These are the vibes I got from the talks from Day 1 of Roguelike Celebration 2023, as well as discussions in break-out rooms and unconferencing. Entirely subjective to my experience.
Fictions of Infinity in Geological Finitudes by Linas Gabrielaitis
Evocative, beautiful, and vague. Dungeons and geology both deal in depth and death. Endless layers of a Dwarf Fortress, the earth's crust, and Borges' infiniite "Library of Babel" Characters who die in dungeons float back to the surface, like oil (made of dead animals) floats up through layers of rock. Drilling down through space takes us back through time. Deep space. Deep time.
Exploring Pacifist Roguelikes by Ludipe
What exactly does "non-violent" mean?
Breakout session with Ludipe
We talked about various way to be non-violent. Court intrigue. Disaster first-response. Surviving in the wilderness. (Violent for animals and fish that get caught and eaten!) Certified vegan games? Games where violence happens, but the player can't be violent. Maybe even something that teaches pacifism and de-escalation: an intentionally didactic game. Some people insist that conflict is necessary to be interesting, but I have enough conflict in real life. I'd like to visit a world where I don't have to struggle.
Another Stupid Date: Love Island as a Roguelike by Florence Smith Nicholls
I don't know about reality TV. Sounds wild. Getting voted out is perma-death. Every episode is a new run. Perceptual uniqueness is key to a character's popularity. Changes and surprises are what keep people coming back. Love to see how far afield a talk can go and still be roguelike-adjacent.
Hunting the Asphynx: Roguelikes, Provenance, and You by Kes
A mystery and a treasure hunt. Sifting through evidence, tracking down and interviewing witnesses, all to find a fictional book by a non-existent author. Think about the stories being lost, the data being deleted, history being forgotten.
Generating Procedures: Rule and System Generation for Roguelikes by Mike Cook
It's proc-gen darling Mike Cook! Hey, Mike! He's here with hot takes, like "doors are bad!"
Generating items and levels for your game is easy mode. Try generating your rules and systems too!
Code is just text! Write self-modifying code! I'm sure nothing terrible will happen.
Breakout session with Kes
I complained about the state of media preservation. We're not just losing metadata about Nethack forks, we're losing movies and video games. The original Dark Souls isn't on Steam anymore! Video games are even more at risk than movies, because hard drives fail a lot faster than strips of film.
Breakout session with Mike Cook
After running out of things to complain about in the other breakout room, I switched to this one, Look, I didn't take good notes because I thought I was saving a transcript of the chat. Turns out I wasn't, so I don't have a record of what happened. (Wow, that's the topic of the previous breakout session! It's already happening!) I do remember that this breakout session had a party vibe.
The Data Science of Roguelikes by Scott Burger
sickos.jps YES!! APIs and scraping webpages and building big spreadsheets! I do this stuff for fun! Steam has an API (unlike itch,io and App Stores for phones!) so he downloaded a bunch of data about games with roguelike-related tags and made some beautiful graphs.
In Defense of Hand-Crafted Sudoku by Nat Alison
I looked at someone playing Sudoku and thought "That seems like homework for a Data Structures class." Then I tried to write a Sudoku generator and found it was not trivial as I assumed. Nat explains that there are generators churning out hundreds of Sudoku puzzles for bored people, but there's also a thriving community of people who make their own puzzles with a dizzying variety of extra rules and variations. These hand-crafted Sudoku puzzles are made with the assistance of automated tools, which seems like a paradox. I love discovering new things that people can do! Who knew? Nat says that even a puzzle is communication between creator and audience, so the human touch is vital.
Breakout session with Scott Burger
Fellow attendee xoxomonstergirl revealed a huge spreadsheet calculating the Vampire-survivor-ness of various Vampire-Survivor-Likes. A stupendous effort! Scores of factors in dozens of categories. Tested against Vampire Survivor (for max score) and Call of Duty 2 (for a low score) I thought my 45-column spreadsheet for movies was overkill, but this is on another level! I'm so impressed. How many turbo-nerds (affectionate) like us are out there, compiling detailed information about extremely niche subjects? How can such data be shared with the people who can benefit from it? Who even are those people?
Scoped-down design: Making a tiny roguelike by Eric Billingsley
Billingsley is telling me smart things about how carefully prune a minimal sets of mechanics, but I'm just shocked at how good his PICO-8 roguelike looks. When he talks about removing stairs from the game, I realize why the goal of the game is finding the Wings of Yendor instead of the tradional Amulet. Wings are the only way to go back up! That's elegance!
Touching Grass & Taking Names: Tuning the Blaseball Name Generator by Elliot Trinidad
The more I hear about Blaseball, the more I regret missing Blaseball. A weird game for a weird time with powerful community.
Audible Geometry: Coordinate Systems as a Resource for Music Generation by Paul Hembree
Hembree talks like The Architect from The Matrix Reloaded. He's not showing off. He wants to be very precise, and these big words mean exactly what he wants to say. I'm bad at listening to music and worse at understanding it, but hearing the Norfair theme from Super Metroid with the sheet music synchronized with a visualization of the set of available notes moving through a series of 3-dimensional cubes. ?!?! I don't know what happened but it was amazing. I'm glad there are people out there who understand this stuff.
Why Dynamic Content Selection Is Hard by Jurie Horneman
A very practical talk. How can I be sure that my cool procedural generator actually produces useful artifacts? How can I be sure that it won't produce something that makes the game unwinnable? That's a hard question with bespoke answers. How can I be sure the artifacts generated are good and fun and high-quality? That's even harder because you can't prove what any of those words mean. Use the vibes, and get vibe checks from your playtesters. Game-making is hard, yo!
Unconferencing
This is where the Zoom calls are! I remembered video chatting with people in previous years, but the breakout sessions were all text-based. I started in the "non-violent roguelike" room, where we talked about ways to be non-violent, but not much about roguelikes. That conversation wound down and people left one by one. When there were three of us left, we all switched to the "Bowl fo Confetti" room, which had over 20 people! 5 of them had their cameras on, and maybe 10 of them spoke. I want to see and interact with you, fellow roguelike enthusiasts!
What is the bowl of confetti anyways? Metaphors and language are slippery, and this one was moving around constantly. A bowl of confetti is the opposite of a bowl of oatmeal, except the metaphor is 10,000 bowls of oatmeal. 10,000 bowls of oatmeal are bad because perceptual uniqueness is very low. Each bowl looks like every other, even though they are technically different. In a bowl of glitter, each piece of glitter is a generated artifact, and they all want to be the most interesting and special artifact. There's too much perceptual uniqueness. For maybe the bowl of glitter is a bunch of things that I'm interested in. Or maybe each piece of glitter is a thing that someone could be interested in, but different players will only be interested in certain colors of glitter at certain times. Someone said "color-blindness to the various flavors of confetti" and we all understood what that meant. Language is wild.
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