Comments on: The Dawn of Stone Soup

By: Reaven

Reaven — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 00:02:37 +0000

I’ve been a fan of Dungeon Crawl since the original, and I think this is the best RogueLike I have played and I’ve tried 90% of them.

By: fnwc

fnwc — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 20:00:19 +0000

I think the stone soup comment has something to do with this fable: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_soup.

However, this is pure speculation on my part, but makes sense (in the community participation point of view).

At any rate, this was a very cool writeup on the history, thanks for sharing.

By: Simon

Simon — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 11:58:49 +0000

But why’s it called “Stone Soup”?

By: greensnark

greensnark — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 20:55:45 +0000

Yes, my first impression of the game was: “Why is everything shouting at me?” :-)

Apparently jarpiain (wasp) kept a log of Linley’s visit to IRC, available here:
http://crawl.develz.org/main/linley-at-%23%23crawl.txt

In response to the thanks: the whole team and the player community deserves the thanks; they’ve been doing a great job on Crawl, and I’m really looking forward to the upcoming 0.6 release.

The number of excellent contributions from outside the devteam proper — vaults, tiles, patches and useful playtesting feedback — is awesome, and I think the development scene for Crawl has never looked better.

By: jpeg

jpeg — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 17:08:59 +0000

And here I thought explaining monster shouts in the tutorial was overkill…

Loved the article, very exciting!

By: evktalo

evktalo — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 14:05:47 +0000

What a great read. Thank you!

I wonder if I (or someone else?) thought of making a log out of Linley’s visit. Might be around somewhere.

Interesting that you were curious about the kobold shouting at you. I watched a first play last Friday and the player wondered about all the shouting too.

–Eino

By: greensnark

greensnark — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 13:47:30 +0000

Linley and Brent are aware of Stone Soup. Linley visited ##crawl back in 2008 with the nick Yredelemnul. I wasn’t on chat at the time, but Eino mentioned that he was pretty happy with the direction DCSS was going.

By: Napkin

Napkin — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 12:24:29 +0000

Awesome article! Thank you very much :)

One thing left me curious: Did Linley or Brent ever show up again and try Stone Soup?

By: bookofjude

bookofjude — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 03:14:35 +0000

Excellent history! I wish I’d found crawl earlier, but I’m glad that I’ve joined the project at such an awesome and active point in time.

By: LoginError

LoginError — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 19:42:32 +0000

I was originally a big fan of nethack, but the interface frustrated me. At first it was funny, randomly being killed by falling down a staircase, or kicking a cockatrice or many other YASD’s. But eventually I was simply frustrated by having to fight the game engine its self, instead of the dungeon. There were also so many special cases: dipping things in potions,blessed/cursed potions/scrolls, sinks, weapons with hidden values,tins etc. I usually had the spoiler files open in a browser window, simply so i could tell exactly how strong the weapons and items were in comparison to each other.

I was pleasantly surprised then when I discovered stone soup and found that it fixed everything I hated about nethack. I could use the mouse for inventory management, items were explained in game, and the game protected you from things you should know better than to do, such as targeting yourself with dangerous spells. Most of my stupid deaths are now from things like “got-surrounded-by-4-yaks” instead of “pressed-the-wrong-button-and-zapped-myself”.

I also applaud the devs for being open and transparent about the development process, and being nice to noobs wishing to contribute.

Anyway, just wanted to say “good job!”. Crawl has been a wonderfully counterproductive distraction for me for this last month, and I see it continuing to be so for a long time.

By: Rz.berry

Rz.berry — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 18:54:37 +0000

Love it, you’ve done great work. My favorite roguelike by far.