Roguelikes are games with depth. They contain a myriad of distinct gameplay features such as permadeath, turn-based interaction and random levels. They often are terminal/ASCII-based, but in more recently released games, they are being developed with graphics.
There are hundreds of these games out in the wild. They are open sourced and closed source; they use a variety of different languages; and they are accessible on a variety of platforms.
Unfortunately, only a handful are available in existing package systems and many don't have auto-update systems or are not updated frequently enough to keep up with new releases.
This week, as a group, we are going to package roguelike games (Nethack, Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, Brogue, etc.) for the Ubuntu operating system.
Our Goals for the Meetup:
- Try out various roguelikes (I reccommend Brogue and Dungeon Crawl for newbies)
- Package a roguelike game so that it can be easily installed and removed by a user
- Demonstrate how to submit that game to a packaging service web API
- Learn various methods of shell scripting within the context of another user's environment
- Using curl or other RESTful client methods to access the web service to submit games
- Figure out good automated strategies for keeping game packages up-to-date
- Figure out what games people would like to package the most
This meetup is going to involve a lot of conversation, brain picking and combined experience from everyone's field. It is a challenge, but a worthwhile one, as it preserves gaming history. The original rogue game was released in 1983 and it is not a simple task for a casual gamer/non-programmer type to download and compile, so let us think that we are not only improving our techniques by working on a unique problem, but that we are actually making the internet a better place for users in general. Hope to see at the meetup ready to hack!
Angelo Lakra
Hacknite Organizer
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