Denver Hack Nite - Roguelike Packaging Party

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