Archive for February, 2010:

Friday, February 26th, 2010 20:21

Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup’s New Official Homepage

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The time has come to finally close down our SourceForge bug, patch and feature request trackers.

We have migrated our bug and feature-request tracking to a Mantis Tracker – please sign up there to contribute! In addition to the tracker, we have created a DokuWiki for play-testing feedback and for suggesting and discussing new features and ideas.

Also, the official home page for the Stone Soup project is now http://crawl.develz.org – if you haven’t yet checked out our development blog, you should! Mailing list and git repository are still located on SourceForge.

Thanks to Jude for covering many of the major changes in 0.6 in the play-testing posts, Darshan for his history blog-post, and Johanna for the post covering tiles and tides! And last but not least, thanks to develz.org and Napkin for hosting us!

5 comments!
Thursday, February 25th, 2010 12:44

Play-testing: A Great Big List

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Due to the large amount of quality posts (specifically, Eino Keskitalo’s account of a Naga Transmuter of Cheibriados, and Johanna Ploog’s article on Shoals and tiles development) that have been made to the blog recently, as well as limited time on my part, we’re going to forgo the usual play-testing highlight and instead deliver The Great Big List.

Tune in next week for a piece discussing the recent removal of the Divinations school! We’ll start where we left off last week, at commit b11820d43d9!

More: Read the rest of this entry…

3 comments!
Sunday, February 21st, 2010 23:55

A Tide of Tiles

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Shoals development from a Tiles perspective

As you might or might not know, the overall Shoals development happened with the speed of a glacier. First started during the development of 0.3.x, the beginning of the Shoals implementation, then codenamed Islands, roughly coincided with Enne Walker’s integration of tiles into Stone Soup. To me, it thus makes perfect sense to have a look at the relationship between Tiles and Shoals development.

More: Read the rest of this entry…

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Saturday, February 20th, 2010 15:55

The Amazing Adventures of Che Nagavara

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I had a pretty good run with two Naga Transmuters of Che recently. The first go first found all the bookshops one could hope for, then stupidly died to a D:11 hill giant before finding the Mines and indulging in bibliophilia.

The other run managed to grab two runes. This was a long enough game to let me see a good bunch of the new content in a real game. Slime creatures, ugly things, I can’t remember a time I was glad to see one of either! While I didn’t get Shoals or Wizlabs, I did have a Treasure Trove. I think the trove itself had more gold than I paid for it though, that was strange.

I didn’t have a lot of trouble starting out. I think the key to getting a naga off the ground is to spit, spit, spit that poison. Transmuters might have a hard XL1, but the very first level gain unlocks Evaporate (and Sticks to Snakes, which I opted out of), which makes matters both easy and fun. A lot of the game was spent e’x'amining if the encounters had poison resistance or not.

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Saturday, February 13th, 2010 03:56

Play-testing: On the Subject of Branching

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If you’re a follower of the crawl-ref-discuss mailing list or a regular reader of commit logs (I know that I am!) you may have noticed the creation of a new branch of Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. The branch in question is “stone_soup-0.6″, and its creation means a variety of things for players of the trunk builds hosted here as well as the versions playable via secure shell and telnet.

This week we’re going to take a few minutes to discuss those things rather than focusing on a specific set of changes.

More: Read the rest of this entry…

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Sunday, February 7th, 2010 04:08

Play-testing: Leader of the Pack!

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We thought we’d take on a slightly lighter (but no less relevant) topic this week: monster packs. Conveniently sized for maximum death, there are a variety of monsters that come in packs. The ones people probably notice the most are ugly things, slime creatures and yaks. These are the most prevalent in the early and middle parts of the game, and, depressingly enough, are also the most boring.

Our current developmental release seeks to relieve some of the monotony with two of these packs: slime creatures and ugly things.

Slime creatures

Slime creatures, a common sight in multiple branches (you might find them camped out in the Swamp, or perhaps huddled in the corner of a room in the Vaults), now combined form larger and larger slime creatures. Two slime creatures combined form a “large slime creature”, three a “very large slime creature”, and so on*. As their size increases, so also do their various statistics: damage is combined, as are hit-points. Thankfully, as these increase, so does the experience granted by them upon death.

More: Read the rest of this entry…

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Saturday, February 6th, 2010 19:33

The Dawn of Stone Soup

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How I started playing Crawl, and the early history of the Stone Soup project.

In the winter of 2002, I had large amounts of free time at my job, and I spent it in two ways: reading books and playing roguelikes. I’d played a lot of NetHack, but I’d reached a point where the game was quite easy and boring, and I was looking for a new roguelike to play. It wasn’t that roguelikes were the only games that interested me, but they possess several features that make them perfect for playing at work.

More: Read the rest of this entry…

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