Bold adventurer, is it fame you are after? Do you want treasure, fight fierce beasts or just to explore the land? This roguelike game, Fame, does not provide any answers for these questions. An adventurer you are and thats it. A manual bundled with the game also remains quiet about your reasons to wander around the world and whack monsters risking your life many times in the process. I found this lack of introduction incongruent with Fame’s otherwise well done plot. Anyway, who really needs a reason to hunt monsters?

Your hero arrives at the village of Elunny. He or she notices it is a beautiful day and already has a good idea what occupation would be enjoyable under such circumstances. There are some NPCs waiting in their homes for you to come and help them out. You might get some quests or decide to immediately head out into wilderness instead in search of some action. If tutorial option was checked you already have a quest to complete. I found the hand-holding mode to be a waste of time. The tutorial is short and tells only about the basics one can figure out in almost no time anyway.

Traveling long distances is one of most noticeable things fundamentally different about Fame. World map is divided into segments and crossing boundaries of one places you into another. This is a good way to escape any tough creatures going after your hide. You can find mushrooms in forests. Also, trees are neither obstructing your vision nor movement. This is nice. In plains you may find large rocks which do block passage but they are rare.

While crossing the country that way is more immersive it is monotonous at the same time. Locations visited more than once invite player to hold down movement key to traverse them. Fortunately when an encounter happens you will be stopped from running into adversaries by a pop up window announcing whatever you meet. Unfortunately if you decide to avoid the generated baddies there is nothing informing you next time of hostile presence in the area. Quite annoying.

Next feature diverging from usual behavior is permadeath. Here it is merely an option to take. Before version 8.4 it was not even supported. The decision makes sense because Fame is not as well suited to replayability as average roguelike game. Static plot takes up large chunk of play time. There is long random dungeon providing lots of varied action but in this department many other games outclass Fame by a wide margin. Since the plot is one of main strengths of the game forcing player to replay it as a punishment for mistakes would be counterproductive.

Fantasy roguelikes often implement hunger. A few have added thirst, some add fatigue and sleep. Fame belongs to the latter category. Your character has to eat but also needs to rest. Yes, you can die from exhaustion if energy meter reaches 0%. I have mixed feelings about this feature. It feels like silly interrupt in glorious times of fighting powerful monsters and searching for fabulous treasure. On the other hand getting bogged down by hostiles now carries additional threat. Even if you slaughter them left and right not getting to safe place in time may have you lose the war of attrition. Bring potions of energy.

Hunger itself is not a concern. It is fairly easy to find locals to dine on. Try to vary your diet, some corpses give funny messages. You should never fear starvation unless you fancy a zombie remains for a breakfast. This is a big no-no.

Fame seems to be greatly influenced by Ancient Domains of Mystery. Developed plot, detailed bestiary, presence of wilderness and large world to explore all seem to be inspired by this old roguelike or at least bear significant resemblance. Some in-game messages like “You encounter a lone wizard” are straight homage to ADOM. Fame does a lot of things its own way but the influence is quite visible.

The game is full of quests. Their number does not approach LambdaRogue even remotely but certainly beats most other roguelike games. Many quests feature interesting pieces of dialog and occasionally some meaningful choices to make. Plot in Fame is well developed but I feel it detracts from replayability. However, it is difficult to have interesting random quests.

Things you are asked to do by NPCs mostly comprise of collecting items from a location or killing some monsters. Then there are odd things like “fetch me a beer” or escort mission. I was surprised by the last one because it was easy. Perhaps trying to rescue the cute puppy in ADOM too many times left me expecting a lot of grief out of guarding a NPC.

Sooner or later inviting depths of mysterious dungeon will lure a prospecting hero in. There is dark inside so it is prudent to bring a torch. Dungeons provide old fashioned hack and slash kind of fun. There is random loot and plenty of monsters to kill. While the items you may find are nicely varied one cannot say the same about monsters.

Creatures in Fame are very bland. Their types tend to differ by stats, speed, picture and description. You fight majority of them with the same single tactic. First, find a choke point, then just slay them one by one. Two exceptions are vampires and basilisks. Vampires are best treated with silver, basilisks can paralyze you. Add venom using monsters to the list and you have seen it all. Finding a new creature strain is supposed to be exciting. Alas, when that beholder turns out to be nothing more than stronger, weird looking goblin it starts to become boring.

Inside one of dungeons I found a shop. Well, this alone is nothing new. The fact you can ask the owner is it good to have a business deep inside dark dungeon is something innovative. Turns out the dude knows perfectly well who has the most money and where to meet them. Nice surprise.

Another failing of Fame are unimplemented skills, that are nonetheless present in the game. Randomize button will avoid picking these for you. If you are curious you may choose them yourself only to find these really do nothing or close to nothing.

Working skills are divided into two categories: combat and adventuring. Members of the first are used automatically. You just have to fight to raise them. Sadly blunt weapons seems to be exactly like axes but for mace-like implements. There is no incentive to choose any weapon skill over another. Adventuring abilities are much better fleshed out.

Final word of warning: save your game often. You may see danger in the form of tough encounter coming but predicting a crash bug attack is impossible. These happen rarely but can ruin your day if you use the save button sparingly. A lot of roguelike genre enthusiasts treat save as something to do before taking a break. Not advisable in this case. Also, a number of minor bugs may make your play unpleasant or even stall your progress. A saving grace is author usually deals with reported problems very swiftly.

In current stage of development Fame offers solid plot consisting of many quests. Game itself could use a bit more content. Gameplay leaves something to be desired, too. It is a roguelike with strong tendencies towards RPGs. I found it to be fun and worth checking out. Good thing it is actively developed. Plus it comes with up to date manual. How many games give you accurate documentation? Oh, and it has werehedgehogs. Now that is a name worthy of a true monster.

Polish players may want to set “lang” to “pl” in their game.ini file. You can find it in directory where applications usually store user data on your platform.

• Register
• Facebook Event
• Blog about your development
• Roguebasin page
• Advice on how to succeed
• Roguelike Radio’s episodes on 7DRLs
• IRC channel

I guess the evaluation committee will have a fun time after the challenge! ^_^

Contact me if you want to have a subforum for your game inside roguetemple’s forums

Good luck!

You are encour­aged to use http://​7drl​.org for blog­ging your game development.

BileBio is a tiny arcade game with roguelike feel. It started as a 1DRL and had some development later. Every game stage has but one aim which is the same every time: reach the stairs alive. The problem is caused by massive plants growing at astonishing speeds. If something would happen to grow on you – it means death, although BileBio does not explain exactly how you die.

Plants in BileBio are combined of roots, flowers and vines. Each part can spawn more of its kind. Roots are indestructible and can spawn new root in any place at the board. They can also burst producing four flowers around it and lots of vines. Flowers grow new plant parts in chess knight pattern while vines grow into adjacent squares. The last two forms can only grow up two times before decaying and withering. Roots sometimes also wither but it is uncommon event. An active plant segment is highlited in red (beware!); decaying segments are displayed in brown.

An elusive thing hinted at in readme is the nectar. Presumably it is worth many energy points and score but I have to encounter one yet. Having reached up to level 31 with 51440 points of score none were generated. None in all games I played. It might be exceedingly rare or not placed due to some bug. Whatever the reason I never found any nectar.

The game presents player with nine abilities to learn at varying costs. These are organized into three branches in which to acquire the higher ability one must have earlier one as a prerequisite. At any time up to three different skills can be learned. Some abilities center around wall usage. Hiding inside one is possible and grants safety for a time. Jumping over a single wall is very helpful in mazes and also cheap. Dash can be quite boon before the growth becomes dense or in short windows of opportunity right after some parts decay. Attacking a plant can be guarantee of survival in some cases but in other jumping over it may be preferable. Finally one can spawn a wall to hide in. The remaining skills have almost prohibitive cost of attaining them. You need to expend sixty points of energy before you can use any and still need more to benefit or fuel previously learned tricks. These are: extra lives (50 energy each), repellent lasting ten turns (costs 10 energy) and energy tripling from nectar (free, but find any nectar first!).

Obstacle and stair arrangement is chosen from a set of twelve handmade maps. Some have multiple exits and plenty of walls to use wall hop or wall walk. Others are mostly empty relying on growing plant life to create variety. Over longer playthrough lack of procedurally generated levels or at least more prepared maps is weak side of BileBio.

There are two factors that factor into difficulty. How many roots are spawned when the stage begins and how fast the plants of given stage get active. At early stages the plant life may die out if helped a bit but with progressing stages the green infestation gets to expand faster and faster.

A specific weak point of the game is unreliable numeric keypad handling. Orthogonal directions are read fine but diagonals are not recognized on every computer. Vi keys are provided as an alternative. That and requirement to compile the game from sources relegates BileBio into obscurity.

To sum up BileBio is a fun thing to try but it is not going to hold your attention for long.

Here is list of all games that broke hundred votes. This number was chosen with premeditation. Like last year the most voted games include some of questionable roguelikeness.

1659 votes   –   Tales of Maj’Eyal

1445 votes   –   ADOM

730 votes   –   ADOM II

687 votes   –   Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup

605 votes   –   Dwarf Fortress

454 votes   –   FTL

442 votes   –   UnReal World

393 votes   –   DoomRL: Doom, the Roguelike

349 votes   –   Brogue

280 votes   –   Dungeons of Dredmor

180 votes   –   Sword of the Stars: The Pit

175 votes   –   Torchlight 2

173 votes   –   Cataclysm

150 votes   –   The Binding of Isaac

138 votes   –   Caves of Qud

135 votes   –   X@COM

133 votes   –   TomeNET

130 votes   –   Sil

The assortment of games varies greatly in roguelikeness. Some clearly belong under the label. Many embrace the nature but are willing to move away from the genre core. Quite a few stray so much they are really roguelike-likes at best. Even further on the scale is a peculiar group of games. These have so few things common with roguelikes that calling them such has no merit. However, which titles fall into the last category will vary from person to person so it is good that Ascii Dreams poll stays very inclusive.

Since the amount of titles to vote for is so great readers may find themselves not recognizing the majority of them. This is caused mainly by the sheer numbers of games. Add to this the commercial titles which can be truly appreciated only by those who purchased them. Mix in games available exclusively for mobile devices and the result might be irregular vote spread. Is this going to visibly affect the results? Soon, we shall see.

We had exactly one hundred challengers of which sixty two succeeded in time. This sounds good when compared with previous year when only about half entrants returned with something to show. You may have read elsewhere that number of successes was sixty three. This is incorrect. One challenger made an 8DRL which is not bad in itself but does not count as success within the rules.

Another observation is challengers omitted posting to rec.games.roguelike.development USENET newsgroup in several cases. The rules state clearly to be counted you have to post to aforementioned newsgroup when you start programming. Next, if you do not manage to complete the challenge successfully you are expected to post about the failure to the very same newsgroup. Thirty eight challengers failed to return with finished games in the time. Seventeen entrants did not post at all. Another four posted but in other places. That was not as bad though. Finished games are to be posted to rec.games.roguelike.announce newsgroup. Completion of only seventeen titles were proclaimed there which is under one third of all produced games.

The designated places to post are there to make creating various lists like one linked to above possible although it is not the only goal. If one was to adhere strictly to the rules there would be only seventeen legitimate 7DRLs! Postings from 7drl.org and announcements from rgrd were also counted but this makes things harder and unnecessarily delays efforts of the 7DRL committee and can easily cause misinformation to spread. For example exact number of successes this year.

To cope with this there are plans of sign up system. If everything goes well next Seven Day Roguelike Challenge will be better organized.