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.

I was awake on time so I was there for the early morning talks.

Generating Riddles for a Generated World by Mark Johnson

It's about Ultima Ratio Regnum, an unbelievably complex games. None of this should work. How can this game be so complex, and look so good, and have so many systems? Here, many systems come together to make riddles so crypic that I don't expect handcrafted RPGs to go so hard. "Make sure that your game knows many poetic ways to refer to every object in your game" Is that advice? That might as well be a magic spell.

Fireside chat about the development of NetHack by Jesse Collet, Keni

Yesterday I felt old when I mentioned webrings and a fellow attendee didn't know what they were. Today, I remembered that "old games" and "old computers" are a lot older than me. NetHack has a mailer-daemon show up in the game to deliver e-mail to the player. Isn't that a security risk? No more than e-mail showing up as a text file in the home directory, which is how e-mail worked back then. One of the "librarians" of early NetHack has died! Video games are a young artform, but on the scale of civilizations, not human beings.

NetHack took a lot of inspiration from literature, so remember to get inspiration from various artforms, not just video games!

McMansions of Hell: Roguelikes and Reality TV by Leigh Alexander

Another talk about reality TV? Maybe I should start watching--no, just kidding. I won't do that. The demo with early Mac aesthetic and celebrities being sorted by Pokemon type are amusing, Alexander also dropped some philosophical and practical bombs. Reality TV, social media, and even this conference are constructed reality, where we build avatars that represent us, but are not us. Influencers and celebrities who are fmous for being famous are acting as protagonists in their constructed reality. It's a new social niche and they adapt to thrive in it.  Also, make your tools easy and quick to use. Your productivity gains will be immense.

Unconferencing How to find mentors, reaching out...

Anyone who joins this chat thinks they are junior, and don't like to put themselves out there, so I had to intentionally kickstart he conversation. No one was champing at the bit to speak. Mentor/mentee is maybe the wrong relationship to seek. It seems like a big deal. Talking to peers about things we like seems easier. We moved on to "how do we join communities" and "how do we make friends" Eventually someone said, "We're all autistic here, right?" Basically, yeah. We worried about finding people who shared our hyperfixations, but here we are in a group of people looking to connect, so let's just list what we are into! That seems like a great way to make introductions. "What's your deal? What are you into?" The other's answers were a mix of things that I also cared about, and things I had never considered. People are so diverse! We ended the timeslot by trading Discord names and bookmarking each other's websites. In coming days I hope to follow up with them.

Remixing the Layer Cake: Facilitating fan reinterpretation through Caves of Qud's modular data files by Ray

I missed part of this talk because I was so focused on the unconference that I forgot to eat lunch. Sorry, Ray!  My impression is: storing data in XML files makes them easy to read and modity. I'm not doing this talk justice.

Preventing Ear Fatigue with Roguelike Music by Crashtroid

Another talk about music, and I'm not good at understanding music. Ear fatigue is an real thing, not an evocative term that Crashtroid made up. how can a composer prevent players from getting tired of listening to music in a game that might be played for hundreds of hours? Crashtroid demonstrated with music from various games.

The Fortunate Isles: Fragment Worlds, Walled Gardens, and the games that are played there by Everest Pipkin

This was a performance. It was poetry. The words were as beautiful as the sounds were as beautiful as the ideas. It made me want to cry.

Alphaman: Developing and releasing a post-apocalyptic Roguelike game in the DOS days when computers were slow, memory was scarce, and no one had ever heard of object-oriented code. by Jeff Olson

I was getting tired after two days of conference, even though it's remote and I was in the comfort of my own home with all the snacks I desire. But this was a pleasant, easy talk. The developer took us on a humorous tour of his shareware game from the 90s. Here are the jokes. Here are the other games that inspired by me. Here's the uncanny prediction that Donald Trump would become president, even before The Simpsons did it.

Social Time: Walled Gardens

Like the "bowl of confetti" from yesterday, "gardening game" is a term that can refer to several similar but distinct ideas, and people spent much of this time trying to find all the overlapping ideas and "tease them apart" I'm sure smarter people than me got a lot out of this.

Live Action Roguelike by Dustin Freeman

At this point, I should expect anything, but I did not expect this live, collaborative, improvised, chat-driven performance art. One actor was a set of first-person hands, our character in a roguelike. Another was the dungeon, the narrator, and the other half of our character. A tiny camera placed in a jumble of toys, bricks, and rolls of toilet paper represented moving around a dungeon. The hands mimed actions which the narrator had to interpret, because the hands didn't have a voice. After several sudden deaths (and a warning about time from the Master of Ceremonies) our character found the amulet which let them fly out of the dungeon, smash through the fourth wall, and emerge on the set, revealing the actors, the green screens, the whole production! A great ending!

A Simulation with a View by Jonathan Lessard

Making a complex simulation is fun, but how will your players see all the cool interactions that are happening all around them? Remember the virtual ecology in Ultima Online? Lessard's solution is extensive in-game documentation, almost a wiki for a fictional world. As someone who reads Dwarf Fortress Legends Mode for fun, this is right up my alley.

Generating boring levels for fresh experiences in Heat Signature by Tom Francis

Pentadact has been uploading funny, honest devlogs for years. Watch the rest of them.  In this talk, he explains that not every system or generator in your game needs to be cool and interesting. Focus on the important parts of your game and put lots of effort into them. "If you can't make the shuffle interesting,, make more interesting cards."  Players will be so interesting that the other parts of the game not attract much attention, so it's OK if they aren't spectacular. Valuable production advice for people who want to finish and release their projects

Design tooling at Spry Fox by Patrick Kemp

Another talk about tools empowering developers to make better work faster. Spry Fox has a YAML-based data format that's easy for people to read and write without knowing how to code. Lots of great editors for text files already exist, so they didn't have to build their own.  The format allows designers to quickly specify many similar items quickly. This part is open source, but the Design Dashboard, a powerful way to view the data generated in the previous step, is still proprietary, Nice dashboards and viewers! Automatically updated wikis! I just love looking at data!

I was pretty tired at this point and didn't pay much attention to the stream.

Fusing AI with Game Design: Let the Chaos In by Brianna McHorse, Chris Foster

I quickly realized they were talking about the LLMs that are built on theft at unimaginable scale. The speakers aren't trying to replace human developers, but the main purpose of these LLMs is to steal jobs from the people whose work they've already stolen. I was so angry that I turned off the stream.