The Gallery's blog, with news and thoughts on roguelike games. A comment system is planned but does not exist yet. There is an RSS feed for the benefit of robots.
Two recent happenings in the roguelike world have brought the Roguelike Gallery some attention.
Release 2021.03 of the Early Roguelike Collection is now available. This is the Roguelike Gallery's version of the original Rogue and other "lost roguelikes" of the 1980's.
The Roguelike Gallery has been operating for an entire decade. That's one quarter of Rogue's entire lifespan, and much longer than I expected it to survive. Much thanks to everyone who persevered through the time I deleted all the saved games (always test your backups!), the 2012 failed upgrade that kept the site down for a week, the time the disk filled up with logfiles, and all the times I forgot to replace expired SSL certificates.
I made some progress on UltraRogue last month. The savefile corruption bug is fixed at last. But while fixing it, I discovered some other related bugs.
The Early Roguelike Collection is discontinuing support for Microsoft Windows. I don't want to abandon the most popular PC platform, but I have few options.
Last month, the Gallery's scheduled downtime passed without complications. The hosting provider (and nearly everyone else) has only partially mitigated the CPU vulnerabilities, so more downtime could be on the way.
I am not a real historian, but until real historians turn their attention to obscure corners of the computer gaming world, someone has to discover and preserve knowledge about early roguelikes. This means not just talking about past roguelike events, but listing my sources and explaining my reasoning so that others can be convinced of my results or correct them.
Happy new year, rogues! The Gallery has completed its eighth year.
If you check the Mercurial repository, you will notice some recent updates to UltraRogue. The game now builds with the same "./configure && make" system as the other early roguelikes. Some bugs have been fixed, and all the games now use portable I/O functions uniformly.
Someone using the "rodney" account has beaten Rogue V3! Unlike last year's win, no cheats were involved. The final score was 11080. Download the ttyrec to watch the rogue struggle with Xorns and Vampires and pick up the Amulet under the eye of a Dragon.
A few months ago, I said that my plans for 2016 included adding HTTPS support to the website and adding UltraRogue to the games collection. I missed the deadline, but HTTPS has been working for a month or so now, and UltraRogue is on the way.
The Roguelike Gallery has survived its seventh year. I have missed several monthly updates because of other projects, but I am now writing again and still at work.
July was a momentous month. Rogue V5 has finally been beaten!
Last month, I succeeded in making a release of the roguelike games. I have managed to drag the code base most of the way into the 1990's. Now it's time to leave it for a while and do some much-needed work on the Web site.
Release 2016.06 of the Early Roguelike Collection is now available. This is the Roguelike Gallery's version of the original Rogue and other "lost roguelikes" of the 1980's.
This has been an uneventful month. I fixed the Flytrap bug, and made a few improvements to the Windows build. No progress was made on the Web site.
Violet Fungi, renamed to Venus Flytraps in Rogue V5, have been fixed.
This month has been disappointing. Instead of adding improvements to the Gallery or fixing known problems, I spent most of the time finding more bugs.
This has been a month of steady progress. Most of the compiler warnings I mentioned last month have been fixed. I discovered about 40 issues while fixing them, though more of these were caused by my suspicion than were actual bugs.
It's time for another monthly status update. For most of February, the Web app has been launched by SystemD, which will restart it if it crashes or if the server is unexpectedly rebooted.
I'm planning to post monthly status updates on the progress of the Gallery. This should be the first of a series where I explain what I have been doing recently.
2015 was a good year at the Roguelike Gallery. Two new games were added, and one of them was quickly beaten. Many new high scores have been set. The site has survived its sixth year of existence on an Internet where lifespans can often be measured in weeks.
There are a few things I should have posted earlier, but never did.
For the past two months, I've been working on restoring Advanced Rogue 7 and XRogue. I've fixed an assortment of bugs, and they are both now available to play and watch.
This is not an article about how to beat Rogue. One does not beat Rogue. At most, once in a very long while, one merely survives.
I want to give a brief history of the early roguelikes. These games are the branch of the roguelike family tree descended from the original Rogue. The other four classic branches (Hack, Moria, Larn, Omega) are games inspired by Rogue, written sometime during the 1980's. In contrast, the early roguelikes are modifications of Rogue, based on the same code.
One of my goals in creating the Roguelike Gallery was to gain some objective insight into the difficulty of early roguelike games.