The challenge has started! Many entrants declared start date and game title. Announcement thread is over seventy posts by now but there is still time to proclaim participation until end of March 6th. A success thread for victorious challengers is already created.

Visit http://7drl.org/ weblog to read how development struggle goes or to learn that other authors are also desperately tracking down a bad pointer reference on the 167th hour.

The 2011 7DRL Challenge, March 5 to 13

The time has almost come! Gather all your strengths and build a roguelike, be it your first one or your next one.

A good roguelike is an expression of pure gameplay: as a developer you can turn your ideas into games for the people to enjoy, without the constraints of 3d modeling or expensive graphics creation.

Developing a roguelike also allows you to portrait a theme within the limitations of abstract or simple gfx output, but having imagination as a tool to recreate infinite environments and stories

Summon your indie gamedev friends, be they roguedevs or not for this, the annual roguelike development party!

Links of interest:

• Roguebasin page

The results are in! going against all laws, conventions and best-practices of roguelike development, DarkGod rose and took the grand-prize for himself and the community around ToME-4. Congratulations!

Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, Dwarf Fortress and DoomRL continue holding strong into the hearts of the roguelikers.

Thanks to Mr. Doull @ ASCIIDreams for keeping the tradition.

There were 167 entries and 1675 votes. This is the top ten for 2010, congratulations all!

Check this article for the full ranking

After just a week of existence, and being featured in some respectable web publications and forums (in which it got lots of feedback), it has been revealed that the Serial Killer roguelike project was fake.

The project claimed to pursuit the development of a highly detailed (DF-Level) simulation of murder including psychological traits and dealing with the forces of the law.

Following are the possible reasons of the developer to announce the unsuccessful end of this project:

• He was doing an university project to study the reactions of people to such a controversial theme
• He was just a high level troll with flash skills and some spare time
• The project raised the expectations far too high and scared the hell out of the developer
• Personal reasons caused the developer to dismiss it, fearing it would affect his life.
• Someone hacked all of his accounts including bay12 and youtube, impersonated him and deleted everything (that person is probably seeking him physically now, to finish his cleaning rampage)

The news has been received with both relief and disappointment. The theme was disturbing, but everybody is free to pick the games they want to play (I would not play it)

Me myself, I’m sorry there are lots of other real projects which yell for attention and feedback for years, yet never receive the kind of input it wasted.

Lait posted his yearly analysis of roguelike games over r.g.r.d. He wrote:

So where does seven years of data put us? We are doing very well for roguelike creation – 6.75 new tracked roguelikes per month, a new peak. It is tempting to dismiss this as a 7DRL effect, but the Old column I think is correctly tracking the creation of larger projects. While it is a new high, I’d hesitate to call that a trend. I suspect we are seeing a continuation of the 30 new roguelikes a year rule identified last year.

Read the full analysis

With fifty completed 7DRLs this year, some people wonder how they will have time to play them all! Fortunately, that is simple…

Just play one a week for the next year.

For those less dedicated, a team of evaluators was assembled to give all the roguelikes a once-over. We graded the roguelikes under six categories using a simple three point scale. We ensured every roguelike was graded by at least two reviewers, and aimed for most to have three reviewers.

After a long week of playing, we present our results!

Check them out here, at Roguetemple’s 7DRL Shrine! http://www.roguetemple.com/7drl/2010/

The Honorable Members of the Committee

• @ Darren Grey
• @ Ido Yehieli
• @ Jeff Lait
• @ Jice
• @ Joseph Larson
• @ Kaw
• @ Michael Curran
• @ Slash

This list is not meant to be an authoritative ranking of the games. If you dive in, you will see different reviewers often disagreed on the rankings.

Instead, it is a way for you to help select which 7DRLs are likely to have things of interest to you.

Specific comments were also written by reviewers. Note that these are criticism for the developer to better improve the game – please do not be unduly offended if they are nitpicky or consist of “I got killed by a ferret on the first screen”.

The categories are, with description of what a 3 means:

• Completeness: Bug free, polished game with no features that feel like they are missing.
• Aesthetics: Good looking, excellent controls and UI.
• Fun: If you try any 7DRLs, try this one.
• Innovation: Brings something fundamentally new to roguelikes.
• Scope: Beyond what you think could have been done in seven days.
• Roguelike: 3 means Roguelike, 2 means Roguelike-like, 1 means Not Roguelike. Each reviewer used their own personal definition here.

Thanks to all the members of the committee for their great efforts, we hope you enjoy it!

Mr. Jeff Lait has finished his yearly analysis of roguelike development activity!

We are doing very well for roguelike creation – five new tracked roguelikes per month, a new peak.  The new Old column, however, I think shows where some of the sense of stasis in the genre comes from.  The early increases may be due to sampling effects as existing roguelikes were largely added to the list.  But for the last three years we’ve seen a balance at about 30 roguelikes being actively worked on.

Check his analysis at this roguetemple article (or the original usenet post (Via google groups))

Major

Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup 0.5

* New species and job: Deep Dwarf, Artificer.
* Removed three species: Gnome, Grey Elf, Ogre-Mage.
* Several cool new uniques and other monsters.
* Several great new portal vaults.
* Zombies and skeletons can no longer use stairs.
* Transformations meld equipment instead of removing it.
* Many spell ranges shortened.
* Much more useful monster descriptions.
* More convenient tiles version.

Runners

Privateer ASCII Sector 0.5.3.3

Ramming a ship will now have the same effect on it’s attitude and on your criminal record as shooting it.

Unangband 0.6.3

This is the final release of Unangband 0.6.3 “Death to the Case Statement” aka “The Projected Release”.

DaJAngband 1.0.98

Magic staffs can now get weapon bonueses and egos. Since this can cause problems with stacking, I also added a free command “&” which can remove unwanted egos and weapon bonuses from a staff to allow it to stack with others of its kind.

Newcomers
When Zombies Attack v0.3

Mostly some small balance tweaks and bug fixes, if you’re interested, check it out:

Unnethack 3.5.1

The main intent of this fork is to put more randomness, challenges and fun into NetHack.

Tomb of The Aztecs 1.2

Longer journey to the bottom of the tomb complex

Prospector 0.1.6b

Grab your scoutship, hunt spacepirates, gather ressources and avoid getting eaten by aliens. And try to get rich while you are at it.

Dev

TinyCurses 1.0a

My next step will probably be to port it to ncurses and pdcurses.

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!