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[s0]

Here's an interesting entry that I think a lot of people will have some comments on: "The Problem with the Roguelike Metagame"!

http://www.ultimaratioregum.co.uk/game/2015/05/23/the-problem-with-the-roguelike-metagame/

agree with pretty much all of that, except the assertion that roguelikes are about winning. i've been playing roguelikes for a long time and have never ascended in any of the classics (and don't feel bad about it). i feel a lot less pressure to "win" in a roguelike than e.g. in a cinematic AAA game or a competitive multiplayer game.

anyway even outside of roguelikes it's annoying how every game has some sort of metagame progression thing going on now (that's one of the things the ruined heroes of might & magic 6 for me). ive learned to really treasure games where individual sessions are self contained.

EDIT:

Teaser for the next URRpdate:

oops sorry for paging your teaser with my rambling. looking great as always 

[failrate]

I didn't even remember that FTL gave ship unlocks for anything less than defeating the Rebel Boss Ship.  I think unlocks are great in Roguelikes, but I think that they should be classes/ships/species that just make the game more challenging.

URR seems expansive enough that most players will never complete it, many players will complete it once, and a few will play it repeatedly.  With that kind of distribution, unlocks make no sense at all.  I think unlocks are also only appropriate for games with short session times.

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

agree with pretty much all of that, except the assertion that roguelikes are about winning. i've been playing roguelikes for a long time and have never ascended in any of the classics (and don't feel bad about it). i feel a lot less pressure to "win" in a roguelike than e.g. in a cinematic AAA game or a competitive multiplayer game.

anyway even outside of roguelikes it's annoying how every game has some sort of metagame progression thing going on now (that's one of the things the ruined heroes of might & magic 6 for me). ive learned to really treasure games where individual sessions are self contained.

LESS pressure to win? That's so interesting! And... hmm. I don't suppose I feel more/less desire (I'd use "desire" rather than "pressure", personally, but I guess even that choice of words speaking to two different mindsets?) in larger games/indie games, but I'll have to tihnk about that. And glad you like the teaser! Full version coming shortly...

URR seems expansive enough that most players will never complete it, many players will complete it once, and a few will play it repeatedly.  With that kind of distribution, unlocks make no sense at all.  I think unlocks are also only appropriate for games with short session times.

All true, and agreed - short session times are definitely an integral part, I think. And unlocks to make the game MORE challenging? Interesting - I mean, in essence, that's what the weird species in DCSS are, right? Playing as Vampire/Mummy/whatever are obviously species you specifically choose for a trickier challenge, even if they aren't unlocked from the start. I really like that model too, even if having them all there from the start does probably risk a few players choosing a tough species without knowing better, finding it incredibly tough, then quitting...

[JobLeonard]

Maybe it depends on whether you are a completionist or not? Or the way the game is structured.

I'm having a blast with Cogmind at the moment, but I doubt I'll ever finish it. But the world feels "alive" enough to enjoy exploring it in different ways and trying out different stuff all the time. Most roguelikes feel the same to me, although the hunger mechanic usually ruins my attempts at exploration.

At the same time, FTL I'm always trying to "win", which is either beating the flagship, or complete one of the missions to unlock the other ships. Same with Spelunky. In both cases the game is set up to constantly push you forward to the next level.

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

Maybe it depends on whether you are a completionist or not? Or the way the game is structured.

I'm having a blast with Cogmind at the moment, but I doubt I'll ever finish it. But the world feels "alive" enough to enjoy exploring it in different ways and trying out different stuff all the time. Most roguelikes feel the same to me, although the hunger mechanic usually ruins my attempts at exploration.

At the same time, FTL I'm always trying to "win", which is either beating the flagship, or complete one of the missions to unlock the other ships. Same with Spelunky. In both cases the game is set up to constantly push you forward to the next level.

Interesting! I can't wait to play Cogmind as soon as I find some time. I'm honestly not sure "completionism" is the term I'd be inclined to use in this context; to me, that means the modern concept of "100%ing" the game, getting every achievement, blah blah, whereas maybe something like "winnism" (?) would be more in line with my own thinking on the nature of roguelikes. I mean, the two are still ends-oriented understandings of gameplay, but I think they're subtly different... or maybe I'm just setting up a false dichotomy by splitting "winning" and "other achievements"?

This week's update:

So, last week I posted an entry which generated a huge amount of discussion here, on Reddit, on Twitter, and (if past experience is anything to go by) probably a few other places I haven’t even noticed. To those who I still owe replies to – I’m getting to them! I’ll be posting a follow-up next week, but this week we’re onto another URRpdate, finally!

Clothing Generation

This week I’ve been working on both generating clothing styles for different civilizations. There are currently six “archetypal” clothing styles, each of which has three sub-styles within it, and each sub-style has its own variation between specific items of “identical” clothing (just small things like the width of clothing relating to the size of its owner, fractional colour differences, that kind of thing). As the maximum number of feudal civilizations the game allows at any one point is eighteen, this works out perfectly, so all/most of the styles will be reflected in each game (though I might add more later). I’ve so far worked entirely on upper-class clothing for rulers, aristocrats, military commanders, etc. There are several dozen colour combinations, and each nation will pick one for its upper-class clothing and then have those same colours reflected, to a lesser extent, in its middle/lower-class clothing. This week we’ll have the upper-class clothing, then next week the follow-up to the metagame post, then the week after that, probably the remainder of clothing and some early development of crowd mechanics, if we’re lucky?! So, here’s an illustrative sample of five of the six “archetypal” clothing styles (the last one is not yet finished):



Going clockwise from the top left, these are inspired by “classic” Western medieval clothing of leather (or other material) waistcoats and a shirt underneath, though here I’m treating them as a single garment; the second is inspired by Japanese kimonos; the third is inspired primarily by older Chinese styles of dress, and also some more “tailored” Western styles; the fourth (i.e. the bottom-right corner) is inspired from a range of styles including far more ancient Babylonian and Hebrew dress; the fifth is based on a lot of Eastern European royalty, and the sixth will be based on Renaissance Western Europe (but is proving surprisingly tricky to realize). These then have the three sub-styles as described above – which consist of different patterns, different locations of buttons, lengths of sleeves, sizes of collar, colour schemes, etc. To take a closer look at the variation within one archetype, let’s go with the Hebrewlonian () archetype, of which I’ve included three below. (There are actually a dozen different possible patterns which can appear on the “clasps”, but just weirdly enough, all three I took for this picture happened to select the same one, and now I’ve only just noticed this and I’m severely disinclined to go and generate them again, so we’re just going to have to make do with these). The right is “average” size (which will include “muscular” or whatever other build definitions I wind up with), the middle for someone slim/athletic, and the right for someone much heavier-set. So these would be belong to three neighboring civilizations who might have experienced a level of cultural bleeding between each other’s society, but maintain their own styles of dress nevertheless:



So, each of these might be tethered to a different culture, but I’ll also be sure to place those cultures next to each other (think pre-modern China, Korea and Japan, for instance), so that you get some sense of “similarity” (sometimes) between clothing styles of nearby nations (though given that many nations might have complex territorial shapes, there is only so far this can be pushed). Naturally there will be coupled with appropriate lower-body garments, boots, gloves, etc, and then we’ll be done with clothing for this release (with armour and weapons… next release?). In the new NPC lookup (or the same for the player) you’ll be able to scroll through all the clothing on an NPC to let you examine what culture you think they might be from. Maybe a logical mechanic would be to have NPCs judge the player, at least in part, based on their clothing style (and many other factors) so that there might be some ability to attempt to pass “undercover” in nations unfriendly to your own. As with everything else: the game will never tell you “this is the clothing style of Nation X”, but once the player has that learned that, you should be able to come to recognize those you encounter in the street, or the origins of foreign merchants/travelers, etc.

I’m now working on two things simultaneously: crowd mechanics, and remaining items of clothing for middle-class and lower-class citizens, and then lower-body garments, boots/shoes, etc. I’m basically working to an “interim” deadline right now since I want to show off a stable build with crowd mechanics functioning (and all clothing items implemented) at the IRDC 2015 I’m hosting on 27-28 June, so all academic work is on hold now whilst I grind towards that goal. Metagame follow-up next week, then more delicious URRpdates!

[JobLeonard]

I'm honestly not sure "completionism" is the term I'd be inclined to use in this context; to me, that means the modern concept of "100%ing" the game, getting every achievement, blah blah, whereas maybe something like "winnism" (?) would be more in line with my own thinking on the nature of roguelikes. I mean, the two are still ends-oriented understandings of gameplay, but I think they're subtly different... or maybe I'm just setting up a false dichotomy by splitting "winning" and "other achievements"?

I was kinda doubting about that term myself, but I couldn't find one that fit less badly. I mean, the first step to completionism is actually finishing the game, then finishing it again with every other character, no? (well, not counting those games that have a linear level progression, where you need to do everything right in one run for a 100%). Mayby "ends-oriented" like you casually mentioned as an aside is the best term?

[s0]

roguelikes are usually so difficult that ascending feels like "100%ing" to me (i never 100% games btw, even in demon's souls/dark souls i havent done *everything* there is to do, as in used every weapon type and every spell and so on). i usually play roguelikes to see if i can beat my personal best and get to a higher level than i could before. and yes i also play for the "journey". im not a very competitive person haha.

modern AAA games are usually easy to "win" (i.e. play through) and are about seeing all the content, so if you haven't played through the entire game you're getting an incomplete experience. in my mind it's comparable to not finishing a book or movie. this creates pressure to continue playing the game even once fatigue sets in (most AAA games are overlong imo). in the roguelikes i like theres no guarantee to win, so there's no sense that i haven't had the "correct" experience if i don't ascend. they also consist of short(-ish) selfcontained sessions and when i get bored of them i can just quit without worrying about how i "didn't finish" the game.

but idk how many other people actually think like this, i guess im a bit of a weirdo lol.

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

I was kinda doubting about that term myself, but I couldn't find one that fit less badly. I mean, the first step to completionism is actually finishing the game, then finishing it again with every other character, no? (well, not counting those games that have a linear level progression, where you need to do everything right in one run for a 100%). Mayby "ends-oriented" like you casually mentioned as an aside is the best term?

Ah, yeah, maybe ends-oriented is best, and acknowledging a little bit of ambiguity between those whose "ends" are unlocks, not the completion... but maybe that's only a result of having these unlocks as rewards instead of the victory/learning? I don't know, it's a tough question which overlaps with a lot. Either way, I'll be uploading my full new thoughts in a follow-up entry next week, and I'll certainly be touching on this then!

roguelikes are usually so difficult that ascending feels like "100%ing" to me (i never 100% games btw, even in demon's souls/dark souls i havent done *everything* there is to do, as in used every weapon type and every spell and so on). i usually play roguelikes to see if i can beat my personal best and get to a higher level than i could before. and yes i also play for the "journey". im not a very competitive person haha.

modern AAA games are usually easy to "win" (i.e. play through) and are about seeing all the content, so if you haven't played through the entire game you're getting an incomplete experience. in my mind it's comparable to not finishing a book or movie. this creates pressure to continue playing the game even once fatigue sets in (most AAA games are overlong imo). in the roguelikes i like theres no guarantee to win, so there's no sense that i haven't had the "correct" experience if i don't ascend. they also consist of short(-ish) selfcontained sessions and when i get bored of them i can just quit without worrying about how i "didn't finish" the game.

but idk how many other people actually think like this, i guess im a bit of a weirdo lol.

so there's no sense that i haven't had the "correct" experience if i don't ascend.

That is really interesting! I... hmm. I'm not sure where I stand on that one and the idea of the correct experience; I suppose I see all roguelike play as part of a narrative towards a victory, as a correct experience even if you die because it's implying that you will soon be able to be victorious, and I think that's very much reflected in the design of "classic" roguelikes without a doubt. Clearly research here waiting to be done!

[failrate]

Some games (like 868-HACK) let you unlock (and lock) all of the unlockables as you please.  It's actually a strategic choice in 868-HACK, too, because fewer programs unlocked means a smaller pool of programs that will be randomly selected if you prefer the earlier unlocks.  It also means that you start the next run guaranteed to have the program that you just unlocked, which means you can plan multiple runs in advance..

Did you check out that Julian Gollop interview on the Game Design Roundtable podcast?  http://thegamedesignroundtable.com/2014/04/10/episode-74-procedurally-chaotic/

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

Ahhh, I did not know that about 868-HACK (to my everlasting shame, I still haven't played it) - and I haven't seen the interview, I will give it a listen!

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

This week, a follow-up to my previous piece on metagames! Travelling back from Canada today and done with conferences for a little while, so a nice few weeks of pure URRpdates are on their way .

http://www.ultimaratioregum.co.uk/game/2015/06/05/roguelike-metagames-the-sequel/

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

This week I’ve finished off procedural clothing generation for the richest individuals in feudal nations. The game can now create upper-body garments, lower-body garments, and boots, for each civilization. These different garments across a given civilization maintain a consistency of colours, a general consistency of size/aesthetic, and a consistency of whether the patterns etched into the clothing are circles, octagons, squares etc, based on the visual preference of the nation in question. Thus far these are only the “upper-class” clothing variations, but I think one can reasonably extrapolate how the others will look (which will come in a few weeks, I expect). Here’s a summary of the three layers of clothing currently implemented – I’m also going to add gloves and cloaks this release, but haven’t got around to them yet (since they’re hardly a priority compared to implementing crowd mechanics before the UK IRDC in a fortnight’s time!), but they’ll probably reflect the coats of arms of important houses if upper-class cloaks, and then just have some appropriate patterns on for middle-class, and nothing special for lower-class. Anyway, onto the clothing of our procedurally-generated aristocrats:

Upper-Body Garments

There are currently seven “archetypes” for upper-body clothing, an example from each being shown below. I’m working on an eighth archetype but it is proving extremely challenging to make it look anything other than awful, so that one might not see the light of day. Regardless, each of these has three sub-archetypes, making for twenty-one high-level “clothing styles” at present, each of which then undergoes extensive randomness within that clothing style, meaning that even if the maximum number of feudal nations are present, there will still be several “unused” high-level clothing styles left over – so that’ll do for now.



Lower-Body Garments

It is very challenging to make “trousers” which look even vaguely as interesting as upper-body garments (or boots or gloves, for that matter!), but I’ve done my best. The “Japanese” and what I have taken to calling “Hebrewlonian” archetypes in the above picture (middle top, and third bottom) will count as both upper- and lower-body garments, whilst the lower-body garments shown here will be distributed to the rest of  the clothing styles. Although in many nations there will be little sexual dimorphism (so to speak) between clothing styles for men and women, this will not be the case in some cultures, and a “dress” clothing archetype has yet to be worked on (I’ll get to it in the next few weeks). So some nations have the J/H archetypes above for both sexes; some nations will have the other above clothing for both sexes; some will have different clothing for the two sexes (and this will all, obviously, be chosen procedurally). So, some trousers/skirts etc (skirts are especially hard to make interesting, but I’ve done my best):



Boots

Now onto the “paired” items of clothing – boots (and gloves). I decided for the time being to forego “shoes” and go with something of a Game of Thrones/TV-adaptation-of-Wolf-Hall logic, i.e. that even those at the very top of society have to give something towards practicality and pragmatism, and basically wear extremely nice boots, rather than wearing beautiful footwear which never comes anywhere near a bit of mud. Boots, like gloves, have a distinct item for each in a pair, so that we can handle things like losing limbs, damaged limbs, etc, later in the game. Gloves and boots use the same colour system – they take the established colours from the clothing above, and then blend it 70% into a generic “leather” colour, to give the impression of dyed leather. Boots are therefore deliberately a tad less “striking” in colour than other items, but still maintain a strong semblance of the same colour schemes. Remember, as always, that you’ll never see these next to each other in game!



Gloves

Gloves are coming soon… but possibly not before the end of June, since now that I have the three most essential items of clothing in place, I’m working solely on NPC mechanics in preparation for showing off an interim “0.8”-ish building at the UK IRDC at the end of the month.

Complete Generated Clothing Sets:

Here are some complete (aside from gloves) “sets” of clothing – note, of course, that the zoom level does vary across each item of clothing so that the player can see maximum detail, and you’ll obviously never see them all in-game “lined up” like this, but I think it’s quite nice to look at some of the aesthetic consistencies across different items of clothing belonging to the aristocratic echelons of a given civilization:









(Note that Set 4 contains no lower-body garment since the robe covers both the upper- and lower-body slots, and also in some of these examples, the underlying pattern – square, diamond, etc – varies, which it won’t in the actual game.)

I will be working on middle-class and lower-class/slum clothing soon, but that’s taking a back-seat now to work on some mechanics for the version I want to be able to show off at the UK IRDC. There will also, of course, be distinct clothing styles for nomadic civilizations and tribal civilizations, but those are going to come along later, although I do have some ideas for what types of generators I’m going to build for both of those.

Future Mechanics

Clothing generation is increasingly pointing towards an obvious but potentially very interesting and unusual mechanic: the ability to “fake” being a member of a given culture. Perhaps you can don clothes of other cultures (and perhaps lighten/darken your skin, as many real-world explorers and “adventurers” in the distant past did for exactly this reason?) and attempt to “pass yourself off” as a native in a distant land… which then yields potential gameplay around attempting to maintain the deception, say appropriate things in conversation, and give nothing away, whilst perhaps other NPCs are capable of noticing slightly unusual things about your character which suggest to them that all is not as it seems? I think this could be some really interesting territory to explore in the future…

What next?

Well, we now have heads, upper-body and lower-body clothing, and boots, so I’d say we’re about to ready to actually create URR’s NPCs. This week I’m going to be working on optimizing the field-of-view algorithm which needs some serious improvement for the next release, creating the new “character lookup” window which has room to include a face and to scroll through their clothing (and in 0.9 their armour and weaponry, if any), and continuing to work on crowd mechanics, spawning/de-spawning NPCs, etc. See you next time for an update on hopefully all of these things!

[gimymblert]

no sleeveless or shirtless?
No short skirt (roman) or conan like?
no (enough) asymetrical features?

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

Oh, something like that is in the works! There are two archetypes I'm still working on, but I've had to put those back until next month since I'm really crunching on crowd mechanics and handling NPCs and that kind of thing for the IRDC in... good grief, just a few days from now!

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

Other stuff to read

Before we start this week’s entry, I have some other stuff you might all like to read! This week I had a piece published at First Person Scholar about the intriguing player-AI dialogue which develops in the danmaku game “Warning Forever” (http://www.firstpersonscholar.com/warning-forever/), and a piece in Memory Insufficient about the alternate history aesthetics of the Red Alert series (http://meminsf.silverstringmedia.com/art/alternate-history-aesthetics-in-red-alert/). If you’re interested, do give them a read and support those other two sites!

Now, on to this week’s many attractions:

Clothes as Items, and Inventory Changes

Clothes have now been transported out of the file I use for working on the game’s graphics and added into the game itself, and turned into items (with a horrifyingly large number of variables – it took me much longer to integrate them than I expected). When you look at an item of clothing, it tells you nothing except the quality of the tailoring – “ornate”, “well-made” or “poorly made” – and what type of thing it is – “shirt”, “pair of trousers”, etc, and tells you nothing about the nation it is from, as that’s part of the learning/discovery process. Along side this implementation, the inventory system has been changed. Previously there were different keys for each action, so one would press ‘d’ to ‘drop’, ‘D’ to ‘drop several’, ‘t’ to throw’, and so forth; they’d then bring up your inventory, you’d select the item you wanted to perform the action with, and go ahead and do it. However, this meant you only saw the picture of the item when you pressed ‘i’ to simply look at your inventory, and that meant the images were (to an extent) being wasted. I’ve now changed it so that there are only two inventory functions: ‘i’ brings up your inventory, and ‘D’ allows you to drop many items at once (without looking at them). When you now press ‘i’, therefore, and choose an item, a line of text at the bottom of that item lists everything you can do with that item, so you always get to see the graphics, and the range of possibilities for each item is made a lot clearer (so things you can wear, or things you can use in some way, or eat, or whatever). I think this is a lot better, makes more use of the graphics, and tidies up the UI a little (given how many roguelikes use every damned letter on the keyboard). An example of a piece of clothing currently un-worn, and one being worn:



Character look-up

The look-up window for any character (player or NPC) has now been significantly changed and upgraded, and faces have also been moved out of the graphical-testing file and fully integrated into the game’s code. The first page currently shows the face of the NPC you’re looking at (or your own), and lists everything that person is currently wearing (which is visible; rings are “invisible” if they have gauntlets/gloves). The second page will soon show health, but I’m still working (yet again!) on thinking through how health is going to work, so we’ll have to see, and for now it has been removed (and will probably stay removed for 0.8 unless I finally figure out how health will work, even though I know how combat is going to work). So here’s a shot of me (without a first name, so the name up there is my family name), and this time I happened to be in the “scarification” civ. You’ll also notice I’ve made all eyes into a light grey instead of white! The reduced contrast is far less jarring.



Browsing clothes

The coolest thing about the new look-up? You can now hit Enter and browse through all the things a character is wearing, using the arrow keys. As you move around the “grid” of things the character has on them, each image then appears on the right-hand side (the first time the right side of the screen has ever been specially used!). For now, therefore, you can look over the upper- and lower-body garments, and boots, but I’ll be working on all non-armour garments in this release, meaning that we’ll be adding gloves, and probably cloaks too, but armour will come next time, and necklaces and rings will come… whenever. Either way, here are some nice illustrative screenshots of this! (With some placeholder first names and surnames…)







NPCs are now spawning

This speaks for itself, really, given the above screenshot. They don’t move, think, react, converse or do anything yet, but they are there, and the game can handle them and draw them correctly, and the player can ‘l’ook at them and browse what they’re wearing. My objective for this coming week before the IRDC is to really crunch and try to get crowd mechanics working to the point that NPCs will spawn and despawn out of the player’s line of sight. As for line of sight and field of view, there’s something cool on that point later down this entry…

Genetics, Culture, etc

I’m pleased to say (and one might extrapolate this from the integration of the facial images) that we’ve now got a model for genetics and cultures spreading around the globe. Genetically the game now chooses large chunks of land for eye and hair colours (they bleed out around the edge, but these screenshots show only the dominant colour in each region; equally, although these are very geometric and unsmooth, that doesn’t ultimately matter, since populations of NPCs in-game will always blend and travel). The first picture shows eye colour variation, the second hair colour, in a generated world:





As for how these work for individual NPCs, basically, each nation has a “core” set of values for their skin tones, eye colour, etc, and that’s based on what values are present in their capital city specifically. Equally, they can also spawn NPCs who might have been born hundreds of miles from the capital, but are still within the same nation. The further you get from a nation’s capital, therefore, the more and more people you’ll see who are born according to the demographics of that particular area, and the closer you get to the capital, the more you’ll see people who look like the people of that capital city. Cultural norms will be maintained however far you go – so people in the capital and a distant colony have the same hairstyles – but visual/genetic markers (eyes, skin, hair colour, etc) will vary as you move around. So if you have a capital city on the far, far east, and a colony of that nation on the far west, and in that colony you might expect 25% to “look like” they came from the capital in terms of eyes/skin/hair colour, most to look “native” to that colony in eyes/skin/hair etc, but they will be visually unified according to their hair styles, other cultural markers, beard styles, clothing, etc etc. So we basically have two layers – the “genetic” and the “cultural” – and these blend and intertwine as you move around the world. Also, different types of civilization have different levels of cultural variety – the open and well-traveled nomads have the most variation within a nation, the small tribal societies have the least, and the feudal civilizations are somewhere in the middle.

Field of View Optimization (at last!)

People have been asking for this for years, so I have finally put some time into optimizing the field of view algorithm, and now you can see basically everything on-screen at one time. Buildings will still have a reduced field of view, and it’ll reduce at night, too, but here’s a screenshot and a gif of wandering outside in the daytime:





Next Week

Well, the IRDC is in a week’s time, and I’m crunching like mad to get some kind of NPC pathfinding/crowd mechanic simulation going there. It’s going reasonably well, and I think I’ll have something good to show off, but I’ve been running into some fundamental design questions – can NPCs push past each other, for instance, if one occupies a tile the other wants to get past – which have surprisingly far-reaching algorithmic implications for how pathfinding and gameplay will actually play out in the longer run.

[gimymblert]

So you use a voronoi map around capitals to seed phenotype?

people pushing against each other kind of remind me that
Kind of remind me something like tis
http://motion.cs.umn.edu/PowerLaw/
(it's basically applying a x² to distance evaluation)

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

Yep, that is the plan; simple, but works well enough, and the "stark" lines it produces are going to be well-masked once the player actually starts playing the game (though hopefully a few people will, from time to time, notice some changing eye colours! Hair colour is much more obvious, though...)

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

Fir any who want to watch, we're streaming this year's UK International Roguelike Development Conference from 10am UK time onwards (starting in 30 minutes)! I'll be speaking at around 4pm UK time. http://www.twitch.tv/roguelike_con

[happymonster]

Clothes and faces look very good. Although as you are pushing ANSI graphics so much I can't help but wonder if you should just go for a full custom tileset for smoother diagonals in those images. 

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

Clothes and faces look very good. Although as you are pushing ANSI graphics so much I can't help but wonder if you should just go for a full custom tileset for smoother diagonals in those images. 

Thanks! There's no way I'm changing now I've done three years of work into this style, though, and I think it's very distinct and striking and helps the game standout somewhat .

Meanwhile: a round-up of this year's (UK) IRDC from the past weekend! http://www.ultimaratioregum.co.uk/game/2015/06/29/irdc-2015/