Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup | |
---|---|
![]() Logo for Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup | |
Developer(s) | DCSS Devteam |
Platform(s) | Web browser, Cross-platform |
Release | September 19, 2006 [1] |
Genre(s) | Roguelike |
Mode(s) | Single-player |
Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup (DCSS) is a free and open source roguelike computer game and the community-developed successor to the 1997 roguelike game Linley's Dungeon Crawl, originally programmed by Linley Henzell. It has been identified as one of the "major roguelikes" by John Harris. [2]
Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup was first among roguelikes in ASCII Dreams' Roguelike of the Year in 2008, in a poll of 371 roguelike players. [3] It later polled second in 2009 (behind DoomRL ) [4] and 2010 (behind ToME 4 ), [5] and third in 2011 (behind ToME 4 and Dungeons of Dredmor ). [6] The game is released under the GNU GPL-2.0-or-later. [7] The latest release is version 0.31 (0.31), released on Jan 18, 2024. [8] "Stone Soup" refers to the European folk story in which hungry strangers convince the people of a town to each share a small amount of their food in order to make a meal that everyone enjoys.
Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup is a roguelike game where the player creates a character and guides it through a dungeon, mostly consisting of persistent levels, full of monsters and items, with the goal of retrieving the "Orb of Zot" (a MacGuffin) located there, and escaping alive. To enter the Realm of Zot where the Orb is located, the player must first obtain at least three "runes of Zot" of the 15 available; these are located at the ends of diverse dungeon branches such as the Spider Nest, Tomb, and Slime Pits.
The game has an explicit design philosophy intended to provide interesting strategic and tactical choices within a balanced game; to offer replayability based on random dungeon generation; to make the game accessible and enjoyable without deep knowledge of its internal mechanics; and to present a friendly user interface that can optionally automate several tasks like exploration and searching for previously seen items. Conversely, the developer team seeks to avoid providing incentives for repeating boring actions without consideration, or providing illusory gameplay choices where one alternative is always superior. [9] [10]
Most levels are randomly generated to maximize variety, while the levels containing the objective items are randomly chosen between several manually-designed layouts, which usually contain random elements, and which are authored in a Crawl-specific language incorporating Lua scripting. Randomly generated levels may contain randomly chosen manually designed fragments called "vaults", as well as portals to special manually designed mini-levels called "portal vaults" such as volcanoes and wizard's laboratories.
Characters are initially defined by their species and their background. [11] Character advancement is based on experience points gained by defeating monsters, which increase both an experience level and a set of skills including melee weapons, ranged weapons and magic. The player determines which skills to increase. [12]
The species choice determines the aptitudes of the character for each of the skills, which represent how much experience is needed to raise the skill to higher levels and adds species-specific abilities. In the 0.29 version, 27 species are available, from those with little deviation from the common mechanics such as humans and hill orcs, to species such as mummies and octopodes which have unusual gameplay mechanics. [13]
The background choice determines the starting skills and equipment, with 25 choices as of 0.29 such as fighters, necromancers, and berserkers; [14] unlike species choice, background choice only affects the start of the game – the player is not prevented from pursuing any skills and using any equipment.
The game also offers a pantheon of 26 gods. The player can choose to worship one of the gods once the appropriate altar is found. A few backgrounds even start the game already worshipping a specific god. The choice of the deity significantly impacts gameplay. Favor with gods is earned in different ways. Some appreciate the player exploring or killing enemies, but there are also more whimsical gods like Ru, who expects sacrifices of his worshippers. Favor with one's god is rewarded with widely different benefits, ranging from passive enhancements to occasional gifts to the player to powerful activated abilities. Some gods' enhancements are tailored to specific play styles, such as Okawaru's gifts of weapons and combat boosts supporting fighter types; and Sif Muna's gifts of spell books and increases to MP regeneration, which are more beneficial to sorcerer types. [15] A player can also choose to abandon their god in favor of another, but this will usually cause the deity to become angry at the player. Consequently they will harass the player for a time with actions like summoning powerful monsters against the player, inflicting nasty status effects like slowing, or simply dealing large amounts of damage on the player.
Linley's Dungeon Crawl | |
---|---|
![]() | |
Developer(s) | Linley Henzell, Crawl devteam |
Designer(s) | Linley Henzell |
Platform(s) | Cross-platform |
Release | 2 October 1997 |
Genre(s) | Roguelike |
Mode(s) | Single-player |
Linley's Dungeon Crawl (or just Dungeon Crawl or Crawl) was a roguelike computer game originally programmed by Linley Henzell in 1995, and first released to the general public on October 2, 1997. [16] The game had a quirky license based on Bison's license and the NetHack License; [17] Stone Soup has contacted every past contributor and relicensed to GPL-2.0-or-later.
Crawl starts with the player's choice of one of over twenty races: several different types of elves, dwarves, humans, ogres, tengu, centaurs, merfolk, and other fantasy beings. Racial selection sets base attributes, future skill advancement, and physical characteristics such as movement, resistances, and special abilities.
Subject to racial exclusions, the player next chooses a character class from among over twenty selections. Classes include the traditional roles of fighter, wizard, and thief as well as specialty roles, among them monks, berserkers, assassins, crusaders, and elemental spellcasters. Wanderers represent an atypical option and receive a random skill set. Together, class and race determine base equipment and skill training, though characters may later attempt to acquire any in-game skill. [18]
The Crawl skill system covers many abilities, including the ability to move freely in armor or silently, mount effective attacks with different categories of weapons (polearms, long or short blades, maces, axes, and staves), master spells from different magical colleges (the elements, necromancy, conjuration, enchantments, summoning, etc.), utilize magical artifacts, and pray to divinities. Training occurs through repetition of skill-related actions (e.g., hitting a monster with a longsword trains long blades and fighting skills), using experience from a pool refilled as the player defeats monsters.
John Harris, in his "@Play" [18] column states that the experience pool system "deftly avoids the many problems of a skill-based development system", mainly praising the need to move on through the course of the game to further improve a PC's skills. In the same article, John Harris states that this experience system "is probably the best skill system yet seen in any roguelike; it could make a claim at being one of the best in any CRPG".
Religion within Crawl is a central game mechanic. Its diverse pantheon of gods reward character conformance to particular codes of conduct. Trog, the berserker god, expects abstinence from casting spells and offers aid in battle, whereas Sif Muna expects frequent spellcraft in exchange for magical assistance and gifts of spellbooks. Some deities campaign against evil, matched by a god of death who revels in indiscriminate killing, while others prove unpredictable objects of worship. Xom, an example of the latter, toys with followers, meting out punishments and showering gifts on inscrutable whims. [19]
The goal of Crawl is to recover the "Orb of Zot" hidden deep within a dungeon complex. To achieve this objective, characters must visit various dungeon branches, such as the Orcish Mines or The Lair of Beasts, which often branch further in to additional areas, like the Elven Halls or The Swamp, and obtain at least three "Runes of Zot" with which to gain access to the Orb. Fifteen different runes can be obtained in any particular game, and obtaining all of them is generally considered an extra feat. While all the possible 654 race/class combinations have been won on the online servers, only 186 of them were ever played online as an all-rune win (as of 2010-08-24). Dungeon maps in Crawl persist, as in NetHack .
The last official versions of Linley's Dungeon Crawl were 4.0.0 beta 26, from March 24, 2003, and a later alpha release, version 4.1.0, dating from July 2005. [20]
Version 400b26e070t, a popular last community release, includes the 2003–2004 patches (Darshan Shaligram) and updates the game to the standard tile version (M. Itakura, Denzi, Alex Korol, Nullpodoh).
The game has been ported to the Nintendo DS as DSCrawl.
Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup begun in 2006 by Darshan "greensnark" Shaligram and Erik Piper as an attempt to restart Crawl development, which had progressed slowly in the years since Linley Henzell, creator of the original Linley's Dungeon Crawl, had retired from developing the game. Several patches had been made to the game, particularly one by Shaligram known as the "Travel patch", which borrowed the implementation of Dijkstra's algorithm from NetHack to provide an auto-exploration ability in game. These patches were compiled into the Stone Soup project, which eventually released publicly on SourceForge. [21]
Stone Soup has since then developed an unprecedented variety of extensions which fit into this general vein of "play aid", such as allowing searching through every item ever discovered by regular expression. [22] Additionally, Stone Soup has made a number of user interface improvements, such as mouse interaction and an optional graphical user interface. [21]
To avoid featuritis, Stone Soup has pruned gameplay elements which they considered superfluous, including several races, backgrounds, magical schools, [23] and most recently the food system. The development team has also expressed a desire to maintain the current total length of the game, and so as new areas are added to the dungeon, old ones have been shortened or even removed to compensate. [24]
One notable addition of the Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup branch is the ability to play (locally or in a web browser) using a graphical tile version of the game. Players unfamiliar with the genre may find the tile version more accessible.
There are two Android ports of the game available.
An unofficial port of the console version was developed and released on Google Play. [25]
There is also a port of the tile version that is under development. The latest unstable builds can be downloaded from the official website. [26]
Several public servers support online play through an SSH client and some of these also allow graphical play in web browser (referred to as webtiles). Features of online play include automated high-score tracking [27] and real-time recording of online play for later viewing. [28] Also, ghosts of other players' characters are frequently encountered on a player's journey, providing an additional challenge. A biannual tournament for all Stone Soup players is held after each major release on the servers (usually in September and April). Additionally, players may test experimental game modes, races, and gods, that are not yet ready to be added to the main version.
NetHack is an open source single-player roguelike video game, first released in 1987 and maintained by the NetHack DevTeam. The game is a fork of the 1982 game Hack, itself inspired by the 1980 game Rogue. The player takes the role of one of several pre-defined character classes to descend through multiple dungeon floors, fighting monsters and collecting treasure, to recover the "Amulet of Yendor" at the lowest floor and then escape.
Roguelike is a style of role-playing game traditionally characterized by a dungeon crawl through procedurally generated levels, turn-based gameplay, grid-based movement, and permanent death of the player character. Most roguelikes are based on a high fantasy narrative, reflecting their influence from tabletop role-playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons.
Ancient Domains of Mystery is a roguelike video game designed and developed by Thomas Biskup and released in 1994. The player's goal is to stop the forces of Chaos that invade the world of Ancardia. The game has been identified as one of the "major roguelikes" by John Harris.
Rogue is a dungeon crawling video game by Michael Toy and Glenn Wichman with later contributions by Ken Arnold. Rogue was originally developed around 1980 for Unix-based minicomputer systems as a freely distributed executable. It was later included in the Berkeley Software Distribution 4.2 operating system (4.2BSD). Commercial ports of the game for a range of personal computers were made by Toy, Wichman, and Jon Lane under the company A.I. Design and financially supported by the Epyx software publishers. Additional ports to modern systems have been made since by other parties using the game's now-open source code.
Crawl, The Crawl, or crawling may refer to:
In computing, procedural generation is a method of creating data algorithmically as opposed to manually, typically through a combination of human-generated content and algorithms coupled with computer-generated randomness and processing power. In computer graphics, it is commonly used to create textures and 3D models. In video games, it is used to automatically create large amounts of content in a game. Depending on the implementation, advantages of procedural generation can include smaller file sizes, larger amounts of content, and randomness for less predictable gameplay. Procedural generation is a branch of media synthesis.
pedit5, alternately called The Dungeon, is a 1975 dungeon crawl role-playing video game developed for the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign's PLATO computer network by Rusty Rutherford. In it, the player controls a character exploring a fixed, single-level dungeon containing randomly-generated monster encounters and treasure. When they encounter a monster, they can fight the monster with a weapon or spells, or attempt to flee. Characters can be saved between sessions.
DRL, short for Doom, the Roguelike, is a roguelike video game developed by ChaosForge based on the first-person shooters Doom and Doom II. It has been in development since 2002, and was released for Microsoft Windows, Linux and OS X. Following a cease and desist notice from "Doom" trademark owner ZeniMax Media, the game's name was changed to DRL in 2016.
Spelunky is a 2008 source-available 2D platform game created by independent developer Derek Yu and released as freeware for Microsoft Windows. It was remade for the Xbox 360 in 2012, with ports of the new version following for various platforms, including back to Microsoft Windows. The player controls a spelunker who explores a series of caves while collecting treasure, saving damsels, fighting enemies, and dodging traps. The caves are procedurally generated, making each run-through of the game unique.
DarkSpyre is a 1990 video game produced by Event Horizon Software for MS-DOS. It was released the following year for the Amiga. Darkspyre is a dungeon crawl style role-playing game. It uses top-down graphics and randomly generated dungeons, similar to a roguelike.
Elona is a single-player, roguelike game developed by Japanese developer Noa; it was released in August, 2007.
Dungeons of Dredmor is a roguelike indie video game released on July 13, 2011, by Gaslamp Games. A downloadable content (DLC) pack, "Realm of the Diggle Gods", was released later that year. A second DLC, "You Have To Name The Expansion Pack", was released on June 5, 2012, and a third, "Conquest of the Wizardlands", was released on August 1, 2012. The game has extensive support for user-created modifications.
Desktop Dungeons is a single-player roguelike-like puzzle video game developed and published by QCF Design. Released in November 2013, the game underwent a lengthy public beta phase, during which it was available to customers who pre-ordered the game. In the game, players navigate a dungeon filled with monsters before battling a final dungeon boss. The game has qualities of a puzzle as players must find the best methods to use items, spells, and upgrades to reach the final boss without losing too much of their character's health. Desktop Dungeons has been compared to a roguelike but with condensed gameplay. Desktop Dungeons received an award for Excellence in Design at the 2011 Independent Games Festival. The game is available for Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, and Android. A video game remake titled Desktop Dungeons: Rewind was announced in 2022 and released April 18, 2023.
Tales of Maj'Eyal is an open-source roguelike video game released for Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux in 2012. Tales of Maj'Eyal is available as donation-supported freeware (donationware) from the developers; donations grant some exclusive online features as part of a freemium model. The game may also be purchased through the digital distribution outlets Steam or GOG. The game's TE4 game engine source code is under a GNU GPLv3 license, while the game's assets are licensed for use "with the Tales of Maj'Eyal game only".
Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead (CDDA) is an open-source survival horror roguelike video game. Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead is a fork of the original game Cataclysm. The game is freely downloadable on the game's website and the source code is also freely available on the project's GitHub repository under the CC BY-SA Creative Commons license. The game is currently largely developed by its community. Rock, Paper, Shotgun named CDDA one of "The 50 Best Free Games on PC" in 2016.
Crawl is a brawler indie game by Australian developer Powerhoof. Up to four players and bots in local multiplayer advance through randomly generated dungeons with one player as the hero and the others as spirits who possess traps and monsters in the environment to kill and thus replace the hero. The game received a Steam Early Access release for Microsoft Windows, OS X, and Linux platforms in August 2014, and a full release for those three as well as PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in April 2017 and a release for Nintendo Switch on December 19, 2017.
Brogue is a free roguelike computer video game created by Brian Walker. As in its predecessor Rogue, the goal of Brogue is for the player to descend to the 26th floor of the Dungeons of Doom, retrieve the Amulet of Yendor, and return to the surface. Players also have the option of delving deeper into the dungeon to obtain a higher score. This task is complicated by the presence of monsters and traps in a procedurally generated dungeon.
A roguelike deck-building game is a hybrid genre of video games that combines the nature of deck-building card games with procedural-generated randomness from roguelike games.
Delver is a 2018 first-person roguelike action dungeon crawler video game developed by Priority Interrupt. It was released for Microsoft Windows, macOS, and Linux on February 2, 2018.
Mistover is a 2019 roguelike dungeon crawler role-playing video game developed and published by Krafton for Microsoft Windows, Nintendo Switch, and PlayStation 4. Mistover is set in a ravaged world recovering from a mass invasion of monstrous creatures from another realm, and its storyline follows the journey of a party of adventuring heroes who are on a quest to discover the source of the invasion. Players navigate environments from an isometric perspective with a party of procedurally generated player characters drawn from a roster of eight character classes to fight monsters and acquire loot recovered from the exploration of levels. A phenomenon known as "mist" is prevalent throughout the game world and negatively influences its characters, monsters, and items.