Player casts ‘Reflection of the Creator’!
When I was a boy the world’s favourite sport was soccer, but in this enlightened age the global past-time is now arguing about what is or is not a “roguelike”. Saying the word in public was banned in most Western nations last year due to the fisticuffs that it inevitably inspires, and the Ayatollah has issued a fatwa that deems non-ASCII roguelikes haram.
Maybe FTL is a roguelike, maybe Dream Quest isn’t. But I think it’s (almost) entirely accepted that Tales of Maj’Eyal is a roguelike. In the tradition of the game that created the genre, it’s a dungeon-crawl through procedurally-generated levels with permadeath and character building — though controversially it features coloured non-ASCII graphics. Heaven forfend.
ToME is in fact one of the most beloved roguelikes going, having been in continuous open-source development on PC since 2009. Last week, lead developer Nicolas “darkgod” Casalini posted a couple of screenshots on ToME’s news page of the game running on some Android devices. I chased him up for more details about this.
Pity there were no unicode emojis when Rogue was created.
“This is still a feasability test for now,” Casalini told me. “I’ve worked only for some days on it and it seems to work well — but slow.” My wife says the same thing about me.
“Some of the slowness is due to the gfx output, which I can improve, but some is due to the very nature of the engine [itself] and this probably won’t be fixable. So in the end I have no idea if this will work well or not. In any case it’d only work on high end stuff due to the sheer size of it.”
The darkgod is taking a very cautious view of ToME on mobile it seems — he might not move forward with publishing the Android version of the game if he can’t tame its performance issues, but he seemed reasonably confident about getting it right when he emailed me yesterday. And what about the other side of the church?
“As for iOS,” Casalini said, “if the Android port works and proves a success I see nothing that should prevent it.”
Watch for ToME on Android soon (maybe) and follow darkgod’s progress on the ToME website.
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