refining each other's concepts and code, rewriting each other's ideas, and building on each other's work. It's not a community that anyone could have ever envisioned or crafted intentionally, and that's what makes it so beautiful.

In the midst of this enormous game of programmer telephone, it's easy for wires to get crossed sometimes. What if someone were to, for example, cite a nonexistent book in their source code? How long might it take for someone to notice?

The answer is not measured in years, but decades.

Kes

Generating Procedures: Rule and System Generation for Roguelikes

2023-10-21 12:00 PDT

Roguelikes generate items, stories, worlds and names - but rarely rules. There's lots of good reasons not to do it - it feels weird, for one thing, and it's technically complex and unpredictable. But it can also be exciting, surprising and funny, and can lead to some amazing new challenges for players and designers alike. It's exactly the blend of generative chaos and technical creativity that people love about roguelikes. So how do you get started? Join me for a look into how generative design shapes rules, how AI can help, and why your next roguelike should design itself.

Mike Cook

Mike is an AI researcher and game designer based in London, UK. He works as a Senior Lecturer at King's College London where he researches how AI can model and support game design processes, and he makes weird games and digital art using generative processes and creative AI. In the past he founded PROCJAM and developers game-designing AI like ANGELINA and Puck. He has never beaten a roguelike, but he has thought really hard about what it would feel like.

The Data Science of Roguelikes

2023-10-21 13:30 PDT

Data science explorations of the roguelike genre. Where is the best data? How do we get it? Where is the genre now and where is it going? How are player's attention spans evolving? In this talk we'll deep dive data strategy, what we can learn from the data, and how best to improve it.

Scott Burger

In Defense of Hand-Crafted Sudoku

2023-10-21 14:00 PDT

Ah Sudoku--the logic puzzle where you fill a 9x9 grid with numbers. While most sudoku are computer-generated randomly, there is a growing community of variant sudoku constructors that make beautiful and brain-bending puzzles--all by hand. Let's explore the history of "hand-crafted vs computer-generated" from the perspective of this puzzle community. We'll cover the motivation, the beauty, and the tools of the trade of hand-crafted puzzles, and show how "hand-crafted vs computer-generated" is more of a spectrum than a binary.

Nat Alison

I'm a freelance software developer who makes weird math apps. I also enjoy solving and constructing variant sudoku puzzles.

Scoped-down design: Making a tiny roguelike

2023-10-21 15:00 PDT

How can we make games that are simple and focused, but still dynamic and varied?

In this talk I'll go over the process of designing my roguelike, Into Ruins -- how I took inspiration from one of my favourite games (Brogue), and how the technical & creative restrictions of developing for the PICO-8 fantasy console led me to some interesting design decisions that gave the game its own flavour.

Eric Billingsley

I'm an indie developer based in Ottawa, Canada. I've always loved making games and started as a kid with tools like Klik & Play. Since entering the industry, I've worked on titles like TUNIC and Cuphead, and released my own commercial titles Spring Falls and Star-Twine. I also help run monthly show & tell meetups with local group Dirty Rectangles. Lately I've been making small games for the PICO-8, including the roguelike Into Ruins.

Touching Grass & Taking Names: Tuning the Blaseball Name Generator

2023-10-21 15:30 PDT

Blaseball (2020-2023) was a massively multiplayer sports fan simulator that asked its online audience to follow a fictional, procedural baseball league's horror story across years -- as well as the hundreds of named digital outfielders who could die or spawn anew at a moment's notice!

Join Blaseball community manager & designer Elliot Trinidad in this practical retrospective about how a simple "first name, last name" character generator was able to illicit everything from obsession to controversy in the hands of a creative community. What do procedural character names say about your game's world? How did we tune our names to better highlight cultural diversity? And just what does it look like when seemingly small decisions get constant live feedback from an invested audience? Tune in to find out!

Elliot Trinidad

Elliot Trinidad is a Los Angeles designer, writer, and multi-disciplined production guy who loves flavorful systems, unpopular anime, and learning about new things. Most recently a Community Designer on Blaseball, he co-managed the live game's highly active & highly creative online community from 2020-2023. Even more recently, Elliot ruined his Dwarf Fortress citadel by getting too ambitious with lava.

Audible Geometry: Coordinate Systems as a Resource for Music Generation

2023-10-21 16:30 PDT

This presentation will explore how the traversal of virtual spaces in games can be used to procedurally remix or even generate music. I'll show how you can connect a game's coordinate system to concepts from music theory and psychoacoustics to create a subtle, spatial synaesthesia, wherein your players move through both physical and harmonic space.

Paul Hembree

Paul Hembree is a composer, programmer, and educator exploring techniques for procedural music generation. Working with his brother as the duo Platypus Games, he did cave generation and music for the roguelite Rite of Tephra, and previously he composed music for Loren Schmidt and Kia Labeija’s Goodnight Traffic City. Currently Paul works at BandLab as a developer on symbolic music generation. Website: paulhembree.com

Why Dynamic Content Selection Is Hard

2023-10-21 17:00 PDT

My talk is about the difficulties you can encounter when building dynamic content selection systems for procedural dungeons, dynamic missions, and similar features.

Overcomplicating these systems is deceptively easy, but making them good enough to ship is hard.

I will be talking about the two core questions of any game feature or system (Does it work at all? and Is it good?), the advantages but also the limits of static analysis, the dangers of highly dynamic systems, and ideas for future directions for all this.

Jurie Horneman

Jurie Horneman has been making games since 1991, starting with programming role-playing games in 68K assembly with the 16-bit demoscene legends at Thalion Software. He was the co-designer and main programmer of the cult CRPG Albion. His area of expertise is the interaction of game design, AI, and storytelling, and he has spoken and written on procedural content generation, narrative design, and game AI. Most recently he helped ship Watch Dogs: Legion. He lives in Toronto, waiting for the dark mode fad to blow over.

Generating Riddles for a Generated World

2023-10-22 09:30 PDT

This talk will examine how riddles that are meaningful, obscure, and solvable, are procedurally generated in Ultima Ratio Regum. I believe this to be a first in roguelikes and in the talk I'm going to outline how the game a) procedurally generates its main categories of cryptic riddles, b) ensures that there is enough information for the player to decipher them, and c) generates and stores unique custom triggers through which they can actually be solved by performing each procedurally generated solution, and d) checks that there are enough ways to figure out the answer to a riddle, i.e. that the riddle is not unusually difficult or the riddle's key components are too rare or hard to find.

Mark Johnson

Fireside chat about the development of NetHack

2023-10-22 10:00 PDT

Host Alexei Pepers and Jesse Collet and Keni (former NetHack devs) will talk about the early days of NetHack and the role of open-source development in Roguelike games.

Jesse Collet

I'm a french software developer who worked in France, California and Switzerland for companies like Sun MicroSystems & Cisco. I got hooked on computer games starting with 8bits micro computers and never stopped. I got extremely lucky and hooked up with a few other passionate people to work on NetHack.

Keni

I'm a retired (except for NetHack) systems programmer who has worked with everything from a 6800 based SBC to a Cray (when that was a very big machine) and written in everything from machine language to SQL, but I'm most happy in C and Perl. The answers are "42" and "vi".

McMansions of Hell: Roguelikes and Reality TV

2023-10-22 10:30 PDT

Reality TV shows are actually constructed realities with their own emergent narrative systems. In this talk, I'll share how my teammate Brian Bucklew (Caves of Qud) and I are working to translate the language volumes and behaviors of mid-2000s "celebreality" shows set in McMansions, into a generative story environment with Macintosh-inspired B&W graphics.

Are all reality shows actually roguelikes? Absolutely, and I'll also share some fun examples of how the world of PCG connects to the age of character-driven social media and performance, microcelebrity and the contemporary reality TV renaissance.

Leigh Alexander

Leigh Alexander is a writer and narrative designer focused on generative story systems, digital society and the future. She won the 2019 award for Best Writing in a Video Game from the Writers Guild of Great Britain for Reigns: Her Majesty, and her speculative fiction has been published in Slate and the Verge. She is currently designing games about intimacy and relationships, and consults with teams of all sizes on narrative design. Her work often draws her ten years as a journalist and critic on games and virtual worlds, and she frequently speaks about storytelling in design, online culture and arts in technology. More of her projects are at leighalexander.net.

Remixing the Layer Cake: Facilitating fan reinterpretation through Caves of Qud's modular data files

2023-10-22 13:00 PDT

Caves of Qud presents a broadly inspectable and extensible engine to inquisitive player-tinkerers. One accessible facet of this engine is its use of robust and modular data files. Much of the game’s content is written in XML files which are both processable to wiki editors and remixable to modders.

In this talk, I will describe how this system works, my experience with it and the communities that interact with it, and how this practice might be replicable into future games.

Ray

Ray studies math and computer science. When not dreaming about Caves of Qud, they might be found playing it instead.

Preventing Ear Fatigue with Roguelike Music

2023-10-22 13:15 PDT

Music in roguelike games will be heard hundreds and hundreds of times over by the players, and is liable to become a bit exhausting to if not considered closely. There are techniques and decisions that can aid in creating music for your game (or directing a composer to create your game's music) that will truly augment the sense of adventure that roguelike a bring to the table. This talk is both geared towards composers AND people who work with them on games. For composers, it will shed some light on the aforementioned techniques, and for other devs it will give you the ability to effectively communicate these ideas to your composer! Everyone gets a little something with this one, so stop on by for a quick look into designing roguelike music!

Crashtroid

Adam Caflisch, known online as Crashtroid, is a self taught composer for video games. Located in BC, Canada, he works on Peglin, a peggle inspired roguelike. He has over 25 game jams under his belt, and 3 soundtracks in steam releases. Passionate about video games more than anything, he strives to share as much as he can about music for games.

The Fortunate Isles: Fragment Worlds, Walled Gardens, and the games that are played there

2023-10-22 13:30 PDT

Every game is a fragment world– bordered by the rules of its logic. These boundaries may be spoken out loud (don’t step on the cracks! the floor is lava!) or may be programmed (the end of traversable ground, the rim of the map, an invisible wall that plays a bonk sound effect when you walk into it). Such edges, encircling, make the space of play. These worlds are defined by their boundaries– they exist floating. This talk takes as its center the concept of the walled garden, expanding it out to include games and games spaces. It looks at ornamental gardens, cloisters and isolate spaces, and even mythological or utopian fantasies of worlds apart, and seeks to connect the logic of potent isolation to the games we make and play. By examining historical narratives of boundaries, walls, and edges as applied to constructed spaces, this talk thinks about processes of worldbuilding and systems design as a methodology of gardening, with all of its attendant violences (against the slugs, yes, but also in their construction out of the world)– and looks as well beyond the boundary, where the garden stops and a wildness of bugs, errors, logical failures and edge cases begin.

Everest Pipkin

Everest Pipkin is a game developer, writer, and artist from central Texas who lives and works on a sheep farm in southern New Mexico. Their work both in the studio and in the garden follows themes of ecology, tool making, and collective care during collapse. When not at the computer in the heat of the day, you can find them in the hills spending time with their neighbors— both human and non-human.

Alphaman: Developing and releasing a post-apocalyptic Roguelike game in the DOS days when computers were slow, memory was scarce, and no one had ever heard of object-oriented code.

2023-10-22 14:00 PDT

A retrospective of the challenges and rewards of developing Alphaman, a post-apocalyptic Roguelike game for DOS back before Windows or widespread internet use. I will talk about the challenges of programming with Microsoft QuickBasic while gearing the code for computers with 8088 microprocessors, with the intent to distribute on 3 ½” disks. I will describe some of my motivation for the admittedly quirky aspects of Alphaman, and talk about some of the content and humor that did and didn’t stand up to the test of time after nearly 30 years. I will also include a plug for the GitHub site where Jamie Bainbridge put the source code (he is my hero for managing to successfully recompile Alphaman after nearly 30 years. This could provide a peek into the source code of a project that grew much larger than originally expected, requiring expanding the original clumsy QuickBasic code with QuickC modules, which themselves included embedded machine language code at places where computation speed needed to be increased. Kids these days have it so easy!

Jeff Olson

I began computer programming in college back in the DOS days, and immediately fell in love with Rogue after receiving it on a free 5 ¼” floppy disk in the postal mail. During graduate school, I began tinkering with a post-apocalyptic game similar in feel to Rogue, and developed it slowly while working on my physics PhD at Cornell University. With the help of play testers and encouragement from friends, I finally completed and released Alphaman in the 1990s. A recent resurgence in interest in Alphaman, with the source QuickBasic/QuickC source code posted on GitHub by Jamie Bainbridge, and a 2-part retrospective published by John Harris, as well as subsequent feedback from many people saying that Alphaman got them into roguelike games, has motivated me to put together this talk.

Live Action Roguelike

2023-10-22 15:00 PDT

A Live Mixed Reality Full-Motion Video Performance

Dustin Freeman

A Simulation with a View

2023-10-22 15:30 PDT

Roguelike systems are often full of rich, intricately generated environmental and historical details. Most of it is lost on players who typically navigate the world through the perspective of a single or small party of adventurers. This makes sense in terms of aligning player and character perspective in their journey. It does, however, limit the information they have access to in terms of discovering interesting or quirky emergent details and stories.

Our current project takes the opposite stance of exposing as much of the simulation as possible to allow players the fun of perusing and discovering the intricacies of its generated histories. This led to a series of novel design problems: how to present this massive quantity of information? And how to give players reasons to engage with it.

In this quick talk, I will quickly explain our approaches to tackling these issues. First, I will present our Chroniqueur interface which affords players an immediate, accessible Wikipedia-like interface documenting most of the world’s simulated history. Secondly, I will touch on the Divine Affaire gameplay which positions players as higher entities responding to the needs of simulated characters. To devise wise plans of actions, they first need to investigate the simulated lives and understand the given situations. Given the complexity of the simulation, miraculous meddling does not always yield the expected results and much of the fun comes from uncovering the consequences of one’s interventions in the characters’ timelines.

The project is playable and I can show all this within the game itself.

Jonathan Lessard

Game designer, researcher and professor; long-time independent game developer. Now focused on research-creation in the field of # simulations and emergent narratives.

Generating boring levels for fresh experiences in Heat Signature

2023-10-22 15:45 PDT

When making Heat Signature, our procedural spaceship infiltration game, I found that we didn't need to generate interesting levels to generate interesting experiences. I'll run through the very basic way our level generation works and why, then explain how we approached the game design to ensure it could throw out fresh experiences even when the levels themselves were boring.

Tom Francis

Designer/writer/coder of Gunpoint, Heat Signature and Tactical Breach Wizards

Design tooling at Spry Fox

2023-10-22 16:00 PDT

A walkthrough of how Spry Fox designs are implemented under the hood. We've developed a text-based config library that contains a number of procedural patterns so our small design team can multiply our content efforts and maintain our game systems. In our latest project, we've added a "design dashboard" layer which lets us peer into our own game data at a higher level. I'll talk through how it works, why we like it, and where we plan to take it next.

Patrick Kemp

Patrick is a game designer living in Seattle. He's worked in games for 17 years, and the last 11 of those were as a game designer at Spry Fox. His tech tree started with Klik & Play, BASIC on the TI-83, and ActionScript. Pre-parenthood, he was an avid game jammer and side project noodler alongside his day job work. Cooking games are his favorite kind of games to make.

A Messy Approach to Dynamic Narrative in Sunshine Shuffle

2023-10-22 17:00 PDT

An overview of the dialogue system in narrative poker game Sunshine Shuffle, covering both how the system is structured and a bit of its development history. The talk will discuss how the game's tech was built to support its dynamic structure, while also talking about the assumptions made at the start of development, and how those assumptions were challenged over the course of the game's production.

Stav Hinenzon

Stav Hinenzon is a game designer and developer based in Redmond, WA. He is currently working as a technical game designer at Sony Interactive Entertainment on an unannounced title. His previous work includes Forza Street, The Last of Us Part I (PS5), and Sunshine Shuffle.

2023-10-22 17:15 PDT

Puzzles are a common design element in many genres - but not roguelikes. Roguelikes are designed for repitition, and a puzzle that's been solved once provides no challenge and no satisfaction on the third (or thirtieth) playthrough. In order to get around the 'curse' of repitition, Josh leans on some strategies from mathematics in order to create systems for producing puzzles that continually engage players, even across many (many) playthroughs.

Josh Galecki

Josh Galecki is a solo game dev based in Cleveland. He fell in love with roguelikes after playing Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup fifteen years ago, and loves the emergent narratives created by the genre. Previous releases include Moondrop (a nonviolent farming roguelite), Within a Dead City, and Dwarven Depths.

Backpack Hero - Player Upgrades and Progression

2023-10-22 17:30 PDT

The creator of Backpack Hero will discuss balance and item creation!

Jasper Cole

Jasper is a lifelong gamer and programmer. in 2022 he released Backpack Hero with the other members of Team Backpack.

Fusing AI with Game Design: Let the Chaos In

2023-10-22 18:00 PDT

For decades, procedural systems have enabled countless games and gameplay that would otherwise be impossible or impractical. The current state of AI in games is chaotic and controversial, and yet it also has the potential to enable its own set of entirely new, otherwise impossible games. How do we explore this new frontier together?

In this talk, a game designer and AI programmer from Hidden Door will discuss how they blend generative AI with traditional game design and procedural systems to build something greater than the sum of its parts. We’ll outline challenges we’ve faced combining these two disciplines and illustrate examples to show how AI can be used thoughtfully to enrich aspects of game design.

Brianna McHorse

Brianna McHorse is an engineering manager and ML engineer with expertise in generative models and natural language processing. She leads the team that is currently building the systems, AI and otherwise, behind Hidden Door’s co-creative narrative game platform, where the challenges range from structuring expressive words to determining the meaning of death. She has a whole PhD about why horses evolved a single toe.

Chris Foster

Chris Foster is the Game Director of Hidden Door. Prior to Hidden Door he was Design Director at Harmonix Music Systems, Lead Designer at Turbine Games, and "Designer, Writer, and Programmer of Last Resort" for Fire Hose Games. Among his many projects from those times, he was the Design Lead for The Beatles: Rock Band, Project Lead for Green Day: Rock Band, and Lead Content Designer for The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar. Chris has taught game design at Northeastern University, and spoken on game development at numerous conferences. He recently released an indie game made with his son Ian, titled Loose Nozzles. Chris was Hidden Door’s infection vector for Vampire Survivors, and he plays too much Powerwash Simulator.