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If you're getting old like me and can't handle twitch games, check out crawl. Super deep, tons of replay value, online play, tournaments, active community, and still under development. And open source. This game's design is stellar.

How exactly is that cross-compilation?

I can build binaries for any other system from any other system. Except for OS X, where you need someone with that exact piece of overpriced junk, and it's hard to find such a person who's willing to run nightlies for you. If you'd want to prove the last part incorrect, it would be nice if someone could run Dungeon Crawl builds at least weekly.

For any other modern system, you either have nicely packaged cross toolchain, or could build it yourself with not much hassle but most folks don't bother as it's easier to run a virtual machine at no cost.

I'm honestly surprised that anyone took the time to do that. And, for doing so, you won 1,000 brownie points. :-P

Maybe I should have said 10 games. Or, maybe I should have just made my point and moved on with life. Basically, what I was saying is that the majority of games don't focus on a rich storyline, or even one with multiple branching options.

I remember with great fondness my hours spent playing text-based RPGs. Or shucks, even something like the current Stone Soup. Things that were made on a shoestring budget, but still delivered hours of enjoyable (though at times somewhat frustrating when the grue eats you for the eighteenth time) gameplay.

Er, I don't think anyone would be irresponsible enough to release official builds even for a minor open source project without having a set of VMs, one with each major supported version of Windows. There's usually something wrong. Like, in Dungeon Crawl (not so minor a project, but not big either), Windows builds for 0.11.0 worked fine, 0.11.1 would crash on startup on Win7 (but not XP, 2k or 8) if I didn't catch it, 0.11.2 built fine again. Quite puzzling -- why would a strictly bugfix point release suddenly fail? Turns out there's something wrong in mingw for LTO compilation (final builds get optimized up the wazoo, nightlies don't). So there's simply no way to skip a test rig.

It's hard to believe in such a level of incompetency. On the other hand, this is Kaspersky...

Yes, Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup is my roguelike of choice. But being the heathen that I am, these days I play online with the "webtiles" version, rather than deal with an ASCII(/Unicode) UI.

Vanilla NetHack hasn't had a release since 2003 but there have been several forks of it, one I did myself (look at my sig).

Considering the "far better roguelikes" that's something just asking for a flame war but I guess he thinks about ToME4 or Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup.

ToME4's root go back a long time, originally an Angband variant but the 4th version separated completely from that heritage and created vast amounts of original content that makes Skyrim look like a coffee-break activity.

Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup is sort of an Anti-NetHack, trying to avoid many of the design mistake NetHack had. Like the needs for spoilers, that different races play the same in the long run, grinding, or that the game doesn't stay challenging after a certain point.

DCSS and ToME4 are big games but in the last years there has been a trend to develop smaller roguelikes. Like DoomRL which is exactly what its title says or roguelikes for mobile devices like 100Rogues and POWDER.

I played a bit of Rogue when I was younger, but Nethack was my first true roguelike love. I've ascended about 50 times /brag. Roguelikes are my favorite genre of games.

I have to take this opportunity to plug Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. It gets my vote for best roguelike by a large margin, though I probably haven't played enough ToME (which is also highly-regarded) to make a fair comparison. DCSS is best played online via the telnet/SSH interfaces. It's not multiplayer, but being able to watch others play and leaving your game available for the world to see makes it even better. The ##crawl channel at freenode.net is the unofficial official gathering place for online play.

Oh, and DCSS also has a tiles-mode. I consider it reasonably blasphemous, but it has led to a browser-based version of the game (https://tiles.crawl.develz.org/> ) which is kinda awesome. You can watch others play to get a sense of what you're getting into.

And the other NetHack tournament /dev/null/ has been doing it before Crawl since 1999.

Junethack is loosely based on DCSS' tournament model. We're using existing public servers (we only need access to the xlogfile with all the game information and the options file for verifying the player's identify which on most public servers are public anyway).

We don't think that we are directly in competition neither with the DCSS tournament nor /dev/null. One of the goal of this tournament is raising awareness of NetHack forks (like e.g. my fork UnNetHack), as NetHack hasn't seen a release in too many years, even though the DevTeam still claims that they are working on the mythical next release.

Whereas /dev/null offers vanilla NetHack with some additional challenges where some have to be solved in-game (e.g. Pac-Man level) and others out-game (in Zapm or Kingdom of Loathing).

We are actually on quite good terms with the DCSS DevTeam. I have even met some of them in real life and there are a lot NetHack players enjoying both NetHack and DCSS. I encourage everybody who likes NetHack to give DCSS a try. I will also be playing again in the next DCSS tournament.

For those of you who require graphics with your roguelikes, you cannot go wrong with DCSS, available here: http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/ Be brave enough to try the 0.9 "Trunk" branch rather than the latest 0.8 release; there are a lot of nifty changes to it.

I am a raging fan of Doom (which I keep playing via source ports to this date), and this is a great experiment, however...the sound is abysmal, and I am too used to modern controls to go back to arrow keys :P
The FPS was OK for me, 20-30, but the sounds....sounded like...flatulence and a 2yo kid with very deep voice being recorded right next to the microphone.

Doom is not terribly complex by modern standards, but the browser struggles to get it moving (probably because of video rendering, not sure if webGL can do much about that, probably does help) and uses a lot of memory moving it. However, if this keeps advancing (most probably will) the web will become more interesting to this indie game developer, even if just for the ease of deployment (relatively speaking).

Despite not being so visually good, I have found the recent nettiles mode of Dungeon Crawl to be quite a surprisingly nice web interface to a game. (link : https://tiles.crawl.develz.org/ )
It uses no visible CPU and almost no network power at all in my computer and is very responsive, and is a novel interface to play a roguelike in a shared server (including spectators and messaging) without having to use putty or cope with the ASCII interface.

Is there any directory of comprehensive game-oriented documentation for simple 2D "webgame" development? I am quite intrigued about building a 7DRL for the browser using some cutesy tiles and some core basics like dungeon generator and item generator. Lua is my fetish language but I certainly could try some browser magic.

As a dev of Dungeon Crawl, I see that systems that smell like Unix these days are a monoculture of Linux and Linux only. Even though you'd expect roguelike players to be biased towards obscure systems, I don't recall a single bug report from a *BSD or Solaris user. Even Hurd had one. Big-endian systems are dead too (two distinct users, one with an old MacOS X, one with Debian on powerpc).

Everyone these days uses either Windows, Linux or x86 Mac.

It's probably just because everyone who used it on *BSD or Solaris had it work fine out of the box.

I've ran it myself under FreeBSD 7.x and 8.x using tiles without issue, simply have to pass the right parameters to the ./configure script.

The real truth is that if software is developed correctly, (that does not have to relate to kernel interfaces/s/ystem heir/etc directly) it should work pretty much out of the box with little or no modification.

As a dev of Dungeon Crawl, I see that systems that smell like Unix these days are a monoculture of Linux and Linux only. Even though you'd expect roguelike players to be biased towards obscure systems, I don't recall a single bug report from a *BSD or Solaris user. Even Hurd had one. Big-endian systems are dead too (two distinct users, one with an old MacOS X, one with Debian on powerpc).

Everyone these days uses either Windows, Linux or x86 Mac.

It's nice that you have your pet OS in that list and suddenly you've developed the same attitude you likely despised from windows devs ten years ago.

As a dev of Dungeon Crawl, I see that systems that smell like Unix these days are a monoculture of Linux and Linux only. Even though you'd expect roguelike players to be biased towards obscure systems, I don't recall a single bug report from a *BSD or Solaris user. Even Hurd had one. Big-endian systems are dead too (two distinct users, one with an old MacOS X, one with Debian on powerpc).

Everyone these days uses either Windows, Linux or x86 Mac.

Angband not as in the game but as in 2nd fortress of Melkor in Tolkien's books. But when speaking of roguelikes, I happen to be a DCSS dev.

Try http://angband.oook.cz/> Angband, http://www.nethack.org/> Nethack, http://www.adom.de/> ADOM, http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/> Crawl, or start looking at http://roguebasin.roguelikedevelopment.org/> Roguebasin. Then you'll be really living. Briefly.