Kharne is the name of a Delphi roguelike which was being developed a very long time ago. I stumbled uppon it in my so called ‘roguelike collector age’, which was like 5 years ago.

That was the past, I am relieved and excited to see its developer, known as the Crowley’s Cat, has decided to give the game a second shot (after a LONG time), and is working on a much evolved and mature version of his game! he has also set up an interesting blog in which its features are being discussed!

While the newest version is being developed, you cant still check out the latest version of Old Kharne, downloadable from his blogsite!

Further info at http://kharne-rl.blogspot.com/

I keep contact from time to time with european roguelike developer Mingos, whom has just recently launched a googlepage about his project: Umbrarum Regnum; while the project is still under development, it is shaping along nicely!

UR is powered by the evergrowing in popularity Jice’s libtcod library and its main influence seems to be ADoM; the project is ambitious but is on the right path to the release.

More info at http://dominikmarczuk.googlepages.com/

Roguetemple presents you a small and comprehensive list of several factors for evaluating the roguelikeness of a game; those may help you get an idea of what a roguelike is,

High Value Factors

Random Environment Generation

The game world and its contents are mostly procedurally generated with each game.

Permafailure (including Permadeath)

You must pay for your mistakes and choices, sometimes at the cost of life. Restoring games is discouraged and only provided to allow continuing split games.

Turn Based Interaction

All entities in the game world are queued in an endless loop and get their independant discrete turn to act.

Single command set

You can access all game commands from any place into the game. There are no artificial restrictions on what actions are available in a given game situation

Freedom

Your game is not directly enrouted into a linear progression. You get to choose what you want to do, how and when

Middle Value Factors

Discovery mechanics

You must research or find out the nature and usages of the items into the world.

Single player

You control a lone character

Lots of content

There are lots of monsters, items, locations.

Complex non-trivial world and object interactions

Items have non-trivial usages, you can do some things which may not be obvious for the item nature.

Low Value Factors

High ramped difficulty

The game gets hard very quick and you are very unlikely to win until you have acquired enough experience.

Monsters are players

The nature of the monsters is similar to the player, they can have equipment, player-like stats, artificial intelligence and are subject to the same world rules.

Character-based display

The player interacts with the world via a user interface based on character symbols that represent UI artifacts and entities into the world.

Hack and Slash

Gameplay involves around killing things and acquiring treasure

TSL 0.9

There’s honestly not a lot to say about this release. It isn’t very polished and the new features aren’t really useful yet - I’m posting mostly to let people know I’m still alive and at least some of the flaws exposed in 0.8 have been fixed.

Warlocks Mountain 0.3.2

As it would happen I was looking at my old source files and came across an old binary for WM. I was stunned that this was a previously unreleased version with a few new features that I had forgotten about.

MageGuild v0.6

Hey, all. Another small step for MageGuild: v0.6.

Zomband 7DRL Merge

I have spent some extra time combining the classic Zomband with the 7DRL expansion, creating one mostly-polished game.

The multicharacter roguelike GUILD is now being hosted at roguetemple. Check out its latest version and send Antoine your comments! http://www.roguetemple.com/guild/

Independant software firm Lukos Software has released the first beta of their .Net MageGuild (v0.5) , looks pretty interesting so far. Note that if you are running windows you will most likely not need to download anything to run it.

Take on the role of a skilled and daring apprentice of the Nahelan Mage Guild. Delve through countless dark halls, gathering troves of hidden knowledge and gaining power; battle hordes of deadly enemies that will test the limits of your power and wit; and if you’re very lucky and very skilled, emerge into the light of day again, a full master in the Mage Guild. Play MageGuild.

POWDER (a.k.a. POWDAH) versions 103 and 104 are out now.

The long sought after fire arrows are finally present, self-poly into an iron golem has been further nerfed, and many bugs fixed. Most notable of the bug fixes is one to correct the gender assignment of dungeon citizens.

Atinar - Valley of Misery, a promising RPG/Roguelike in the works, has a new blog. Although no release is yet available, developer has promised to show off advancements to the public via his blog

Although easy to play, and enjoyable even during a coffee break, it has enough deep and dynamic content as to be able to always show something new and interesting for the player.

MegamanRL version 0.0.8 has been released by Slashie.net, featuring bugfixes and enhancing customization. You can now fully create your own levels and configure your enemies AI!

Cracks and Crevices 0.4

OK, I’ve sat on the release long enough. I’m sure some basic bug will pop up but what the hey.

GearHead2 v0.501

A new version of GearHead2, the robot-pimping giant-monster-fighting post-apocalyptic pop-singing roguelike, has just been uploaded to SourceForge.

Legerdemain 0.9.5

Legerdemain: the epic roguelike/IF/RPG hybrid that a couple of people are talking about!

Now with only half the crashes!

German NetHack-De 3.4.2-20080309a

NetHack-de is an attempt at a German translation of NetHack.

Sewerjacks 0.8.6d

You can finally unlock all races by defeating the races boss. Defeating the game will give you more classes for the race you were playing.

Angband 3.0.9b

Angband 3.0.9b is a bugfix version of 3.0.9.

Mines of Elderlore 1.0 beta 4 is released

I have continued developing it after the initial 7DRL release, adding graphics, balancing gameplay, and now release 1.0 beta 4 is there.

Unangband 0.6.2 Beta Release 2

This probably the last release with so big changes before 0.6.2 gold. Among other things, options’ names are changed, so some of your old pref files may not work as expected (old option names are ignored).

DoomRL Windows Installer

ADDITIONAL FEATURES
- confirm overwrite of .bat and .ini files during update
- enable or disable deletion of doom.prc, player.dat and score.dat during update
- configuration section in the Windows start menu for game settings, music and sound
- detection if the game is running
- Vista SP1 ready

Incursion 0.6.5B

There are new Win32 and Linux versions of Incursion up on the website. The bug list, down for several days, is now fixed. I’m going to be refactoring the Encounter Gen code next, so no updates (other than hopefully a Mac port of 0.6.5B) for a little while.

Ok, this year we had 23 challengers, 9 winners, 6 failures and 8 runaways. Congratulations to all the winners and better luck next year for the rest!

Next week will be the official 7DRL Playing week, as was the last year… just to play and review these 7DRLs!

Without further ado, here you have the list of official winners!

chrysalis by sinoth - Completed: http://sinoth.net/chrysalis.zip

The goal is to destroy the 10 bases scattered all over the world. You do so by killing the base power core ‘B’ that is somewhere inside each base. You can press ‘r’ to turn on base radar that points you to where the remaining bases are.

Countryside Zomband by zooptek - Completed: http://www.zooptek.net/drupal/?q=node/8

Player enters suburbs when they escape the city. Suburbs have a different random map generation.

Fatherhood by Jeff Lait - Completed: http://www.zincland.com/7drl/fatherhood

As the name suggests, in Fatherhood you play the role of a father who has an important task to perform. That task is the stopping of the flood waters (or on some maps, the fires) that threaten to wash away his homeland. The tension is that you have another implicity task: to be a good father. Your three children are also in the world, running about, either helping or hindering as is their whim.

TrapRogue by Nate - Completed: http://test.clockwatch.info/nate879/TrapRogue.zip

Your goal is to find the Axe of Verwiz deep in the dungeon and evade traps.

MegamanRL by Slash - Completed: http://slashie.net/megamanRL

Use z to jump, x to fire, s to setup

Dungeon Climb by Heck Ruler - Completed: http://sourceforge.net/projects/dungeonclimb/

You have been cast down into a chasm and left for dead. Climb out before you starve to death. Features: An opening movie, 3D map, line of sight, climbing, jumping, falling, falling damage, hunger, food. It’s almost fun!

Numbers by Robson - Completed: http://iceyboard.no-ip.org/projects/numbers/

Numbers is an educational roguelike, created in seven days. It is designed to test and improve your basic maths skills.

Tribe by Kadwell - Completed: http://irrasjonal.net:8080/7drl/tribe/

Deadline in ten minutes, so I’ll be brief. I have completed my 7DRL project about leading a tribe of goblins in defending against an entirely unprovoked attack by a seemingly endless series of so-called “heroes”. It has a strong emphasis on using NPCs to your advantage.

TimeRogue by GreyKnight - Completed: http://greyfire.org/?p=timerogue

Rogue with time-travel, basically

Congratulations again!

6 more brave roguedevs have accepted the 7DRL challenge!

Space Marine type RL by Corremn

You are a mercenary marine that recruits other mercs and take on bad stuff and shit.

“thats a zergling, Leister, smaller type of Zerg…, they wouldn’t be out this far, unless … aww shit!’

A Knight in the Dungeon by Gerry Quinn

The main character operates like a chess piece of sorts - he probably has several lives and normally moves like a king in chess, killing pieces he moves onto. Items or skills may award him special moves or attacks.

ArabiaRL by Andy Pymont

You will play Aladdin, aiming to escape the depths of the cave after being left there by the vizier who has just run off with your lamp, your genie and your girl.

Countryside Zomband by zooptek

The goal is not to update or fix the existing Zomband, but to make a whole new expansion for it. In original Zomband, the goal was to escape the city. My work for the 7DRL challenge will be what happens after your character escapes the city. Although both are in the same executable, the new region your character enters after escaping the city will have all new level generation, tiles, items, monsters, and player abilities.

1DRL by Zaratustra

Started development.

Gang City Brawler by Timothy R. Dean et all

The inspiration comes mostly from 80’s arcade brawler games and to a lesser extent the movies about the punk kids of that time. The overall objective of the game is to eradicate all the gangs in the city by taking out the gang leaders using bare fists, street weapons and even the environment itself as a weapon.

Following the 7DRL phenomenon pre 7DRL challenge (6 projects), 11 developers (for now) have decided to jump into the challenge! this, is their history.

RogueTCG (or possibly RoguEMon!) by Lochok

My goal is to write the RogueTCG (Trading card game) - in which the goal will be to use your RoguEMon cards (your RoguEMen as it were) to battle your way through the foyer, sales and administration to confront the CEO to have your custom card produced.

Simple Flash Rogue by failRate

I intend to make a super-simple Rogue-like in Flash that will save game state both locallly and on a remote server, so I can play at home or away. The latest version will always be found at http://failrate.com/b/7DRL.html

Return to Sorsaria by Krice

This game is set in alternative reality where The Avatar died, sadly. The player jumps into Sosaria through moon gate and finds a world full of hostile creatures.

TrapRogue by Nate

You’ll have to get an artifact from the dungeon and evade lots of traps. I’ll let you be surprised about the rest :)

Rogue Batallion by Ed Kolis

My concept is “Rogue Battalion” - it’s a roguelike in a modern warfare setting, where “Captain @” is the commander of an army battalion. The main unique feature is that of Vehicles

Faterhood by Jeff Lait

The name of the game is “Fatherhood”

SomethingWithZombies by Mr. Red Sunshine

Don’t yet know the goal or the proper Theme. Something with Zombies, biological weapons, a mysterious corporation and an accident. Zombies don’t require much ai ;-)

chrysalis by sinoth

The general game concept is that you start as a weak insect-like creature (I invision it as a zergling (COPYRIGHT BLIZZARD)) and you must destroy the military bases of humans that have invaded your planet.

Gameplay will revolve around destroying fortified bases randomly scattered on a generated world. There will be no dungeon levels up and down, but instead one large map that you can traverse seamlessly.

Unnamed by chukGren

Basically, it will be a forced fight to the death between some number of combatants in a play area that gets smaller as time elapses. The catch is that the combatants all knew each other beforehand so some of them are reluctant to attack others… and they will only start doing so past some psychological tipping point (time, people attacking them, damage, etc).

Undisclosed by Slash

I have started coding my roguelike.
Actually, I havent… but the time is running already, isnt it? :)

Unnamed by Nick Beam

I started a couple hours ago. It’s loosely based in the Magi-Nation universe, a trading card game and game boy game from ~2001. I’m using my Tarn (http://github.com/jdp/tarn) engine to build it. I’m still not sure about the exact story or point of the game, but I’m sure it’ll come to me by the time I finish the subsystems. :<

So, get ready for it if you are participating.

Dont remember what a 7DRL is, had a potion of erase memory recently? go to roguetemple’s 7DRL shrine, which will be populated by roguelikes very soon :)