Roguelike Games

Roguelike games are the computer game-play offshoots of a 1980 single-player dungeon-crawl, Rogue, Exploring the Dungeons of Doom.

In a big nutshell, a roguelike is a single-player computer role-playing game in which the player character explores a [mostly] randomly generated environment — usually a dungeon. Said environment is filled with monsters, treasure, and mystery. As with most RPGs, the player character's abilities improve with experience and the deployment of powerful artifacts discovered along the way. Games of this genre tend to be turn-based and fairly open-ended with respect to what the player can do at any point in time.

What About the ASCII 'Graphics?'

Some rogue-purists believe that true roguelike games eschew computer graphics in lieu of ASCII representations of game play. I don't really have a horse in this race, but... Bah, I say. It's the game play that matters — and the appellation roguelike is sufficiently vague as to permit a lot of leeway. Personally, I can't really remember if d is a dwarf or a dragon, so some iconic representation seems to go a long way toward helping me escape the meta-game of memorizing the interface.

Roguelikes as Development Projects

Poke nearly any roguelike project and you'll likely find an open-source Internet collaboration. Because roguelikes are typically labors of love rather than profit, they bud in the twilight hours of hobby-time. As such, they are almost always works-in-progress.

• RogueBasin

Some Examples of the Genre

A list far more thorough than any I could hope to muster is the
Google Directory of Roguelike Games. Nevertheless, here are a few roguelikes I've encountered, in no particular order:

• Nethack
  • Faclon's Eye, the isometric front-end for Nethack
  • Vulture's Eye, a more up-to-date fork of Falcon's Eye (it's MIA, currently)
  • SLASH'EM Super Lotsa Added Stuff Hack - Extended Magic
• Angband
  • Tales of Middle Earth
  • Steamband
  • more variants
• ADOM — Ancient Domains of Mystery
• Dungeon Crawl
• Moria
• Lost Labyrinth is an 'action' roguelike written in Blitz Basic
• Scourge — a graphical roguelike with the amusing premise that your characters are has-been heroes employed as dungeon exterminators
• Golem — an unfinished double-project to produce both an isometric and a 3d game set in the same world
• The Tombs — a simple Flash-based roguelike for instant gratification

More

• Accidental Engine — a project devoted to the exploration of random-dungeon generation algorithms
• Roguelike Restoration Project — devoted to bringing legacy Roguelikes (including Rogue!) to modern platforms

Graphics

There are many graphical front-ends out there to give rudimentary visualization for roguelike games, using tiles to replace the ASCII characters favored by some purists. Here are some repositories of such tile resources, of use in building your own roguelike or roguelike art:

• RLTiles
  public domain graphics — the 64x64 set is nice
• Reiner's tilesets
  Lots of fully animated isometric sprites and terrific isometric props. Great stuff.
• TomeTik
  One of several places from which you can obtain David E. Gervais' famous pixel creations as seen in Dungeon Odyssey and countless other shareware/freeware games.