How long have you been associating yourself with roguelikes?

Hmmm, for me it's been a couple years since I started downloading and playing roguelikes. One of my favorites, besides MageGuild , has to be ADOM. Thanks to that game, I got into all sorts of roguelikes.

I am as skilled as a six year old in computer programming, but I know roguelikes must be tough to create. That's why my job is to play the roguelikes!

How about everyone else?

I guess I'll go next.

I've probably been playing roguelikes for...10 years now? Something like that. The first one I played was Moria, which I abandoned for Angband as soon as I realized it existed. I've played just about every major roguelike out there at least a few times, and quite a few of the minor ones. Right now, I'm particularly into SporkHack and POWDER, with a healthy splash of the newest vanilla Angband...very impressed with where that one's going.

On the development side, I've been attempting to write roguelikes for almost as long as I've been attempting to play them. MageGuild is the first one that's gotten to the point where I consider it fun and playable. I'd gotten another one pretty close right before I started work on MG; when I'm satisfied with MG, I might drop back to it and try to rebuild or fix it. Or I might take a break from writing roguelikes and work on one of the dozen other projects I've got in mind.

My turn:

I started with ADOM about four years ago, after having found it in some free game download site, in a fit of boredom. Since I'm really into the innerworkings of progamming and computer mechanics myself, and the game initially appeared to be something that required a lot of knowledge in that field, I was put off. But when I realized about how intriguing the game seemed after reading through the manual and some other resources, I tried it again and got a bit hooked. It was a lot of fun, and paved the way for an appreciation of roguelikes in general.

Then I moved to Dungeon Crawl, by which time I was very into roguelikes. The variety in races and classes truly fascinated me, so I kept at it and had some success. Nethack was next, but the problem was that reading the spoilers and learning about all the intricacies of the game was a bit more fun than the game in practice, at least the middle and the end of the game. But I still can enjoy a few rounds of Nethack and can pretty reliably get down to the quest at least.

I stuck with those three, until I discovered the newsgroups, and it was no going back after that. Commercial videogames started to lose my interest, and I started enjoying 7DRLs and various other smaller projects. DooMRL, POWDER, Angband, Ragnarok, and several others got some attention in this time period but nothing too extensive.

Then recently, I picked up ToME, which was a case similar to Nethack, and had a roguelike renaissance, so to speak, where I got back into roguelikes hardcore. And here I am, loving Mage Guild!

I'll bite.

My exposure to the genre happened because my first computer came with Rogue installed on it about 14 years ago. A few years later I also found Ragnarok and Angband on a shareware/freeware CD, although at the time I wasn't aware that there was a roguelike genre.

I never beat Rogue, and I savescummed through Angband and Ragnarok.

Another few years, after I had gotten internet access I found Zangband online and savescummed through that.

Eventually I found ToME, and I found that playing the game with permadeath lead to more tactical, cautious, and skilled play, and despite the seeming frustration value is actually a lot more fun than savescumming.

I legitimately beat ToME, went back and beat Ragnarok without saving (even though the final version of the game lets you keep your saves, I manually delete mine when I die now).

Anyway, since then I've played a lot of the games put out by the community, and most recently I came across Mage Guild posted at Slash's Rogue Temple site, and decided to give it a shot.