He thinks that he got the same grade curve at a 60 that he does at an 80, maybe a bit more spread out, but with the same people on top and the same ability for him to assign letter grades. One of my undergraduate CS professors (Stephen Rudich at Carnegie Mellon) told us that he used to aim his exams to have a median of about 60, but now he aims them to have a median of about 80. Even *without* the game guaranteeing that there were enough keys for a perfect player to open every door. So, if Binding of Isaac let you return to previous levels (and maybe gave you a bit of a hint about which doors were likely to contain which types of content), it would be a lot different. But there will probably be another source of fire somewhere later in the dungeon, and at that point I'll have the option of going back for it. If I drink that potion too early, I might not be able to open the door right now.

In contrast, Brogue might generate a room locked by a burnable barrier, and then place a potion of incineration somewhere accessible on the level. So if you can't open a locked door right now, you can never come back and unlock it. One of the big things about Binding of Isaac's system, at least for me, is that you can't return to levels. I don't think that whether it generates enough keys is the main difference between Binding of Isaac and Brogue. and seemingly easier to go in a wrong direction. Smartphone roguelikes: I found it annoying that the finger obscured the way I was going in HyperRogue, and implemented an experimental 'reverse movement' option where you push your character from behind. HyperRogue displayed a similar graph in its early stages and it also looked very spiderweb like.įarming: maybe the showcased game was novel, but it is also very nice to farm herbs in ADOM. It is possible to have a more traditional look there (each dungeon point belongs to the vertex which is closest to it, and we draw edges on the boundaries). Spiderlikeness of this graph-based dungeon: I think it looks like a spider web only because possible locations are shown as dots, and possible movements as edges. I would call Darren's dream 'smart random' or something like that. We usually don't want this in roguelikes.

Hydra Slayer has a boss level which looks like the Mandelbrot set, and it looks always the same. The word 'procedural' means generated by an algorithm, and in roguelikes, 'random' is much more important than 'procedural'. Procedural content vs random content: I think Darren is wrong here. I also balance ranged and melee but not by making their damage equivalent - ranged weapons are much more deadly, but characters attacked in melee can't then shoot or use any other item, giving melee a distinct role in tying up dangerous opponents. In particular the point about firing unrealistically quickly: in AS.T.Ro each character can move up to (typically) four spaces per 'turn' - this effectively reduces the rate of fire and consequently makes combat a bit more tactical and dynamic since the cost of repositioning is much less. I missed the opportunity for some gratuitous self-promotion during the discussion about ranged mechanics, since AS.T.Ro () emphasises ranged combat and addresses some of the issues we talked about. It's a shame that my internet connection kept cutting out during the recording (if it seems like I've disappeared in some parts of the podcast it's sometimes because I have). Perhaps next time I'll stop trying to be a smartarse and just use powerpoint like everybdy else. If anybody's interested my 'slides' are here: The URL in Darren's link doesn't seem to actually go to my presentation.

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