In platformers with "double jump", where should you actually perform the second jump? Generally somewhere in the middle. Your jumps reach the furthest if you do so.

How can we tell how good are we in run-based games? Win rates? Streaks? Streaks ignoring one loss? Here is how much information is given by various methods, depending on what our winning probability roughly is, and the number of runs. More details on: mathstodon.xyz/@zenorogue/1... #roguelike

Take a grid, for each line add 1 to all points on a randomly picked side of that line, paint points black if the result equals 0 to 1 mod 4, and you get a hitomezashi pattern. But what if we do this for an arbitrary pattern of curves instead of a grid? #hitomezashi #mathart #generativeart

a tiny world, pretending to be infinite

They say that making "roguelikes" makes things easier for developers. But Rogue devs wanted a game that was exciting every time you played it. That is definitely HARDER than making a game that is exciting once. Procgen games take ages to mature. Otherwise they feel repetitive. For example:

There should be a genre of "genreless" games. A good genreless game is good because it has unique ideas that make it different from everything else. At the same time, it is a perfect realization of that idea, and/or that idea is difficult to replicate, so it does not start a genre. Your favorites?

I have seen some backlash for Silksong destroying the game industry by being cheap, while it is just one game that one cannot even play forever. But we have lots of other "reasons not to buy games anymore" looking more serious, and I do not see much protests against them. For example:

Four new "player character shapes" were added to HyperRogue recently. All can be recolored. send pics of your characters #roguelike

The #HugoAward for Best Game or Interactive Work goes to Caves of Qud.

What is the most important? if you want to know what this #mathart means: mathstodon.xyz/@zenorogue/1...

Fast-paced and turn-based - the return of a roguelike legend! *Jupiter Hell Classic* packs procedural levels, explosive weapons, and brutal tactical combat. Early Access starts NOW! store.steampowered.com/app/3126530/...

nice

Silly alternatives to the classic Chess notation for the squares on chessboard.

HyperRogue 13.1 released! zenorogue.blogspot.com/2025/08/hype... #roguelike #nonEuclidean #mathart

Interesting. The world map in #RealmsOfAncardia no longer is flat. What do you think? (ignore the stupid text log) And thanks once more to @zenorogue.bsky.social for the original implementation idea in bsky.app/profile/zeno... and to @ravenmore.pl for suggesting to use this in #RealmsOfAncardia.

Inspired by @zenorogue.bsky.social 's post about globular ASCII projections (my words) in bsky.app/profile/zeno... I tried that for #RealmsOfAncardia but I guess I have no talent at anything but rectangular 2D maps 🤪 The joys of #roguelike #programming

A yet another vizualization of the distortions of the Mercator projection. A #roguelike map using the Mercator projection is projected back on a sphere. In the map, all the characters are of the same size.

My interpretation of the dragons from HyperRogue #furryart #art #dragon #fanart #HyperRogue

Our new video. Have fun! In most of our videos, we have been playing with the non-Euclidean spaces. However, we have not played with the time dimension in them so far. In this video, we combine spherical and hyperbolic geometry with relativistic effects. youtu.be/PxnoSsjMrck

WE DID IT! Approaching Infinity is Overwhelmingly Positive! #startrek #roguelike #indiegame #gamedev #indiedev

New beginnings... #roguelike #adom #RoA #realmsofancardia www.roguelike.games/2025/05/22/n...

My marine biology roguelike is finished! With 200+ sea creatures, 300+ items, and seven dungeons it's the full release of the underwater dungeon crawler, Crablike! quinn2win.itch.io/crablike

springboarding off this interesting post to talk about some characteristics of "roguelikes" or whatever first thread: map vs. overmap maps, like Rogue: you move and fight on the same map overmaps, like Dicey Dungeons: the map selects the next encounter which takes you somewhere else

The evolution of randomized synergy builders: (1) literal #roguelike: focus on complex turn-based tactics and adventure, with some synergies. (2) Isaac-like: focus on synergies, with some intermediate gameplay/adventure. (3) Survivors-like: more focus on synergies, very simple gameplay. [...]

Metaprogression for me is usually a reason to stop playing the game, but there are some games with metaprogression that I liked, and the common thing in these 2 games is that they do not have other form of progression. Is it the case that intraprogression and metaprogression clash?

I coined the term “roguelike” back on USENET in the early 90s. Don’t know if that’s worth carving on my tombstone but

Just hit 400 Steam reviews and still 95% positive! That's 80% of the way to OVERWHELMINGLY POSITIVE! #indiedev #scifi #roguelike #passionproject

Just published my first math paper! What a journey! youtu.be/zVRNcRFaZ94

Do you want the hexes on a sphere to be regular? Or do you want them to be of the same area? Or do you want straight lines be actually straight? (in one of two ways) #RogueViz #noneuclidean

Feels to me that modern 2D platformers tend to focus too much on awkward jumping instead of satisfying stairways and ladders? It was originally called "ladder genre" [Wikipedia], what if that term won? I started with JSW and Chuckie Egg II, their influence makes my creation feel different. #rulfoa

Some things in video games are just impossible to represent visually

This gives off Berlin Interpretation vibes. It forgets to say that boomer shooter is a subgenre of first-person shooter: no mention of perspective, shooting stuff can be just ignored. Out of context, do all of this but not in a shooter and not in FPP, could become a new "genre" that most indies are.

A procedurally generated, non-human building. What creatures could live in buildings of this kind? (There is a correct answer, but other answers are interesting too.) #Rogueviz #mathart #procgen

Caves of Qud is a Hugo finalist for Best Game or Interactive Work!! 🚀🚀🚀😎😎😎🍄🍄🍄

#MathArtMarch #quadrilateral Not as much an artwork as a peek behind the scenes of an artwork. This is the sketch I made to work out how many granny squares I needed for the Five-Square shawl, and a reminder of how unwieldy exponential growth is. gallery.bridgesmathart.org/exhibitions/...

A visualization of direct influences between various descendants of Star Trek (1971), such as Rogue (R), Diablo (D1), Minecraft (MC), Spelunky (Spel) and Isaac (BoI). The embedder does not care about the direction of influences, so we get a nice non-chronological network. #roguelike

Imagine a game that is a series of questions. They are about the lore of this particular game (e.g. you are starving, which one of 5 fictional foods do you eat, only 1 is not poisonous). The intended way is to play again and again until you know all the right answers to win. Is that metaprogression?

Remember what I said about how Twitter is useless for self-promotion even if you have a big following there? There's data showing BlueSky, even with smaller user numbers, generates way more referrals than Twitter purely because it doesn't suppress links. Stop saying you need Twitter for promotion.

This is wild. What an honor. Live and drink!

The animation on the left shows clearly that the shortest path between two places on Earth is the straight line. Unbelievably, there are possible worlds where this would NOT be the case! 🧵 ... #nonEuclideanGeometry #rogueviz

@zenorogue.bsky.social I haven't posted the code yet but here's a run. I'll post a bigger one tomorrow when the imagemagick script finishes on it

heyyyyy we're 610 reviews away from 10,000. what are you and 609 of your friends doing this afternoon?

Ported Seuphorica (Scrabble solitaire deckbuilder) to RogueViz for a more intuitive and powerful interface. But since this is RogueViz, let us make the board geometry abstract, to have even more fun with geometry and topology! 🧵

Thinking about forgotten weird games I have been playing (or watched other playing) on Amstrad CPC, I remembered this one, about stone age humans. In this screenshot, I am trying to craft a weapon by hitting a piece of flint in correct places.

Hello! I have a little survey about procedural generation and games. No expert knowledge required - it's for anyone to take and fill in. It'll take about 5 minutes to complete. RTs appreciated! forms.gle/AN4zFDxodQyx...

Developer's intention: A beautiful visualization feature! What the users share: A chaotic art generator! BREAK THE LIMITS! 🎨🔥

New Roguelike Radio! @andrewdoull.bsky.social and I analyse the topic of Science Fiction settings in roguelike game design: www.roguelikeradio.com/2025/02/epis...

Yet another big update to Seuphorica! Gigantic tiles required lots of special cases to implement, but that just means lots of ways to have fun with them, or abuse them to get gigantic scores! Also some other new tiles, and a Portuguese version. zenorogue.itch.io/seuphorica

Updated Hydra Slayer! Mostly a bugfix update, there were some minor bugs with the next page key in the help screen, a crash when trying to examine shadow hydras, and music not playing due to the lack of DLL. Go to Steam, itch.io, GitHub, or the ASCII web demo to play! #roguelike

Colon turns cox into cotwitter