I was unfamiliar with the term roguelike. For those in the same boat, a definition from Wikipedia:
"Roguelike is a subgenre of role-playing video game characterized by a dungeon crawl through procedurally generated levels, turn-based gameplay, tile-based graphics, and permanent death of the player character. Most roguelikes are based on a high fantasy narrative, reflecting their influence from tabletop role playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons".
God that game was so hard. Maybe I’m a wimp about rogue likes in general though. I enjoy stuff like XCOM where it’s a puzzle you can reason your way through and use save states to re-try when you realize your plan or your execution of the plan is insufficient for the task. There are random elements, but it’s mostly a puzzle.
> Maybe I’m a wimp about rogue likes in general though
That really is a core element of roguelikes- some playthroughs, you're just going to get screwed by the random number generator- hence the saying "pray to RNGesus". And when you die, you start over- no fixing, no recovery.
With those precepts in mind, FTL is a pretty fair game. I've beaten the mothership a few times in vanilla FTL, and each time it was a combination of making good tactical decisions, and getting one of the several equipment configurations that I knew how to capitalize on. There's no shame in bailing early on a run where you know you're not going to get a useable set of equipment.
The only way I know to "cheat" (and one I don't feel guilty doing) is to discuss strategies among a community of people who have also been experimenting with different approaches. That's how I learned that teleporters and mantis raiders are so OP.
The thing most players do is try to race for the end, which makes sense -- you are being constantly pursued! Counterintuitively, you want to go as slowly as possible to maximize the amount of rewards you receive. The more planets you visit in a system, the more rewards you get, and the stronger you are when you hit the mothership.
That was a key misunderstanding I had that let me make significant progress once I figured it out. That... and liberal use of the spacebar to pause.
The thing about roguelikes is that they’re turn-based, while FTL requires some micromanagement skills being closer to real-time strategies. You can still pause of course, but I’ve seen some Twitch streamers make no-pause runs on hard difficulty, which is abolutely insane.
These games are frequently labeled as "roguelike", but also are referred to as "roguelike-like", "rogue-lite", or "procedural death labyrinths" to distinguish them from the more traditional roguelike.
Yeah, it seemed like sometime around when Spelunky came out was when a bunch of games (generally indie games) started coming out that were inspired by certain elements of roguelikes: procedural everything, generally designed to be played through in one sitting, "winning" isn't really the goal but rather seeing how far you can get and enjoying what happens along the way, etc.
For the longest time game journalists and people on game forums were careful to refer to these games as "rogue-lite", etc., but in recent years it's become more common to just call them roguelikes as well, even though they don't play anything like Rogue/Angband/Nethack/etc. That's fine by me, it feels more like a natural evolution of the terminology than people using the wrong words for things.
It made sense for me at the time, since I'm not a programmer and it offered an easy to use library. But if I were to start again I would use something like BearLibterminal since it supports ttf fonts, multi-tile characters, etc.
Happy to answer questions about the game and its sequel here. I haven't worked on the original for some time and it's still pretty rough around the edges, but it's hopefully fun.
I remember playing this way back when, after finding it when looking around for fun open source games. I still think I have a portable copy in my Google Drive somewhere.
I happened to read about Patton's Best and thought it was a really interesting solo game. I really liked the idea of following a small team through a number of days of a campaign, although this was something that was handled very simply in the original board game. But then I thought, couldn't this be done really well in a computer game? I had programmed a couple unfinished games in the past, and was looking for a project that I could bring to completion.
Also, I simply thought that this was something that ought to exist, so I went ahead and created it.
The first version was basically an attempt to translate the board game experience into a complter game, and since I'm neither an artist nor a programmer, the roguelike style suited me very well - no graphics, and an emphasis on the mechanics of the game. The sequel has had a number of false starts, but recently I thjink that I've been making good progress, and it will hopefully end up fixing many of the problems with the original game, and extend it into new territory.
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[ 1.2 ms ] story [ 55.6 ms ] thread"Roguelike is a subgenre of role-playing video game characterized by a dungeon crawl through procedurally generated levels, turn-based gameplay, tile-based graphics, and permanent death of the player character. Most roguelikes are based on a high fantasy narrative, reflecting their influence from tabletop role playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons".
FTL was just confusing, hopeless death for me.
That really is a core element of roguelikes- some playthroughs, you're just going to get screwed by the random number generator- hence the saying "pray to RNGesus". And when you die, you start over- no fixing, no recovery.
With those precepts in mind, FTL is a pretty fair game. I've beaten the mothership a few times in vanilla FTL, and each time it was a combination of making good tactical decisions, and getting one of the several equipment configurations that I knew how to capitalize on. There's no shame in bailing early on a run where you know you're not going to get a useable set of equipment.
The only way I know to "cheat" (and one I don't feel guilty doing) is to discuss strategies among a community of people who have also been experimenting with different approaches. That's how I learned that teleporters and mantis raiders are so OP.
That was a key misunderstanding I had that let me make significant progress once I figured it out. That... and liberal use of the spacebar to pause.
The thing about roguelikes is that they’re turn-based, while FTL requires some micromanagement skills being closer to real-time strategies. You can still pause of course, but I’ve seen some Twitch streamers make no-pause runs on hard difficulty, which is abolutely insane.
Regardless, a very original game.
/ Wikipedia
For the longest time game journalists and people on game forums were careful to refer to these games as "rogue-lite", etc., but in recent years it's become more common to just call them roguelikes as well, even though they don't play anything like Rogue/Angband/Nethack/etc. That's fine by me, it feels more like a natural evolution of the terminology than people using the wrong words for things.
I remember playing this way back when, after finding it when looking around for fun open source games. I still think I have a portable copy in my Google Drive somewhere.
Also, I simply thought that this was something that ought to exist, so I went ahead and created it.
The first version was basically an attempt to translate the board game experience into a complter game, and since I'm neither an artist nor a programmer, the roguelike style suited me very well - no graphics, and an emphasis on the mechanics of the game. The sequel has had a number of false starts, but recently I thjink that I've been making good progress, and it will hopefully end up fixing many of the problems with the original game, and extend it into new territory.