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[Melly]

A roguelike where you're a patient in an insane asylum, and have to escape. You can spend time leveling your insanity by fighting the demons that haunt and torment you, and gain spells and abilities to fight them off, or spend time leveling your reality by fighting off the workers that are trying to capture you, but you cannot fight reality by imaginary means, nor can you fight the demons with conventional means. What is to you a +1 cursed sword is in actuality a spork with sticky honey on it so you can't drop it. You have to identify items for what they really are before you can fight with them in reality, but then they become ineffective against the imagination.

Massively awesome.

[JimmyBignuts]

I like the idea of poaching in a roguelike although maybe this can be incorporated into the adventurer mods of dwarf fortress. Having said that most things can and probably will be eventually.

[Lukas]

I don't know if this is the right to post it but Slashie and I once thought about a new form of the RogueLike:

Roguelike 2.0:
+ ASCII graphics with all the restrictions we know (topdown view) (or ASCII-art-chunks)
+ mostly real time gameplay (turn based gameplay may be applied)
+ stereo, CD-quality background music and sound effects, dialogue with voice acting.
+ non-Roguelike gameplay or gameplay which doesn't necessarily have to concentrate on things like Permadeath etc. (but                                                                       that rule isn't too important)
+ Easy to use user interface
+ ASCII(-art) cutscenes


BaronCid

[JimmyBignuts]

I agree with the use of sound. Decent sound really makes a good roguelike great.

[William Broom]

I guess the essence of a roguelike is to represent ideas through symbols and text rather than images.

[dmoonfire]

I guess the essence of a roguelike is to represent ideas through symbols and text rather than images.

Eh, for me roguelikes have more to do with random game play, a very wide variety of things, and discovering what something does. Cheat books are useless with most RL's and that is what I like. It doesn't matter if it is graphical or not for me, just that you have to explore and learn the game every time.

[Don Andy]

I'd say a game is a roguelike as long as a vast majority of people considers it as such :D

[Xion]

I don't really think graphics have anything to do with whether a RL is a RL, 'cause then Powder would be excluded, and I think Powder is closer to the RL formula than say Doryen Arena/TCoD, which seems more like RL+WoW.

Also;
What Don Andy said.

[PenguinHat]

I'm sure that graphics have nothing to do with something being a RL. It's just become tradition (and cheap) to do ASCII.

If you asked me what the single most important RL charactistics are, I would say perma-death and procedural generation.

[joshg]

Permadeath is a big part of it, although Shiren fudges that just a little by allowing you to carry items over between dungeon dives - if you go out of your way to do so.

My favorite bit of my favorite roguelikes is the style of gameplay that emerges from the combination of permadeath, turn-based play and a complex game world.  It creates a sense of a puzzle-like, skill-focused gameplay that rewards the player for knowing when to stop and think through the next move carefully.  ie. learning when to stop and go, "Oh crap if I make the wrong move right now I will die for sure," and then running through all my options in my head to find that only moving left, zapping the right wand and then attacking can save my butt.

Or, to put it another way, if you can't have YASD (yet another stupid death) stories, it's not a real roguelike.  :D

[Alevice]

Or, to put it another way, if you can't have YASD (yet another stupid death) stories, it's not a real roguelike.  :D

This is pretty much my reason for playign a few of them. See fhow far can I go, until I die.

[Golds]

Bacteria roguelike would be badass.

[Melly]

Bacteria roguelike would be badass.

YES

[William Broom]

You are a hacker in the near future. Your task is to enter the substrata of the darknet (represented as dungeons) in search of the lost knowledge of the hackers of olden times. As you delve deeper through decaying message boards and disused IRC channels, you are moving further and further into the archived past. Just like the layers of fossils beneath the earth, the relics of the eldernet are preserved in layers, from the shimmering heights of the neo-blogosphere down through successive levels of archives, into the early days of the internet before Eternal September began, down beyond archives into trace memories in forgotten server-farms. What dark secrets will you uncover there? Conspiracies perpetrated by governments long-since deposed; edit wars beyond imagining now lost in the vast recesses of time; otherworldly memes whose intangible humour has faded like the smell of violets on a cold morning. And what dangers shall befall you? Mad, lonely spambots trawling through forums long since deserted; viral videos that mutate and adapt to cling to the outer fringes of the known datastream; gibbering worms and rootkits that gnaw upon out-of-date login details in the cracks between ISPs.
Dare you brave these horrors, you shall return to the fount of the internet itself, the ENQUIRE database that sleeps in forgotten halls beneath CERN, its power supply leeched from the Large Hadron Collider and maintained by a race of demented hunchbacks who worship her binary beauty as God. Yet is this all that exists, the deepest layer of the eldernet, the climax of web-archaeology? Or is there something deeper still, the primeval information superhighway - beyond cables, beyond wireless, beyond time and space: the majesty of pure information that pulses in patterns ascribed to it by an unseen hand before the birth of the universe itself!

Beat that!

[Melly]

Yes for that too.

[Melly]

Random idea I just had and may do in the future:

Cube RL

Translating the Cube movies into a roguelike.

Be an average John Doe suddenly waking up to a horrible nightmare, trapped in a maze of cubic rooms with no food or water, desperately trying to find your way out. And that's not mentioning all the lethal horrible traps existent in many of the rooms. We got spikes, toxic gas, acid, lasers, and many more unthinkable ways to die. Find other trapped people, or the remains of those who the labyrinth already claimed. Find an exit before starvation and fatigue get the best of you. Or resort to unthinkable measures.

I'm a fan of Cube.

[JimmyBignuts]

I'm a fan of Cube.

Me too. That sounds like an awesome idea.

[Slash - Santiago Zapata]

Some nice ideas here... but I already have too many roguelikes in development, shouldn't start a new one!

[Seth]

I really liked this thread and I got really excited when I saw it was necro'd because I thought someone was going to post more non-traditional roguelike ideas

[Slash - Santiago Zapata]

Has roguebasin theme list been posted here already?

http://roguebasin.roguelikedevelopment.org/index.php?title=Themes