Hey folks, something a little different today. Over the last few months I've been helping out with organizing this year's Roguelike Celebration, which is happening this weekend!

Roguelike Celebration is a yearly community-generated weekend of talks, games, and conversations about roguelikes and related topics, including procedural generation and game design. It's for fans, players, developers, scholars, and everyone else!

Its tickets are under a pay-what-you-want model, so if that description interests you at all you should check it out: https://www.roguelike.club/event2026.html

There are a bunch of great talks lined up this year, but a few highlights are:

• Brian Bucklew and Corey Frang are sharing the in-progress text templating framework that has been taking on the huge task of localizing Caves of Qud, with its complicated grammar structures.
• Dan Stormont and Michael Howk are presenting a 45 minute special feature on how the source code of Hack (one of the oldest Roguelikes) was recovered and what it took to make a game written for the PDP-11 playable on modern hardware.
• Andrew Plotkin is going to explore the commonalities of mazes across many genres to try and discover what it is about mazes that leaves you feeling lost.
• Matt Carney is going to explore how to balance procedural generation and authorial intent, using Terry Riley’s minimalist musical composition tool In C (1964), as a template

I've mostly been doing behind-the-scenes work this year, so you won't see me in the actual conference, but if you see the little gameboy chiptune segments during break periods (this time brought to you by my 3DS!), that is streaming from my desk this year.