ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

I've discussed this at IRDC, and there's been discussion and planning on RogueTemple. The "Roguelike Incubator" (Todd Page's idea) is based around a cabal (or cabals) of developers joining to give each other criticism and development feedback as they put together their games, with the aim of producing a polished bundle of roguelikes. The first such attempt is starting now, with a bundle to be released for the Annual Roguelike Release Party in September, and I invite interested developers to put forward their names:

http://roguetemple.com/forums/index.php?topic=2443

Admission is open, but on the agreement that you contribute regularly and produce a polished roguelike by the target date. Those that don't contribute or fail to produce sufficiently polished games will be excluded. This is necessarily elitist - we want to establish a brand with recognised quality, but more important than that have the right pressurised environment to push us to work hard.

All operations will be public, so feel free to keep an eye on things or provide your own feedback even if you're not taking part.

I'll be taking part with Rogue Rage, and some others have already signed up too.

I wish I could trust myself to develop anything. Hopefully some cool things will come out of it. This is what concerns me:

100% Roguelike - intense and challenging games with permadeath and procedural design

Are "intense," "challenging," "permadeath," and "procedural design" the only qualifications for being 100% roguelike? If you are taking a strict interpretation of "roguelike," it sounds like the bundle will contain five Nethack clones, five Angband clones, and a half-baked ADoM clone. There seems to be a lot of discussion regarding web integration, Steam-like distribution, nontraditional graphics, and achievements, none of which seem particularly roguelike. Not that this is bad - I'd rather see a bunch of games that play very uniquely, perhaps some even heavily pushing the definitions like Diablo or Minecraft (roguelikelikes?). My favorite roguelikes are ToME, POWDER, Brogue, Dwarf Fortress, and DoomRL, and not one of those would I call 100% roguelike.

Then by your definition I guess Rogue isn't a roguelike? It's nothing like the big 3 you mention. Nethack and Angband do not have a monopoly on the term.

Our 100% roguelike brand is to make clear there's a coherent theme. It excluds real time games, but generally the definition or roguelike is much broader these days than it was 10 years ago. All the games you list are generally accepted as pure roguelikes.

I would say that Rogue technically isn't Rogue-like, given that similarity isn't the same as equality, but semantics :P. Anyway, I wasn't really complaining, it was just hard to judge what sort of projects were expected. I read RogueBasin articles occasionally, and I've picked up that the term "roguelike" isn't very concise.