Game-related ramblings.

Tag: Mercury

Roguelike Updates: Axe And You Shall Receive

Readers who are unfamiliar with roguelikes may wish to read my introduction to the genre, or peruse the various Roguelike Highlights posts. Also remember that you can click on images for bigger versions.

Just because I spent four months playing nothing but indie platformers doesn’t mean that the various roguelikes I’ve covered on the blog have stopped updating. It’s time to catch up with the latest developments! The biggest news for me was the release of Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup v0.12 (it’s now at v0.12.2 with a few more bugfixes). While the nickname for this release, “High Vaultage”, refers to the redesign of the Vaults dungeon branch, I was actually more interested in another change: axes now hit up to seven targets around the wielder with each attack. This presented an excellent incentive to return to a race/class combination that I’d dabbled with before: the deep dwarf berserker.

Roguelike Updates: Who Needs Leveling, Anyway?

It’s time for another roundup of updates to the various roguelikes I’ve covered on this blog. The big news is that Brogue has reached v1.7, with some major changes.

With the exception of its scrolls of enchantment — which allowed players to customize their characters not by some up-front character generation choices but by which pieces of equipment they chose to enchant — Brogue was quite similar to the original Rogue on first release. But the scrolls of enchantment were a great idea, and the strict rationing of these scrolls created strategic dilemmas not found in other roguelikes. By the time I wrote about it, other features of Brogue had already started to follow suit. The player character’s strength (and therefore, ability to use heavier weapons and armor) was no longer tied to experience level, instead being granted by potions of strength which were rationed just like scrolls of enchantment. This meant that it was no longer necessary to fight lots of enemies before getting to use better equipment, and stealthy tactics were more viable.

Still, fighting monsters for experience points to gain levels remained at the core of Brogue, and gaining levels was the only way to gain more health. Until now. With v1.7, leveling has been completely removed from the game.

Roguelike Highlights: Mercury

If you haven’t already, you may wish to read my Introduction to Roguelikes. Previous Roguelike Highlights can be found here.

I’ve been pretty busy recently so I haven’t had much time to post, but I wanted to at least write something quick about Mercury. While most Roguelike Highlights are fairly long and detailed, this one doesn’t have to be, because of the central premise of Mercury. It’s a winner-generated roguelike. Rather than being continuously updated by the developer, as most roguelikes are, Mercury instead tracks players’ high scores, and at the end of each cycle (I think cycles are two weeks long but I’m not sure) the two players with the highest scores can add a new character class, monster, or item to the game. Then everyone plays with the new stuff for the next cycle, and the new high scorers will get to add more stuff when that cycle ends.

That means that Mercury started off as a very simple game, with only one character class, one type of monster, and one item. Since then, it’s grown quite a bit.

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