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Resources and Inspiration

Minotauros' list of links and resources mostly pertaining to LoSt and Roguelikes


I'm the third from the left

Community

Temple of the Roguelike: All things Roguelike
Roguebasin: The wiki
Roguelikes on reddit: This place is pretty active (check out their /r/roguelikedev thingie as well)
Roguelike Radio: I listen to this when I'm cleaning
Roguebase: RL blog aggregator

Games

Abura Tan: Early Weird West RL that almost got off the ground. A minor classic, perhaps, but a major influence on LoSt, by which I hope to deliver something like what Abura Tan aimed for
Other wild west-themed RLs: There are a few, but I've never seen any even as finished or ambitious as Abura Tan. Check Wild West RL, Dead Horizons, Gravebound (for Android), The Last Rogue (abandoned, Windows only), and there have been others over the years… (Personal aside: In 2013, an early version of LoSt was a failed 7drl entry, along with Gun.Smoke (which had a wonderful train simulator) and Lawman :)
Misc. (not Westerns): ADOM, Caves of Qud, Gearhead I and II, PrincessRL, and many other classic Roguelikes.
Misc. (not RLs): The Mystic Western Jam contains lots of oddities… For action Roguelites of sorts, Westerado may be worth a peek, or Duster (currently in early access) may turn into something…

For developers

Roguebasin Articles: A good reference to get started on most topics.
How to Write a Roguelike in 15 Steps: Read this from time to time for laughs :)
Ascii Dreams: Not very active now, but the archives has some gold, look for older article series
John Harris' @Play: Another classic column. More by Harris here and here (and there was a book in 2016)
Hexagonal Grids: Everything you were afraid to ask about hexes
A* Pathfinding for beginners: Knowing the basics is sufficient; the other big thing in RL pathfinding being Dijkstra maps
Roguelike Intelligence: An introduction to state machine AIs – and then some more AI primers, and why not check out behavior trees – and there's always rereading Ascii dreams ;)
Maximizing the Impact of Procedural Personalities: by Tanya Short (Moon Hunters etc.), who is always ambitious about breaking ground in procedural content generation
Joe's tips for random story generation: by Joe Hewitt of Gearhead fame
Self Contained Reusable Plots: Outlining a basic technique for generating random plots, not unsimilar to what I have in mind for LoSt
Unexpected Narrative in Games: A piece on storytelling through gameplay in general
Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling: E. Short makes games more in the direction of Interactive Fiction, but theory and practice applies to proceduralism in general (if digital literature interests you at all, read her Annals of the Parrigues, starting at the afterword, p. 81)
Tales Online: A fucking massive database of fairy tale motifs. If anyone is making a Propp-RL, feed this to your randomizers!
Procedural Content Generation Wiki: Not big or active, but worth a look
Dynamic World Design: Written with MUDs in mind, this (pseudo-academic) article lists some key factors to designing an active world; over the years I've bookmarked  some articles on similar topics, can't remember if they're any good though ;)

Inspirational mishmash

An exhaustive list of the Wild Western Canon would be impossible. Instead, here's just some of the works that have influenced my development of LoSt in big or small ways:

mudfaced goon
Films/tv: The Great Train Robbery (Porter), El Topo (Jodorowsky), Dead Man (Jarmusch), The Wild Bunch (Pekkinpah), Seven Samurai (Kurosawa), The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (Leone), O Brother Where Art Thou (Cohen), Blazing Saddles (Brooks), Deadwood (Milch), Carnivàle (Knauf), The Mahabharata (Brook)

Books: The Place of Dead Roads (Burroughs), The Etched City (Bishop), The Book of Imaginary Beings (Borges), Heart of Darkness (Conrad), Elsewhere (Michaux), Author of the Acacia Seeds (LeGuin), Gargantua & Pantagruel (Rabelais), Monadology (Leibniz), The 36 Dramatic Situations (Ponti)

Misc.: TSR's Boot Hill, Deadlands, Far West RPG, Over the Edge, Tales of the Arabian Nights, Hieronymus Bosch, Meso-American Codices, Tom of Finland, Carl Barks, Krazy Kat, Jeff Smith's Bone, Jansson's Moomin, Waits' The Black Rider, Residents' The Tunes of Two Cities, Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica, Gabriel's San Jacinto, Beatty's Post Apocalyptic Cowgirls, wiki's fearsome critters, Heyoka, Olmec, Indus Valley, Nubia, The Wild West, cowboy jargon, Wrathful Guardians of Buddhism, etc.

As always,
Minotauros 




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