The original idea was to start with "roguelike" here, but unfortunately I'm not able to do that. The only roguelike that I spent a long time with is Angband (and I haven't even finished it once). However, show me something like Spelunky or Necrodancer or Risk of Rain and I'm guaranteed to spend a few evenings with it.

I'm not surprised if it's the first time you hear the term "roguelite" or "roguelike-like". I really think we should come up with a more approachable term for this basic idea. Let me explain it in one paragraph:

A roguelite is a game that you can finish in a few hours tops, but that you're not going to finish on your first attempt. It's a game where you're going to lose and then you're going to start over. However, losing is fun because playthroughs are short and expendable and you can quickly learn from your mistakes. Starting over is fun too because every single playthrough is going to be different: you will keep discovering new content and the challenges won't get close to repetitive for a good while.

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"Hey, this is Kos! Have you met Kos? He is a passionate gamer."

I get that a lot during introductions. The next line usually sounds something like "Hey Kos, nice to meet you, what games do you play?" sounds like a simple question, but I never seem to be able to answer that!

I could probably get away with something like "Old games" or maybe just "Factorio" and it would be mostly true, but hey, I can do better! Let's give it a little more thought...

Among all the random titles that I happened to launch, I can pinpoint a few genres that just resonate with me the most. I'm not a hardcore gamer and I have not explored any these genres to the core, but there's a super high chance that if you show me a game from one of the following genres, it will resonate with me instantly.

Here goes...

• Part 1: Roguelite
• Part 2: Metroidvania
• Part 3: Shmup

Okay, I admit - my recollection of events from here onwards is rather fuzzy. Might be not enough coffee, but it's probably related to the fact that at some point I got less scrupulous with note-taking and instead spent a good chunk of most lectures slaying hydras. However, after a valiant effort, I somehow managed to still walk away with a few pages of notes...

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This was the longest day of the conference for me, and also the most exciting one, since I had the chance to listen to two of my personal gurus of Polish indie gamedev - Michał Marcinkowski from Transhuman Design and Kornel Kisielewicz from ChaosForge. But let's not get too far ahead...

Since there's so much to cover, I'm splitting this day into two parts.

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