As part of preparing my talk for roguelike celebration 2026, I created a visualization of the references between slashie.net projects considering both game design elements and also technical inheritance.

Why did I do this? I’ve been making games of all kinds for a long time, so I thought it would be useful to look back and analyze what I’ve been doing to see how can I continue doing it better during my last days; this led me to the idea of stop seeing them as separate projects, but rather as a continuous experiment where each game borrows something from an earlier one. Sometimes it’s a mechanic, sometimes a map generator, some times big chunks of code to be used as its foundation.

So I created this thing to help me see and build those relationships and groupings; I wanted to know which games started whole families, which ideas kept coming back, and which projects were dead ends that led nowhere. But mainly what “identities” I’m making for myself when it comes to game design, and how I can continue improving them. You can see it online at https://slashie.net/lineage

The map starts from the project list on slashie.net turned it into a dataset of about 124 games, from 2001 to 2026. For each game I summarized its gameplay and visual features and where that information came from. Then came the links between games, with each link says which game a project descends from, what kind of relationship it is (successor, remake, mod, shared engine, inherited procedural generator, and so on) and which features carried over.

Every link is also marked by how certain it is… some I stated myself, some are documented in devlogs or readmes, and some are only inferred from similar features. I set some rules around it like setting and theme wouldn’t count, since I was mainly looking for design patterns and technical inheritance.

The result is an interactive timeline. Each game sits in its year, grouped into swim lanes. A bar shows how many years I worked on it, and lines connect it to its ancestors. The page has two views: “Game design” groups games by gameplay lineage: streamlined turn-based roguelikes, world exploration games, first-person crawlers, etc, while “Technical” regroups the same games by the code they’re built on: the Java/SERF chain, Flash, the JavaScript/JSRL family, Phaser, Unity and others. Some links appear in both views, like a remake or a reused generator. Others only make sense in one. The Java codebase is a good example: it runs from Guardian Angel through CastlevaniaRL, DrashRL, ZeldaRL and Expedition up to Hope, even though those games play quite differently.

Click any game and everything outside its ancestry and descendants fades out. A side panel lists what it inherited and what it passed on. You can also search, hide the inferred links to see only confirmed history, or highlight everything at once.

Looking at it this way surprised me. A few small experiments turned out to be the roots of whole lineages. Some of the projects I remember as most important turned out to have no descendants at all.

Next up I’ll be integrating this data-wise to slashie.net’s main projects datasource so that there’s only one place to keep updated.