You can download the mp3 of the podcast, play it in the embedded player below, or you can follow us on iTunes.
Topics discussed in this episode include:
- Brian and Darren's tentacles throughout the roguelike community
- DarkGod's minions, and the community features he has built into Tales of Maj'Eyal
- How most roguelike fans are focused into single and disparate game communities: ToME, ADOM, DCSS, Angband, Nethack, Brogue, DoomRL, Dungeons of Dredmor
- The reasons why many players only ever significantly play one and only one roguelike
- How the ASCII Dreams Roguelike of the Year poll represents community acitivty
- The struggle for small games to get players and visibility
- Sites with general roguelike discussion: RogueTemple, Something Awful Forums roguelike thread, Bay12 Games "Other Games" forum, reddit/r/roguelikes
- The #rgrd IRC channel for live chat with other developers
- The confluence of developers on Twitter, including Darren and Ido
- The TIGSource development forums
- Just how lovely and friendly roguelike communities are and how welcoming they are of new players and respectful they are to each other (yes, that includes you, dear listener!)
- Player generosity in funding, including the ADOM Crowdfund, the DoomRL donation drive, and the regular donations for Dwarf Fortress and Tales of Maj'Eyal
- The role of communities in the formation and evolution of roguelikes, and how all the major roguelikes have been built upon player suggestions
- The benevolent dictator set-up for development, and how this works well for roguelikes, and why this makes it important for big projects to pull fanbases together early on
- Lots of Finns play ADOM, we don't know where the Japanese are hiding, and other such roguelike demographics
- In-person meetings, including LondonIndies, TIGJams, GDC and of course the upcoming International Roguelike Development Conference in Poland 7th June
- The blogosphere (god I hate that word) and RogueBase to keep track of roguelike blogs
- Potential for engagement with the pen and paper RPG communities
- An open question for you: What other major communities do you know of?
Join us next time for a start of our response to this year's epic crop of Seven Day Roguelikes!
Also on the subject of physical meet-ups, for anyone around London I'm hosting a 7DRL Afterparty this Sunday: http://7drl2013.eventbrite.com/#
ReplyDeleteIn other late thoughts, the likes of Twitch.tv livestreamers and Youtube channels, especially TheUberHunter's in the case of the latter, surely help to constitute another evolving pillar of the community on the whole---UberHunter would make for a good guest in this respect and others...plus he already has a quality audio setup. ;)
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ReplyDeleteWow, you're pumping the episodes faster than i can find the time to listen to them! I ended up posting a comment about ep. 64 here by accident, sorry ^_^
ReplyDeleteThank you for your efforts!
I think that you almost did not mention the Usenet community. Strange, I think it is the most important one (even if only for the historical reasons).
ReplyDeleteThere are also some language-specific communities, like http://roguelike.phx.pl/ or http://rlgclub.ru/
You're right, we didn't touch on community history at all. My bad! Usenet is pretty dead, but RGRD can have some interesting threads still, and historically it's a treasure trove of information and discussion.
DeleteI mentioned rgclub.ru, sort of, though I'm pretty sure I spelled them out wrong and I have no idea what's been afoot lately in their doings as the only lively project I know of offhand is Fall from Heaven the RL still at it in the shadows and my Perpetual Hoping Machine that Rayel comes back to life one day.. : /
DeleteHello there!
DeleteFall From Heaven, now Falled would step out of shadow really soon, trust me!
We are at the end of looooong road to total game conversion.
What about rlgclub.ru/forum.
Well, we have half-dozen of promising projects. Couple of them are Russian only, but this is the list of the rest:
Pixel Dungeon for Android. I didn’t play it, because don’t have any android devices, but people really like this. http://pixeldungeon.watabou.ru/
Ignite. Haven’t been released yet, but looks damn promising! I am really jealous about this RL. =)) http://alexbard.org.ua/tag/ignite/
And Wizards Quest. Author planning to release Wizards Quest 2.
With regard to keeping tabs on stuff: I too have a terrible memory! I also use 8 computers and suck at synching bookmarks -- I've lost more valuable links than I've got bookmarked.
ReplyDeleteSo, I just wanted to share a tip that I use for keeping up to date about random news on the web, specifically sporadically updated indie games and seemingly dead roguelikes...
ChangeDetection.com
Say there's a page anywhere on the web that has some obscure game updates on it and the dev has no RSS feed. You put in your email address and the URL on the site, and it sends you an email when the page is updated. They also create a RSS feed for all the notifications you add to your account.
Protip: create a disposable email address, register your change detection account via it, and add a bunch of roguelikes and what not to that account, then simply forget the email address / password and use the RSS feed instead -- i.e. share a public RSS feed made of all the stuff you find interesting.
A large part of community building is just making the information available to the right folks... It's 2013 people, "sharing bookmarks"? hahahaahah... It would be funny if it wasn't so sad :-(
Updated post with the new RogueTemple forums location:
ReplyDeletehttp://forums.roguetemple.com/index.php
Darren, maybe update the link to your Twitter handle since you changed it?
ReplyDeleteGood point, done!
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