Retrospectives

Every good roguelike deserves a retrospective. So share your wisdom and experience with other developers.

Full Games

Underhall

"Finishing a game teaches you more than starting a game"

UnBrogue

"These successes are testament to the core Brogue design, but also the strengths of the roguelike genre: provided you play to those strengths"

2011 7DRLs

A little anxious when it's dark

"The basic moving @ actually took me a bit more time than I had anticipated, but after that point, the development got much more fun."

Gridfolk

"Herein lies the tale of Grid­folk the failed 7DRL. It is a tale of ambi­tion, time squan­dered, determination, excitement, and defeat."

Mad Mage

"Also, I think the math is fun­da­men­tally wrong, as some of my diag­o­nal cor­ri­dors just stop in the mid­dle of nowhere. But again, it looks cool, so I’ll live with it."

SRL

" So the one thing I really wanted to do was the lighting. [...] Sadly ‘sexy lights’ is just a dev feature now as the majority of machines just couldn’t cope with 400 lights no matter how ‘deferred’ the lighting renderer was."

Twelve Hours

"Less garish colors and a few small animations should help improve the aesthetics."

Wordrogue

"Just from this experience, I learned so much."

2012 7DRLs

I rule, you rule, we all rule old-school Hyrule

"So, have a plan but ditch it when it doesn't work and focus on your strengths since your strong points will make your project a success and your weak points will, at best, be a waste of time, and, at worse, may overshadow your strengths."

2013 7DRLs

Betrayal at House on the Hill

"This actu­ally works out, since in hind­sight I don’t think that Betrayal at House on the Hill’s mechan­ics actu­ally trans­late quite as directly to a Rogue­like as at first I thought."

Dead Grinder

"There are RL engines available, and I could have used them, which is definitely something you want to consider when you’re working under a severe time constraint like 7DRL."

Peli

"It’s got me think­ing about all the other games I can make if I actu­ally Just F*ing Do It."

Pugnacious Wizards

"Like many 7DRL challengers, I added a lot of useless content that wasn't related to my main focuses. [...] Sometimes human nature conspires against us."

Tower Defence Roguelike

"We also had little time on workdays - we have full-time jobs and it’s often not easy to productively brainstorm complex mechanics after coming home tired at evening. Maybe we should pick a more predictable idea..."

Swift Swurd

"...but this would have been hard to play straight and I felt an enor­mous relief when I cut it on day five."

Unwald

"...the only expla­na­tion I have, is that if you want to use entity sys­tem, you really have start to think the way entity sys­tem works (or at least how I believe it should work)."

Tutorials

2011 Java Tutorial

"Each post should have code, narration, references, and details about the author's thought process."