Today was the second and last day of this year’s Roguelike Celebration conference. For more information about the conference, see yesterday’s blog post.

What was the best talk today?

Like yesterday, it’s really hard to choose. So I won’t. Here are two of my favorites from today:

Most fun: McMansions of Hell

I think the talk I enjoyed the most was Leigh Alexander’s McMansions of Hell: Roguelikes and Reality TV. The concept of the game is just bonkers. Seriously, read this description:

Reality TV shows are actually constructed realities with their own emergent narrative systems. In this talk, I’ll share how my teammate Brian Bucklew (Caves of Qud) and I are working to translate the language volumes and behaviors of mid-2000s “celebreality” shows set in McMansions, into a generative story environment with Macintosh-inspired B&W graphics.

https://www.roguelike.club/event2023.html

It’s a Murder Mystery Game a la Clue, designed to look (and sound – there are floppy-disk loading noises!) like an early-90s Macintosh shareware adventure game. It takes its setting from reality TV shows, and its game mechanics from Pokemon. Ozzy Osbourne is a “Dark Rock” Pokemon, of course.

Despite all of that retro-wackiness, it’s got a surprisingly-sophisticated “asset pipeline”. All modern roguelike games have a bit of “design by spreadsheet” going on, but this one literally uses a Google Sheets spreadsheet as the source of truth for game data, loading it directly from the sheet on startup. So the designer’s cycle is literally change an entry in a spreadsheet, reload the game in another tab, and immediately see the changes. So cool.

Most awe-inspiring: Generating Riddles for a Generated World

I think the talk with the largest “wow” factor was Mark Johnson’s Generating Riddles for a Generated World:

This talk will examine how riddles that are meaningful, obscure, and solvable, are procedurally generated in Ultima Ratio Regum. I believe this to be a first in roguelikes and in the talk I’m going to outline how the game a) procedurally generates its main categories of cryptic riddles, b) ensures that there is enough information for the player to decipher them, and c) generates and stores unique custom triggers through which they can actually be solved by performing each procedurally generated solution, and d) checks that there are enough ways to figure out the answer to a riddle, i.e. that the riddle is not unusually difficult or the riddle’s key components are too rare or hard to find.

https://www.roguelike.club/event2023.html

For most game designers, writing a set of decent riddles would be challenge enough. But for a roguelike game, you of course want infinite replayability, so that requires infinite riddles. This talk described a fiendishly-complex system whereby support for riddles is “baked into” the random world generation, providing clues scattered all over the (enormous world), ensuring there are enough ways to advance that you can’t get permanently stuck, and with enough variety that you’ll never see the same riddle twice. Really inspiring stuff.

If you’re sad you missed these talks, here’s what to do

Go to https://www.roguelike.club, and sign up for the mailing list. When the talks are available as individual videos on their YouTube channel, you’ll hopefully get an email about that. And you won’t miss next year’s conference!

Also, check out some of the videos from previous years. There’s some great stuff there.

See you next year!

This was an incredibly entertaining and inspiring event. I will definitely be attending next year.