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"

Pugnacious Wizards 2

"It's a mess but I tested a hypothesis and learned my lesson: don't go overboard with separating the objects and their display."

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)."

Stabby

"Choosing an unorthodox feature may take up more time than just implementing it directly took."

2014 7DRLs

ElvinRL

"Oddly enough, the shortcomings of ElvinRL are what have taught me the most about making an RL game."

Tutorials

2011 Java Tutorial

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

Roguelike Radio Episodes

IRDC 2012 Retrospective

2013 Retrospective