A Weird Pokemon Appeared In Pokemon Go And No One Knows What It Is [Update]
Pokemon Go's latest Community Day took place this past weekend, and by all accounts, it was a fairly standard event. However, something rather unusual happened right after the Community Day ended: a strange, never-before-seen Pokemon briefly appeared in the wild. [Update: The Pokemon Company has confirmed the unusual new monster, and its name is Meltan.]
In each region, an unidentified Pokemon began swarming immediately after the event concluded. No one knows what kind of monster it is; it was first discovered in the game's files shortly before the Community Day by dataminer Chrales, but it was listed with the name Kecleon--a chameleon Pokemon first introduced in the Gen 3 games Ruby and Sapphire.
The strange monster, which you can see below, appeared in the wild for precisely 30 minutes following the Community Day, after which point it disappeared just as suddenly as it debuted. Niantic hasn't formally acknowledged the new Pokemon, but it most closely resembles Ditto, albeit with what appears to be a golden nut for a head.
Moreover, when the strange Pokemon was captured, it would reveal itself to be Ditto. Some players have also reported that the new monster would turn into Chikorita--the featured Pokemon during September's Community Day--or the aforementioned Kecleon when captured.
Whether or not it has any relation to the shapeshifting Pokemon remains to be seen, but it is considerably smaller than Ditto, so it isn't likely to be an evolution of it. Barring a small handful of exceptions--for instance, Bellossom is notably smaller than Gloom--Pokemon generally increase in size when they evolve.
While the upcoming Pokemon: Let's Go, Pikachu and Let's Go, Eevee games for Nintendo Switch will feature only the original 151 Pokemon (plus their Alolan variants), The Pokemon Company had previously teased that players could receive a brand-new Pokemon by connecting the Switch games to Pokemon Go. Whether or not this is the Pokemon in question remains to be seen, but we'll likely learn more soon, as those games are scheduled to launch on November 16.
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 09-25-2018, 06:58 PM - Forum: Windows
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10 new ways for everyone to achieve more in the modern workplace
It’s been over a year since we introduced Microsoft 365, the complete, intelligent, and secure solution that empowers employees to drive their organizations to future growth. Customers are seeking to transform and support a workforce that is more diverse and mobile than ever before, and they are relying on latest advancements in technology to do so. Customers such as Goodyear, Eli Lilly, and Fruit of the Loom use Microsoft 365 to empower their employees.
Microsoft 365 is growing quickly, built on the strength of more than 135 million commercial monthly Office 365 users. Windows 10 has approximately 200 million commercial devices in use, and there is an install base of over 82 million for Enterprise Mobility + Security (EMS). Today, at the Microsoft Ignite Conference in Orlando, Florida, we are introducing new capabilities in Microsoft 365 that make it possible for every person to do their best work.
1. Microsoft Teams is the fastest growing business app in Microsoft history
After less than two years in market, more than 329,000 organizations worldwide use Microsoft Teams, including 87 of the Fortune 100 companies. In fact, 54 customers now have more than 10,000 active users of Teams, and Accenture just crossed the 100,000 active-user mark in Teams. Further growth has been spurred by the recently announced free version of Teams.
We continue to add powerful new capabilities to foster teamwork and collaboration. New artificial intelligence (AI) powered meeting features are now generally available—including background blur and meeting recording. Background blur uses facial detection to blur your background during video meetings, and meeting recording allows you to playback recorded meeting content at any time with captions and a searchable, timecoded transcript.
General availability of new live event capabilities will begin to roll out worldwide in Microsoft 365 later this year. These new tools allow customers to create and stream live and on-demand events in Teams, Yammer and Microsoft Stream to inform and engage customers and employees, wherever they are. Beginning in October, employees can watch videos on the go with the Stream mobile app for iOS and Android, with support for offline viewing. And we’re working with our ecosystem of device partners to deliver new devices optimized for Teams meetings and calling, including the new Surface Hub 2. Surface Hub 2 is perfect for dynamic teamwork and features a light, sleek, and intelligent design that’s easy to move around and fit in any workspace. The first phase of Surface Hub 2, Surface Hub 2 S, will start shipping in the second quarter of 2019.
Blur your background during meetings.
2. Extend the power of Teams to empower workers in all roles and across industries
We are extending the power of Teams with new experiences that are tailored to industry-specific and role-based workflows. For example, new capabilities in Teams help empower Firstline Workers to do their best work. With new schedule management tools, managers can now create and share schedules, and employees can easily swap shifts, request time off, and see who else is working as well as important announcements. These new features will be available in October. As an example of how Teams can enable secure workflows for regulated industries, we’re delivering a new care coordination solution, now available in private preview, that gives healthcare teams a secure hub for coordinating care across multiple patients. It provides for integration with electronic health records (EHR) systems and enables care providers to communicate about patient care in real-time within Teams’ secure platform. We are also releasing two new secure messaging features with particular relevance in healthcare settings—image annotation, now generally available, and priority notifications, which will roll out by the end of this year to all Teams commercial customers. These capabilities support HIPAA compliance and enable doctors, nurses, and other clinicians to communicate about patients while avoiding the privacy risks that arise when healthcare professionals use consumer chat apps.
Easily swap shifts, request time off, and see who else is working.
3. Find what you need faster with Microsoft Search
Microsoft Search, a new cohesive search capability, makes it easier for you to find what you need without leaving the flow of your work. We’re putting the search box in a consistent, prominent place across Edge, Bing, Windows, and Office apps, so that search is always one click away. We’re also supercharging the search box so you can not only quickly find people and related content, but you can also access commands for apps and navigate to other content wherever you need to get work done—even before you start typing in the search box. Recognizing that you work in an ecosystem of information, we’re extending Microsoft Search to connect across your organization’s data, inside and outside of Microsoft 365. Learning from your everyday work patterns and acting as a brain for your organization, the Microsoft Graph personalizes your experiences everywhere. We’re pulling together the power of the Microsoft Graph and AI technology from Bing to deliver future experiences that are more relevant to what you are working on. This will include automatically answering questions such as “Can I bring my wife and kids on a work trip?” by using machine reading comprehension that takes knowledge of the world and pairs it with understanding of your organization’s documents. Preview the Microsoft Search capability it as it rolls out to Office.com, Bing.com, and in the SharePoint mobile app today, with many more experiences to come in Edge, Windows, and Office.
Find what you need faster with Microsoft Search.
4. Create content that stands out with Microsoft 365
Three new features in Microsoft 365 use the power of AI to help you create content that shines. Ideas is a new feature that follows along as you create a document and makes intelligent suggestions. In PowerPoint, Ideas recommends designs, layouts, and images. In Excel, Ideas recognizes trends, suggests charts, and identifies outliers in your data. Ideas will be generally available in Excel soon and will also begin rolling out in preview to the other apps starting with PowerPoint Online. Additionally, new data types in Excel turn references to stocks and geographies into rich entities that can be used to build powerful, interactive spreadsheets. The Stocks and Geography data types—generally available soon—make it easy to get updated stock prices, company information, population, area, and more. Finally, new image recognition capabilities in Excel take a picture of a hand-drawn or printed data table and turn it into an Excel spreadsheet, making data entry as easy as taking a picture.
In PowerPoint, Ideas recommends designs, layouts, and images for your presentation.
5. Office loves the Mac
Office empowers everyone to achieve more on any device. And Office loves the Mac. We’re committed to the Mac as a first-class endpoint and have made significant investments in the platform over the past year—including moving the Mac and Windows versions of the apps onto a single code base and releasing new features for the Mac every month. We also tailored new experiences for the Mac, like the new Touch Bar integration.
Today, we’re announcing OneDrive Files On-Demand for Mac, a way to access all your personal and work files from the cloud in Finder without using storage space and only download them when you need them. Files On-Demand gives the Mac an intelligent connection to the cloud and is just one more example of the power of Office on the Mac platform. Preview it before it rolls out to all Mac users.
OneDrive Files On-Demand for Mac displays all your OneDrive files in Finder but only downloads them when you need them.
6. Work together with your entire network with LinkedIn in Outlook and Office web apps
We’re announcing two new ways to use the power of the LinkedIn network within your daily workflow. Soon, when you connect your LinkedIn account to Office 365, you’ll be able to coauthor documents with people in your LinkedIn network in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint and send emails to them directly from Outlook. This brings your corporate directory and your LinkedIn network together, so you never lose touch with the contacts who can help you succeed, inside or outside your organization. You’ll also see LinkedIn highlights about the people in your meeting invites, providing you with insights about attendees, so you can prep for important meetings quickly and easily. These features help you focus on what’s important by providing information and connections directly in your flow of work and will be coming soon in a staged rollout.
7. Deliver a modern desktop with Azure
For many companies, the specific needs of their business demand a virtualized desktop experience. Today, we are introducing Windows Virtual Desktop, the only cloud-based service that delivers a multi-user Windows 10 experience, which is optimized for Office 365 ProPlus and includes free Windows 7 Extended Security Updates. With Windows Virtual Desktop, you can deploy and scale Windows and Office on Azure in minutes with built-in security and compliance. Sign up to be notified of the preview availability.
8. Manage your environment with the Microsoft 365 admin center
Following our recent release of the new Microsoft 365 admin center, we’re announcing new features to help you to monitor and manage applications, services, data, devices, and users across your Microsoft 365 subscriptions, including Office 365, Windows 10, and EMS. The Microsoft 365 admin center has several new capabilities to help you better manage your environment, including insight-based recommendations, a more consistent UI, and customized views for each of your admins. The public preview of these features is rolling out now to targeted release admins and soon to all admins. To get started, visit admin.microsoft.com.
Manage your environment more easily with the Microsoft 365 admin center.
9. Achieve modern compliance easily for the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and more
In the world of complex regulations and evolving privacy standards, customers consistently tell us they need the built-in, intelligent capabilities of Microsoft 365 to proactively achieve compliance in their organizations. We’ve expanded Compliance Manager to now include 12 assessments across different industries. The unified labeling experience is also now available in the Security & Compliance Center as a single destination where you can create, configure, and automatically apply policies to ensure protection and governance of sensitive data.
Compliance Manager now includes 12 assessments across different industries.
10. Advancing security for IT professionals
The work we do in security at Microsoft gives us the broadest perspective on the challenges and a unique ability to help. We focus on three areas: running security operations that work for you, building enterprise-class technology, and driving partnerships for a heterogeneous world. Today, we’re announcing several new enterprise-class capabilities that leverage the Microsoft intelligent cloud and operational learnings to help organizations secure their people, devices, and data.
New support for passwordless sign-in via the Microsoft Authenticator app is now available for the hundreds of thousands of Azure Active Directory connected apps that businesses use every day. Nearly all data loss starts with compromised passwords. Today, we are declaring an end to the era of passwords. No company lets enterprises eliminate more passwords than Microsoft.
Microsoft Secure Score is the only enterprise-class dynamic report card for cybersecurity. By using it, organizations get assessments and recommendations that typically reduce their chance of a breach by 30-fold. It guides you to take steps like securing admin accounts with Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA), securing users accounts with MFA, and turning off client-side email forwarding rules. Starting today, we’re expanding Secure Score to cover all of Microsoft 365. We are also introducing Secure Score for your hybrid cloud workloads in the Azure Security Center, so you have full visibility across your estate.
Finally, we are announcing Microsoft Threat Protection, an integrated experience for detection, investigation, and remediation across endpoints, email, documents, identity, and infrastructure in the Microsoft 365 admin console. This will save analysts thousands of hours as they automate the more mundane security tasks.
Microsoft Secure Score is expanding to cover all of Microsoft 365.
We look forward to bringing you these new ways to achieve more from unlocking creativity to advancing security. You can learn more about our announcements, see all of our Microsoft Ignite sessions live streaming or on-demand, and connect with experts on the Microsoft Tech Community.
Editor’s note 9/24/2018: This post has been edited with updated information on the availability of Ideas and new data types in Excel.
For the first time in the racing and driving genre, experience dynamic seasons in a shared open-world. Explore beautiful scenery, collect over 450 cars, and become a Horizon Superstar in historic Britain.
The Linux Plumbers Conference is the premier event for developers working at all levels of the plumbing layer and beyond. LPC 2018 will be held November 13-15 in Vancouver, BC, Canada. We are looking forward to seeing you there!
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 09-25-2018, 12:29 PM - Forum: Windows
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Microsoft unveils AI capability that automates AI development
The tedious but necessary process of selecting, testing and tweaking machine learning models that power many of today’s artificial intelligence systems was proving too time-consuming for Nicolo Fusi.
The final straw for the Microsoft researcher and machine learning expert came while fussing over model selection as he and his colleagues built CRISPR.ML, a computational biology tool that uses AI to help scientists determine the best way to perform gene editing experiments.
“It was just not a good use of time,” said Fusi.
So, he set out to develop another AI capability that automatically does the data transformation, model selection and hyperparameter tuning part of AI development – and inadvertently created a new product.
Microsoft announced Monday at the Microsoft Ignite conference in Orlando, Florida, that the automated machine learning capability is being incorporated in the Azure Machine Learning service. The feature is available in preview.
Learning service reimagined
Automated machine learning is at the forefront of Microsoft’s push to make Azure Machine Learning an end-to-end solution for anyone who wants to build and train models that make predictions from data, and then deploy them anywhere – in the cloud, on premises or at the edge.
Microsoft also announced Monday that the Azure Machine Learning service now includes a software development kit, or SDK, for the Python programming language, which is popular among data scientists. The SDK integrates the Azure Machine Learning service with Python development environments including Visual Studio Code, PyCharm, Azure Databricks notebooks and Jupyter notebooks.
“We heard users wanted to use any tool they wanted, they wanted to use any framework, and so we re-thought about how we should deliver Azure Machine Learning to those users,” said Eric Boyd, corporate vice president, AI Platform, who led the reimagining of the Azure Machine Learning service. “We have come back with a Python SDK that lights up a number of different features.”
These features include distributed deep learning, which enables developers to build and train models faster with massive clusters of graphical processing units, or GPUs, and access to powerful field programmable gate arrays, or FPGAs, for high-speed image classification and recognition scenarios on Azure.
From left, Microsoft’s Paul Oka, Sharon Gillett, Nicolo Fusi, Evan Green, Gilbert Hendry, Francesco Paolo Casale and Rishit Sheth discuss the algorithm and different ways to choose the next machine learning pipeline. Photo by Dana J. Quigley for Microsoft.
Recommender system
The automated model selection and tuning of so-called hyperparameters that govern the performance of machine learning models that are part of automated machine learning will make AI development available to a broader set of Microsoft’s customers, noted Boyd.
“There are a number of teams and companies that we work with that are now just going to make predictions based on the models that automated machine learning comes up with for them,” he said.
For machine learning experts, Boyd added that automated machine learning offers advantages as well.
“For trained, specialized data scientists, this is a shortcut. It automates a lot of the tedium in data science,” he said.
Automated machine learning homes in on the best so-called machine learning pipelines for a given dataset in a similar way to how on-demand video streaming services recommend movies. New users of a streaming service watch and rate a few movies in exchange for recommendations on what to watch next. The recommendations get better the more the system learns what movies users rate highest.
Likewise, automated machine learning runs a few models with hyperparameters tuned various ways on a user’s new dataset to learn how accurate the pipeline’s predictions are. That information informs the next set of recommendations, and so on and so forth for hundreds of iterations.
“At the end, you have a very good pipeline. You don’t have to do anything on top of it. And, the system never needs to see the data, which is attractive to a lot of people these days,” said Fusi, explaining that a user’s dataset remains on their local machine or in a virtual machine in Azure backed by Microsoft’s privacy policy.
Nicolo Fusi, a Microsoft researcher and machine learning expert, developed the automated machine learning capability for his own research purposes. Photo by Dana J. Quigley for Microsoft.
From lab to product
Fusi described the research behind automated machine learning in an academic paper. The Azure Machine Learning team saw an opportunity to incorporate the technology as a feature in the machine learning service, noted Venky Veeraraghavan, group program manager for the machine learning platform team.
Over the process of validating the technology, product testing and benchmarking with customers, the Azure team discovered several novel ways customers could use it.
For example, customers who have hundreds or thousands of pieces of equipment in different geographic locations, such as windmills on wind farms, could use automated machine learning to fine tune predictive models for each piece of equipment, which would otherwise prove cost and time prohibitive.
In other cases, data scientists are turning to automated machine learning after they’ve already selected and tuned a model as a way to validate their handcrafted solution. “We have found they often get a better model they hadn’t considered,” Veeraraghavan said.
For Fusi, the capability has eliminated the most tedious part of developing AI, freeing him to focus on other aspects such as feature engineering – the process of extracting useful relationships from data – and to get some rest.
“I can start an automated machine learning run, go home, sleep, and come back to work and see a good model,” he said.
Top image: Nicolo Fusi presents a graphic that shows models identified by automated machine learning. Photo by Dana J. Quigley for Microsoft.
Related:
John Roach writes about Microsoft research and innovation. Follow him on Twitter.
Instagram co-founders latest executives to leave Facebook
By Mikey Campbell Monday, September 24, 2018, 08:51 pm PT (11:51 pm ET)
Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger have resigned from their posts at Facebook and will depart the company in the coming weeks, leaving the massively popular photo sharing app solely in the hands of Facebook executives for the first time.
Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom (left) and CTO Mike Krieger. | Source: Toyokeizai
CEO Systrom and CTO Krieger notified Instagram leadership and Facebook about their departure on Monday, according to The New York Times.
Following the report, Systrom posted a short message to Instagram’s official blog confirming the move, saying he and Krieger are “now ready for [their] next chapter.”
“We’re planning on taking some time off to explore our curiosity and creativity again,” Systrom said. “Building new things requires that we step back, understand what inspires us and match that with what the world needs; that’s what we plan to do.”
Over the past eight years, the co-founders turned Instagram into a social media monolith with more than one billion users worldwide.
The app started life on Apple’s iOS platform in 2010, quickly rising through the ranks to become one of the App Store’s most popular titles. Instagram remains in the upper echelon of the App Store, currently sitting in the No. 2 spot for free-to-download apps behind Google’s YouTube.
Systrom and Krieger did not explain the reason for their departure, sources said.
The resignations are the latest in a series of high-profile departures for Facebook. Over the past few months the social network lost a number of high-ranking executives, including VP of communications and public policy Elliot Schrage and VP and general counsel Colin Stretch, amidst criticism over the company’s data collection policies. In April, WhatsApp founder Jan Koum, who joined Facebook when the messaging app was purchased by Facebook in 2014, announced he was leaving after expressing concern over the company’s handling of user data, The Times said.
It was in April that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg faced Congress to explain how political data consulting firm Cambridge Analytica gained unauthorized access to the personal data of some 87 million users.
Facebook, as well as other social media platforms including Instagram and Twitter, were also condemned for their part in disseminating false information leading up to the 2016 presidential election. Specifically, Russian operatives created accounts and Facebook groups, bought ads and conducted maneuvers with an intent to disrupt the election process.
Whether Systrom and Krieger took their leave due to Facebook’s user data woes is unclear, though a report from TechCrunch cites tensions with Zuckerberg as a potential catalyst for action.
Facebook purchased Instagram six years ago for $1 billion in what is seen as its most successful acquisition to date.
Here’s a guide to Artifact, before you can even play Artifact
By Ian Boudreau24 Sep 2018
Okay, I realize that not many of us are able to play Valve’s Dota 2-based card game Artifact yet – only a select and precious few have been selected to play in the closed beta that’s going on. But there’s no reason not to bone up on knowledge about how the game works, so you’re prepared to lay waste to opponents when the game does arrive on mobile next year.
A YouTuber by the name of SwimStrim has been playing a lot of the Artifact beta, and he has an appropriately huge amount of knowledge to drop. Today, he uploaded his video detailing all red-colored heroes and cards, and even if you’re not playing yet, it’s a wealth of information:
[embedded content]
If you’re interested in the game and want more, Swim has a card reveal and black deck analysis available to watch here.
Artifact is coming out November 28 on PC, and it’ll be available on mobile sometime in 2019.
For the first time in the racing and driving genre, experience dynamic seasons in a shared open-world. Explore beautiful scenery, collect over 450 cars, and become a Horizon Superstar in historic Britain.
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 09-25-2018, 04:32 AM - Forum: Lounge
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Google exploring 6DoF and other features for Daydream VR
Google has detailed a handful of features its team is toying around with for its Daydream VR platform that developers might be interested in, including experimental 6 degrees of freedom (6DoF) tracking for the Mirage Solo.
6DoF tracking isn’t a groundbreaking VR development on its own, but, as Google notes on its developer blog, the tech has typically been limited only to PC-based VR while the Mirage Solo is notably a standalone headset.
The company is adding APIs to the Mirage Solo that allows for 6DoF controller tracking, and has created its own set of experimental controllers to give devs a way to test out and create VR experiences to accompany the tech.
Ideally, this would mean that the Mirage Solo will eventually be able to offer accurate and self-contained positional tracking without the need for external cameras or sensors positioned throughout a room.
U.S.-based developers can apply for an experimental 6DoF dev kit to try out the tech for themselves on Google’s developer portal.
Google is also working on a way to open up the Mirage Solo to augmented reality through a WorldSense-powered “see-through mode” that would use the headset’s tracking cameras to let someone see the world around them while wearing the headset. With that, virtual objects could then be placed and interacted with in a real-world environment, similar to AR apps for mobile phone cameras and AR-dedicated headsets like the Magic Leap One.
A full write-up and a handful of gifs on these and a few other experimental features Google currently has in the works can be found on the Google Developer Blog.
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 09-25-2018, 04:32 AM - Forum: Lounge
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Don’t Miss: Exploring the rise and appeal of Roguelikes
Over the last year, the roguelike has become the it-genre, particularly for independent developers. While debate remains over what constitutes a roguelike or whether the term should even be used, there’s no argument around the fact that both developers and players have come to love these games for their endless, procedural challenges.
This year’s best student game in the Independent Games Festival was Risk of Rain; Klei Entertainment sold over a million copies of Don’t Starve last year. These are just two obvious success stories that owe a lot to the appeal of roguelike mechanics.
Tanya X. Short of Kitfox Games (Shattered Planet) succinctly captures this appeal: “As a designer, and as a player, I love procedurally generated, system-driven games because I’m curious.”
That hook has lead more and more to explore the boundaries of roguelike game design. “I think success breeds success,” says Don’t Starvelead Kevin Forbes. “There have been a couple of really good games in the past few years that serve both as an introduction for players, and as inspiration for developers.”
“There’s a book that could be written on this topic.”
Daniel Cook, developer at Spry Fox (Road Not Taken) explains another key element of the genre — its longevity. “I’ve been playing NetHack for well over 20 years. It is very much a hobby for me. The long-term variability, depth of mastery, and richness of evergreen surprising moments are an anomaly in this era of disposable movie games,” he says. In fact, the roguelike — from its history to its design space — is so fruitful that “there’s a book that could be written on this topic,” he says.
“When some journalist / grad student / pundit asks ‘What is the culturally relevant future of the game industry?’ one loud and clear answer should be ‘roguelikes,'” says Cook.
The roguelike has caught on not just with developers, but also with players. Why is that? 100 Rogues developer Keith Burgun puts it down to a renaissance of players looking for games that offer rich play experiences — which we can also see in the surge of popularity of everything from Minecraft to European board games, he suggests.
“I think people are just slowly, but surely, getting a tiny bit more ground about ‘what games are.’ They are realizing that games are fundamentally way more than just a Universal Studios theme park ride.”
He continues, “I think they’re starting to realize how important gameplay — quality interactions — are, and that’s causing more and more of them to look in places that they wouldn’t have before.”
Short notes that players are attracted not to the idea of the “roguelike” per se, but the experiences these games afford to them: “People don’t play first person shooters because they like the word FPS; people play FPSes because they enjoy shooting guns as an immersive experience.“
“What I love as a player is that I’m constantly running into new situations that I want to share with my friends,” Cook says. Short agrees: “Their value tends to be in providing the maximum possible array of outcomes… i.e. satisfying novelty as long as possible, with the minimum number of elements.”
Burgun notes that this novelty can speak to gamers in a very basic way, with roguelikes offering “so much stuff in one package that surely something in there, you’re going to enjoy.”
“As a player, I feel like any given mechanic or system can reliably be pushed to its limits, as a challenge and as a strategic tool.”
“You can be surprised by something new every time you play. You can challenge yourself to learn about and master complex systems,” Forbes says. “I think that a lot of players really appreciate being able to direct their own experience, and emergent gameplay lets things happen that keep the experience fresh. There’s a level of replayability inherent to the genre that’s sorely missing these days.”
The roguelike allows for “unique, surreal and wonderful collisions between player agency and complex systems,” says Cook, a mode of expression that is “unique to games.”
Forbes continues this thought: “I’ve always found it odd we game designers have such an exciting, unique medium to work with, but so often waste its potential trying to emulate film.”
It’s the potential for surprise that can excite both the player and the developer, Short says. “As a player, I feel like any given mechanic or system can reliably be pushed to its limits, as a challenge and as a strategic tool. And as a designer, it’s incredibly satisfying to watch players use your systems to come up with new strategies you didn’t think of.”
But its appeal for developers extends well beyond that: Roguelikes provide an exciting creative space, certainly, but the genre also allows today’s smaller teams to stretch their resources.
“I think every designer now has to ask themselves, at the start of any game project these days, ‘Is there any way I can procedurally generate any of my content without the quality suffering enormously?’ Any answers to the affirmative must be taken seriously. The value-to-cost ratio is just too high,” Short says.
Cook puts it more succinctly: “One- or two-person teams can’t afford to make 100 hours of sexy 3D-storytime. But they can make 100 hours of roguelike bliss.”
“One- or two-person teams can’t afford to make 100 hours of sexy 3D-storytime. But they can make 100 hours of roguelike bliss.”
The savings is not simply based on the fact that content is generated procedurally and thus, in some sense, free — the thinking required to create games like these also insures design changes won’t result in costly rework, says Cook. “With static levels, a change to your core mechanics could result in months of rework,” Cook says. “Regenerating levels after a change to your game mechanics is a trivial exercise. Content becomes amenable to cheap refactoring.“
That flexibility also results in a fundamentally different kind of gameplay, says Defender’s Quest developer Lars Doucet. “In most other games, you can always reset, or reload, and use your knowledge of the future (or of unchanging levels) to march your way forward. Most video games are like karate katas that you practice over and over again. With roguelikes and procedural death labyrinths, it’s an actual fight on the streets — you don’t know what’s coming at you, and you have to improvise and think on your feet.”
This procedural flexibility, in concert with mechanics like permadeth that the genre has popularized, “opens up the possibility for single-player video games to actually be contests — to be competitive — to be a thing you can win and lose,” notes Burgun.
