December 24, 2009 by Stone
I’m excited. I haven’t really had much ambition lately for new stuff, but the idea of getting this roguelike moving is fun. As a (self-identified) super nerd, I had a few ideas. I actually considered a Pokemon Roguelike. It won’t happen though, at least not for a while, since there is a LOT of continuity and a lot of data out there for Pokemon already.
I considered recreating Mystic Towers in Rogulike format too. This is tempting, since the levels are already designed, and the game was fun enough to warrant playing through it again even though it’s like 20 years old. Mystic Towers was the first game I bought on my own (saved allowance for weeks), and the first game coming close to 3d that I had played. It was fun, some parts of it were scary (I was like 8 the first time I encountered a dark room with a loud monster chomping on me), and it was innovative for it’s time. Yeah, a lot of people will look at it now and think that it’s boring, or unoriginal (hint: it’s not), but it had everything a gamer wanted back in 1994: puzzles, half-assed physics (pull something off a shelf, it falls. flat things like money could be underneath movable things, you could escape a monster by being above it, and firing downward), monsters, a sense of urgency (you had to find a bomb and blow up the monster generator before it repopulated the tower. In the hard towers, you wouldn’t have enough spell ammo to take the monsters out again if you weren’t careful), and a cohesive story.
So I might make that for my first stab at a roguelike, though I actually have a bigger ambition in mind that I’m going to discuss at a later date.