HyperRogue – a non-Euclidean roguelike

(roguetemple.com)

125 points | by bane 2134 days ago

8 comments

  • DonHopkins 2134 days ago
    Like Hunt the Wumpus on steroids (or LSD)!

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunt_the_Wumpus

    >There are twenty rooms, each connecting to three others, arranged like the vertices of a dodecahedron or the faces of an icosahedron (which are identical in layout).

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregory_Yob

    The author of Hunt the Wumpus, Gregory Yob, aka Hara Ra, aka Gregory H. Coresun, passed away in 2005, and had his head frozen at Alcor's Scottsdale cryonic neuropreservation facility, where he now resides among the great COBOL programmers.

    https://medium.com/@donhopkins/cobol-forever-1a49f7d28a39

    • PhasmaFelis 2134 days ago
      > had his head frozen at Alcor's Scottsdale cryonic neuropreservation facility, where he now resides among the great COBOL programmers.

      I'm choosing to believe that Alcor has a Hall of Frozen Heads of Great COBOL Programmers.

      • wjnc 2134 days ago
        Those would be the all caps rooms (COBOL, FORTAN, LISP).
    • nkozyra 2134 days ago
      This was the first game I played as a small child and it was far too frighting for what it was.
  • kqr2 2134 days ago
    On October 6-7 in SF, there will also be the 2018 Roguelike Celebration:

    https://roguelike.club/

    Tickets: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/roguelike-celebration-2018-tick...

  • dang 2134 days ago
    • zenorogue 2134 days ago
      But still in development :) Tons of new lands, game modes, and display modes added since then.
  • gabcoh 2134 days ago
    http://elevr.com/portfolio/hyperbolic-vr/

    Another interactive exploration of the hyperbolic plane. This one is less a game than a interactive visualization buy still cool.

  • nyolfen 2134 days ago
    i followed the roguelike scene a bit when i was younger but i've kind of stopped paying attention to it since i no longer as much free time for hobbies.

    what are the coolest roguelikes from the last ~5 years?

    • TeMPOraL 2134 days ago
      Cataclysm: DDA is a great, open source roguelike zombie apocalypse survival game. Featuring open world instead of dungeons, and absurdly large number of crafting recipes.
    • _phaq 2134 days ago
      I'm really enjoying Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup at the moment. Especially as a game for when I don't actually have time.

      It takes like two seconds to go from desktop to in-game, continuing your previous run, and saving your progress + closing is just as quick, so I often just launch the game when I have to wait a minute for something to finish.

      It's also really good at keeping up tension. It rarely feels too easy, if it does and you start playing careless, that's when it gets you. It also rarely feels too hard, it's almost always your fault when you lose.

      And it has a few mechanics to cut out the boring parts, like auto-explore which explores the dungeon until it finds an item, enemy or something else of interest. Or auto-combat which automatically walks up to enemies in sight and whacks them, however is entirely stupid at it, so it's only suitable for encounters where you see no risk of dying.

      And it has a crapton of content, and is really good at combining this content to form all kinds of interesting situations.

      https://crawl.develz.org/

    • avereveard 2134 days ago
      Dwar Fortress adventure mode is pretty enjoyable if you get past the hardcore interface

      Adom just got a large rewamp and polish update, tome has a lot more questlimes, but of really new games are few: cogmind is one, doom rl depending on when you left off and for last there’s this thing I cannot wrap my head around for how amazing it is, even if it pushes ascii game boundaries all the way to the other side https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9YdLPg3ncY

      • nyolfen 2134 days ago
        doomrl graphical release is probably the last thing i took a big dip into. thanks for the recs! just got cogmind.
    • m12k 2134 days ago
      Slay the Spire does a great job of fusing roguelike and deck building game
      • shoo 2134 days ago
        Slay the spire is fantastic and the devs are still layering on content and features. if you've ever played and enjoyed a deck-builder (e.g. https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/36218/dominion ) and also like roguelikes you'll probably really get a kick out of it.
    • indy 2134 days ago
      Both Cogmind and Caves of Qud are really good
    • imtringued 2134 days ago
      Elona+ The caveat is that it doesn't have permadeath which leads to the usual grindyness associated with normal RPGs. On the other hand it also means that you can easily spend 200 hours on a single character.
    • imh 2134 days ago
      Rogue Legacy was fun.
      • reificator 2134 days ago
        Progression beyond unlocking new ways to play the game (such as in FTL) almost immediately kills any interest I have in a roguelike/roguelite. Or really most genres that it's infested.

        What happened in the last 10 years that every game now needs to drip feed constant rewards rather than just being fun enough that you come back to play it?

        IMO the beauty of a roguelike is its impermanence. You pick it up, play for awhile, and if you lose the slate is wiped clean for next time.

    • myhf 2134 days ago
      Frog Fractions 2
      • reificator 2132 days ago
        Death is of no consequence in that game though, so I wouldn't consider it a roguelike.

        The mechanics are more important than the graphics when categorizing roguelikes IMO.

        That said, it is pretty fun. The original is even better though: http://twinbeard.com/frog-fractions/

    • cturner 2134 days ago
      Smart Kobold is non-euclidean, and a compelling play. Fidel is worth a look also.
      • zenorogue 2134 days ago
        Smart Kobold (and other games by Jeff Lait, such as Vicious Orcs) have interesting, weird geometry indeed, but it is still "flat". A bunch of Euclidean square grids glued together. HyperRogue uses actual hyperbolic geometry, which is very different.
  • TickleSteve 2134 days ago
    non-euclidean?? or is this something different?
    • FreeFull 2134 days ago
      It's meant to be non-Euclidean, it was just misspelled and for some reason mods haven't fixed it.
      • arvinsim 2134 days ago
        Maybe part of an inside joke?
  • michaelmior 2134 days ago
    Title should be "non-Euclidean"
    • dang 1180 days ago
      Fixed now. Thanks!
    • crtasm 2134 days ago
      Ah shame, I wondered if it was a new term (and type of confusing game environment) for me to learn about.
    • Abekkus 2134 days ago
      non-euclidean is an ill-fitting name, It's just extra dimensional, still within euclidean constraints, and generally not even making full use of a fourth dimension,

      These games only explore allowing overlapping 3-dimensional spaces with clearly defined boundaries between those overlapping 3D spaces.

      • shadowmint 2134 days ago
        This is true of many ‘non euclidean renderers’ but in this case it is actually using a hyperbolic plane as the playing field.

        Higher dimensionality is largely irrelevant to whether the geometry is euclidean or not.

        • LoSboccacc 2134 days ago
          Most games set on a globe are, like, say, planetary annihilation.
          • shadowmint 2134 days ago
            Yes, but we're all basically familiar with elliptic geometry, and as a result it's not terribly interesting or surprising.

            Hyperbolic geometry, on the other hand, is alien to most people, (especially fractal like the projections into 2d and 3d), so when people wave their hands and say 'non-Eyclidean geometry!', that's what they usually actually mean.

            Try actually watching some of the hyper-rogue gameplay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lX5eCfRSCKY

            I assure you, it's more interesting as a geometric visualisation than planetary annihilation is.

            More technical reading here: https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/1407550/what-hyperb...

            • LoSboccacc 2134 days ago
              Yeah it’s nice but at his core non-euclidean geometry is just about the parallels axiom. The dimensional aspect is what makes this game interesting, not the euclidean aspect.
      • bencoder 2134 days ago
        I believe op was just referring to the hn title which has a 'y' in place of the 'u'. The original URL does not use that spelling
        • zenorogue 2134 days ago
          Funnily, the title of the HackerNews post about HyperRogue in 2015 was "non-Euclinean roguelike". But it got fixed later.
          • tigerlily 2134 days ago
            Hi Zeno! I love your work on IVAN3D, and Necklace of the Eye!
  • Null-Set 2134 days ago
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