Intro.

The Infinite Deadline Problem

First of all, welcome to the second issue of Roguelike. The magazine. I know it’s late. I also know it contains only four of the planned articles, and even this was only possible with Glenn R. Whichman’s article about JavaScript as language for roguelikes.

Well, usually I tend to excuse myself again and again for not meeting deadlines, but of course I know that everybody in the roguelike scene tends to not even giving deadlines. So I will adopt this behavior for RTM ;-)

The problem with this is that the concept of a magazine requires to meet deadlines. It’s neither a piece of software (or, to be more precise, a computer program) nor a blog, it’s a thing which is expected to return on a regular basis. The question is how wide this basis should be. One month? Did not work. Two months? Might be possible (and when RTM started, I even scheduled RTM #2 for May, not for April … ). However, three months would be the most realistic cycle.

And this produces another problem (but at least one I was always aware of): Reviews. If RTM is only published four times a year, writing reviews of games which are in development is rather useless. By the time the review is written, a new release could be already out, with issues fixed still mentioned in the review. The reviews could of course contain the version number of the tested game, but critical reviews might produce negative effects on games which already have been improved. Especially readers who don’t visit r.g.r.d regularly and don’t know about the fast update cycles of many roguelikes might get a wrong impression.

A Concept

So what to do to make my life easier, but keep RTM interesting?

Step one: Continue publishing interviews and writing theoretical articles (e.g. the – in this issue absent, sry again – series Aesthetics in Roguelikes or the articles about languages and coding).

Step two: Cover new roguelikes which are in alpha or early-beta stage only with summaries, but not with complete reviews. The last 7DRL contest showed me that it’s just not possible for me to play them with the effort needed to write accurate reviews.

Step three: Review only roguelikes which can be expected to be fun for other people than the developers on r.g.r.d – this does not mean I don’t respect the efforts of developing new games and concepts, but reviews in RTM will be more useful if they cover games which offer a wider range of gameplay (e.g. a minimal length; things to discover etc.) also for players still not so affine to roguelikes, and many alpha/beta-projects (and most 7DRLs) don’t fulfill this requirement.

So this is the plan and it allows me to ignore most of the infinite [release]-messages, taking pressure from me, while it also admits me to have a look at older roguelikes – so don’t be surprised if there was a YANAIM (Yet Another Nethack Article In Media) in RTM some day ;-)

Mario Donick