Part of the Roguelike Universe series: selected games between 1971 - 2016
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This chart represents connections between roguelike games and with games from other genres. Data was gathered from crawling the web for interviews, post-mortems, reviews and dev diaries. Connections were made by algorithms using keyword spotting in natural language processing.
The genre-influence matrix was developed as a supplementary legend to read the influence diagram above. Each quadrant represents a combination of in-genre/out-of-genre and past/future. This creates an interesting dynamic where a title can be representative of its own genre, taking most of its influence from the past, or influential by having many connections to its future, with respect to titles in the roguelike as well as the broader context.
Taking each arc in the quadrant (upper-left, upper-right, bottom-left, bottom-right), we can draw a point for each roguelike game. The more arcs there are in each quadrant, the more biased the point is towards a corner of the map. For readability, we omitted 20 titles, and relaxed the point placements so they are not cluttered.