Friday, March 22, 2019

Episode 152: The Kitchen Sink

We discuss the kitchen sink school of game design, with Alexei Pepers and Darren Grey.

You can download the mp3 of the podcast, play it in the embedded player below, or you can follow us on iTunes.



Synopsis & Useful Links
  • Interactions with the sink in Nethack
  • Developing flavour and interest in game content using kitchen sink design 
  • Hand crafted flavour (eg. Dwarf Fortress) vs procedurally generated content
  • 'If statement' technical design of Nethack
  • Tanya Short - Writing Modular Characters for System-Driven Games
  • The modern roguelike design ethos of anti-kitchen sink (eg. Brogue, DoomRL, Hoplite)
  • Kitchen sink complexity vs modern design simplicity
  • Nethack and kitchen sink designs influence on how roguelikes are perceived
  • Supermassive roguelikes - Dwarf Fortress Adventure Mode, GenRogue, Ultima Ratio Regum, Caves of Qud, Catatclysm DDA
  • Games rich in procedural generation and balancing the effective limits (random noise vs flavourful content)
  • Alexei’s favourite kitchen sink mechanic: Nethack’s kitchen sink
  • Darren's favourite kitchen sink mechanic: Choking to death on your own vomit if paralysed whilst sick in ADOM
Related episodes: 84 Nethack, 121 Simulation, 144 AI, 149 Chaos Theory

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