Since 1980, in-the-know computer gamers have been enthralled by the unpredictable, random, and incredibly deep gameplay of Rogue and those games inspired by it, known to fans as "roguelikes." For decades, this venerable genre was off the radar of most players and developers for a variety of reasons: deceptively simple graphics (often just text characters), high difficulty, and their demand that a player brings more of themselves to the game than your typical AAA title asks. This book covers many of the most prominent titles and explains in great detail what makes them interesting, the ways to get started playing them, the history of the genre, and more. It includes interviews, playthroughs, and hundreds of screenshots. It is a labor of love: if even a fraction of the author’s enthusiasm for these games gets through these pages to you, then you will enjoy it a great deal. Key Features: Playing tips and strategy for newcomers to the genre Core roguelikes Rogue, Angband, NetHack, Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, ADOM, and Brogue The "lost roguelikes" Super Rogue and XRogue, and the early RPG dnd for PLATO systems The Japanese console roguelikes Taloon’s Mystery Dungeon and Shiren the Wanderer Lesser-known but extremely interesting games like Larn, DoomRL, HyperRogue, Incursion, and Dungeon Hack "Rogue-ish" games that blur the edges of the genre, including Spelunky, HyperRogue, ToeJam & Earl, Defense of the Oasis, Out There, and Zelda Randomizer Interviews with such developers as Keith Burgun (100 Rogues and Auro), Rodain Joubert (Desktop Dungeons), Josh Ge (Cogmind), Dr. Thomas Biskup (ADOM), and Robin Bandy (devnull public NetHack tournament) An interview regarding Strange Adventures in Infinite Space Design issues of interest to developers and enthusiasts Author Bio: John Harris has bumped around the Internet for more than 20 years. In addition to writing the columns @Play and Pixel Journeys for GameSetWatch and developer interviews for Gamasutra, he has spoken at Roguelike Celebration. John Harris has a MA in English Literature from Georgia Southern University.

Love is a dangerous game to play. Forced to open the borders of his territory, closed to the outside world since he was a teenager, Alpha Dean Reynolds has now been charged with hosting the prestigious Alpha Games. The event will draw the strongest and bravest shifters from all around, looking to prove they're good enough to become the new alpha. All coming from pack's that hate his own. When a group of dangerous rogue wolves turn up, their pushy leader demanding to compete, he's living his worst nightmare. He doesn't want rogues left to wander his lands freely, and even though she's caught his wolf's attention. Jamie's a distraction he could do without. Especially when she gets hurt and he's not so sure it was an accident. A run-in with a brutish alpha is the last thing Jamie needs when all she wants is to keep her family safe. After making it clear her mere existence is offensive to him, Dean's the last person she expects to come to her rescue, but with her place in the competition at stake, Jamie determined not to give in to the pull she feels. It doesn't matter how much Dean's growing on her, her dream has always been to be the leader of her own pack, and she's not going to let a little thing like love stand in her way. A dual POV, MF wolf shifter romance with enemies to lovers, forced proximity / one bed, fated mates, a dominant alpha male, and lots of spice.

In 1980, computers were instruments of science and mathematics, military secrets and academia. Stern administrators lorded over sterile university laboratories and stressed one point to the wide-eyed students privileged enough to set foot within them: Computers were not toys. Defying authority, hackers seized control of monolithic mainframes to create a new breed of computer game: the roguelike, cryptic and tough-as-nails adventures drawn from text-based symbols instead of state-of-the-art 3D graphics. Despite their visual simplicity, roguelike games captivate thousands of players around the world. From the author of the bestselling Stay Awhile and Listen series, Dungeon Hacks: How NetHack, Angband, and Other Roguelikes Changed the Course of Video Games introduces you to the visionaries behind some of the most popular roguelikes of all time and shows how their creations paved the way for the blockbuster videogames of today—and beyond.

Rogue Stars is a character-based science fiction skirmish wargame, where players command crews of bounty hunters, space pirates, merchants, prospectors, smugglers, mercenary outfits, planetary police and other such shady factions from the fringes of galactic civilisation. Crews can vary in size, typically from four to six, and the character and crew creation systems allow for practically any concept to be built. Detailed environmental rules that include options for flora, fauna, gravity, dangerous terrain and atmosphere, and scenario design rules that ensure that missions are varied and demand adaptation and cunning on the parts of the combatants, make practically any encounter possible. Run contraband tech to rebel fighters on an ocean world while hunted by an alien kill-team or hunt down a research vessel and fight zero-gravity boarding actions in the cold depths of space – whatever you can imagine, you can do.

Shell Games is a cops-and-robbers tale set in a double-crossing world where smugglers fight turf wars over some of the world's strangest marine creatures. Puget Sound sits south of the border between the U.S. and Canada and is home to the magnificent geoduck (pronounced "gooey duck"), the world's largest burrowing clam. Comically proportioned but increasingly fashionable as seafood, the geoduck has been the subject of pranks, TV specials, and gourmet feasts. But this shellfish is so valuable it is also traded for millions of dollars on the black market— a world where outlaw scuba divers dodge cops while using souped-up boats, night-vision goggles, and weighted belts to pluck the succulent treasures from the sea floor. And the greatest dangers come from rival poachers who resort to arson and hit men to eliminate competition and stake their claim in the geoduck market. Detective Ed Volz spent his life chasing elk-antler thieves, bobcat smugglers, and eagle talon poachers. Now he was determined to find the kingpin of the geoduck underworld. He and a team of federal agents set up illegal sales, secretly recorded conversations, and photographed hand-offs from the bushes. For years, they tracked a rogues' gallery of lawbreakers, who eventually led them to the biggest thief of all— a darkly charming con man who called himself the "GeoduckGotti" and who worked both sides of the law. In Shell Games, veteran environmental journalist Craig Welch delves into the wilds of our nation's waters and forests in search of some of America's most unusual criminals and the cops who are on a mission to take them down. This thrilling examination of the international black market for wildlife is filled with butterfly thieves, bear slayers, and shark-trafficking pastors— all part of one of the largest illegal trades in the world.

Making a game can be an intensive process, and if not planned accurately can easily run over budget. The use of procedural generation in game design can help with the intricate and multifarious aspects of game development; thus facilitating cost reduction. This form of development enables games to create their play areas, objects and stories based on a set of rules, rather than relying on the developer to handcraft each element individually. Readers will learn to create randomized maps, weave accidental plotlines, and manage complex systems that are prone to unpredictable behavior. Tanya Short’s and Tarn Adams’ Procedural Generation in Game Design offers a wide collection of chapters from various experts that cover the implementation and enactment of procedural generation in games. Designers from a variety of studios provide concrete examples from their games to illustrate the many facets of this emerging sub-discipline. Key Features: Introduces the differences between static/traditional game design and procedural game design Demonstrates how to solve or avoid common problems with procedural game design in a variety of concrete ways Includes industry leaders’ experiences and lessons from award-winning games World’s finest guide for how to begin thinking about procedural design

Game Design Deep Dive: Roguelikes examines the history and rise of the often-confusing roguelike genre. Despite being more than 30 years old, the roguelike genre remains a mystery to a lot of consumers and developers. Procedural generation, or having the game generate content, has been a cornerstone and point of complexity since its inception. The 2010s saw an explosion of new designs and examples, along with a debate about what a roguelike is. The genre found its way back to mainstream audiences with the award-winning Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls. Since then, roguelikes have revolutionized the way we see and design games. Author and game design critic Joshua Bycer explains the differences between the various roguelike designs and give a detailed blueprint showing what makes the best ones work. The first of its kind talking about the roguelike genre Examines the design and methodology of roguelike games and the different variations A high-level discussion and breakdown of procedural and random content generation Joshua Bycer is a game design critic with more than seven years of experience critically analyzing game design and the industry itself. In that time, through Game-Wisdom, he has interviewed hundreds of game developers and members of the industry about what it means to design video games. He is also a public speaker and presenter at schools and libraries on game design and game development.

Rust is an exciting new programming language combining the power of C with memory safety, fearless concurrency, and productivity boosters - and what better way to learn than by making games. Each chapter in this book presents hands-on, practical projects ranging from "Hello, World" to building a full dungeon crawler game. With this book, you'll learn game development skills applicable to other engines, including Unity and Unreal. Rust is an exciting programming language combining the power of C with memory safety, fearless concurrency, and productivity boosters. With Rust, you have a shiny new playground where your game ideas can flourish. Each chapter in this book presents hands-on, practical projects that take you on a journey from "Hello, World" to building a full dungeon crawler game. Start by setting up Rust and getting comfortable with your development environment. Learn the language basics with practical examples as you make your own version of Flappy Bird. Discover what it takes to randomly generate dungeons and populate them with monsters as you build a complete dungeon crawl game. Run game systems concurrently for high-performance and fast game-play, while retaining the ability to debug your program. Unleash your creativity with magical items, tougher monsters, and intricate dungeon design. Add layered graphics and polish your game with style. What You Need: A computer running Windows 10, Linux, or Mac OS X.A text editor, such as Visual Studio Code.A video card and drivers capable of running OpenGL 3.2.

Go on an adventure and build a roguelike from scratch using JavaScript. With the help of the battle-tested Phaser library, you’ll go through all the steps to build a small, fun, playable web roguelite game. The author will guide you on how to add further features to the game such as populating the game with enemies, adding treasures, and so on. You will acquire technical knowledge about procedural generation and tile-based mapping as well as learn game design skills such as what makes dungeons fun and how to evoke an emotion in your game. Roguelikes are very popular with indie developers because of their focus on gameplay over graphics. You’ll see why they appeal to game designers on a budget and discover that they serve as a good platform to experiment with novel ideas and designs. Along the way, you’ll cover the increasingly popular roguelite genre that provides a hyper casual form of the genre that is approachable and often mobile. After reading this book, you’ll be ready to create your own roguelikes, to dive deep into procedural generation, and also to bring some of the techniques shown here into other genres and game projects. What You Will Learn Make use of procedural generation for dungeons, mazes, monsters, and treasure Pick up skills to use Phaser to build games Implement turn-based mechanics Use tile-based graphics Who This Book Is For Game developers who want to build something fun and who have at least some prior JavaScript programming experience.