Friday 26 February 2010

Brogue

This is certainly a beautful looking Roguelike.

Seems to have lots of innovative ideas as well. But its Mac only at the moment. Is it any good?

13 comments:

Jeff said...

There's actually a windows port in the works, a guy on the Something Awful forums is working on it.

Here's a link to it, there's a download link in the second post down.

http://rogue-ish.blogspot.com/

Joshua Day said...

I pumped a great many hours into this when it first became available on Linux, and I was happy I did. It's one of the most rogue-like roguelikes I've played -- that is, it's aggressively simple in giving you just a few simple entities to relate with that end up creating complex situations anyway. (There's no corpse-eating, so the food clock is strict, if forgiving.) The AI is a lot of fun to play around with.

Ryan Szrama said...

What a gem! I'm glad you linked to it, as I'm always looking for Roguelikes that play great natively on my Macbook. Some are just impossible without a numpad, but I didn't find that limiting at all.

This game has some innovative gameplay and UI features I haven't seen before. The pathfinding seems to be very well done (I was chasing a monkey for 5 minutes trying to get back my wand before giving up), which enables a killer mouse walk feature. Double click anywhere in the dungeon to walk there. The water features are nice, and there's attention to detail in ambient elements. I also liked the D screen showing discovered items and such.

Finally, I thought I wouldn't like the "graphics" at first, because I'm quite an ASCII minimalist thanks to my start on Rogue / ADoM, but I thought the tiles he chose worked great. Furthermore, the use of light is especially noteworthy, in both LOS and ambient light effects.

All in all a great game, and I can't wait to dig into the source. : )

Ryan Szrama said...

Oh, and I forgot to mention I love the sleeping monsters. Fun to walk up on a napping kobold and knock him over the head before he knows what's coming. ; )

Ryan Szrama said...

Holy crap, this game just keeps getting cooler and cooler. Really, I keep discovering impressive features.

This time, I found that diving into deeper water provides a chance for your items to float away on the current. Eventually they'll end up in the shallows for you to recollect. There are also hidden creatures in the water... beware the shrieking eels. ; )

Even better... I started hallucinating while fighting a toad! I guess I accidentally licked it or something. This caused the monster to change appearance every round (ogre, bat, lich, etc.), although I'm sure it remained as a toad in stats. Every tile also started adopting a random background color within a very tasteful palette of "hallucinogenic" colors. Very cool!

Ryan Szrama said...

Oh my goodness... this game seriously has a lot of awesome surprises. Now I've discovered I can come across "captured" creatures that appear to be caught in some sort of web. If you set them free, they become your allies! This game gets allies right, as far as I'm concerned.

You really have to check this one out.

Dave said...

I have. I can't get it to run very well :-(

Its either running very slow or eating up a lot of processor speed. In either case its extremely unresponsive to keyboarc controls and takes forever to redrawm.

Mind you, I'm running Vista, so that night be the problem.

Its a shame, as I really, really wanted to check it out.

Ryan Szrama said...

Major bummer you can't get it running. I'll have to fiddle with the ports sometime to see how they fare (or translate it into FreeBasic for a cross-platform port). In any event, I just posted a review on my new Indie / Roguelike blog:

http://roguewombat.wordpress.com/2010/03/05/brogue-gets-it-right/

You inspired me. : )

toosmug said...

Hey Dave, I'm the guy who did the Windows Port. It is a bit buggy at the moment. I haven't pinpointed why it runs fine on some machines and terribly on others, but I think it maybe have to do with the graphics card used... I think this is due to the current code's reliance on OpenGL. Could be wrong, but that's what I'm going off of at the moment.

I'll admit right now that I haven't done much work on it lately, as I've been wrapped up in other projects... but switching everything to pure SDL is on my list of things to do.

Dave said...

I look forward to the new version! all the comments here make me really want to play it properly now!

Pender said...

I apologize for the lack of full cross-platform availability. Thanks to the recent appearance of an OS X Xcode implementation of libtcod, I hope to release a new version of Brogue for Windows, Linux and OS X simultaneously -- hopefully within the next week or two, and almost certainly by the end of May.

Dave said...

Fantastic!

Pender said...

Brogue is now fully cross-platform!

http://sites.google.com/site/broguegame/