Dungeon crawler game

Dungeon crawling games (also called dungeon games or roguelike in Latin America) are a subgenre of role-playing video games characterized by adventure through mazes, through random procedurally generated levels, turn-based video games, tile-based graphics, and permanent death of the player character. Most dungeon crawlers are based on a high fantasy narrative, reflecting their influence from tabletop RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons.

Although the dungeon crawlers Apple Manor and Sword of Fargoal predate this, the 1980s game Rogue, which is an ASCII-based game that runs on the terminal or terminal emulator, it is considered to be the forerunner and namesake of the genre, with games derived from Rogue's reflections and its character- or sprite-based graphics. These video games became popular among college students and computer programmers in the 1980s and 1990s, leading to a large number of spin-offs and variants, but they stuck to these common gameplay elements, often titled as the "Interpretation of Berlin". Some of the better known variants include Hades, The Biding of Isaac, Inscription, Hack, Noita (video game) NetHack, Ancient Domains of Mystery, Moria, Angband, Tales of Maj'Eyal and Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. The Japanese video game series Mystery Dungeon by Chunsoft, inspired by Rogue, also follows the concept of dungeon crawling games.

More recently, with more powerful personal computers and video game systems, several new video games include elements of the dungeon crawler genre while incorporating other game genres, thematic elements, and graphic styles as well. These games generally retain a notion of procedurally generated dungeon crawlers and permadeath of the player character, but do not include all of the high-value factors of the Berlin Interpretation. These games are often labeled as "dungeon crawlers", but are also known as "dungeon crawler style games", "rogue-lite", or & #34;procedural death labyrinths" to distinguish them from more traditional dungeon crawlers.

Origin

The origin of the term "dungeon crawler game" came from the USENET newsgroups around 1993, as it was the main channel that dungeon crawler gamers of that period used to discuss these games, as well as what developers used to announce new releases and even distribute code video game source in some cases. With several individual groups for each game, it was suggested that with the growing popularity of Rogue, Hack, Moria and Angband >, all of them sharing common elements, that the groups be consolidated under a general term to facilitate the discussion between videogames. A debate took place between the users of these groups to try to find an encapsulating term that would describe the common elements, starting with rec.games.dungeon.*, but after three weeks of discussion, rec.games.dungeon.* on the grounds that Rogue is the oldest of these game types, was chosen as "the lesser of all available evils". was already established within the community. This usage parallels that of "Doom clone", a term used in the 1990s that later evolved into a "first-person shooter" #3. 4; more generic.

Gameplay and Design

General gameplay

Derived from tabletop RPG concepts such as D & D, almost all dungeon crawlers give the player control of a character, which can be customized by selecting a class, race and gender, and adjusting attribute points and skills. At the start of the game, the character is placed in the highest level of a dungeon, with basic equipment such as a simple weapon, armor, torches, and food. Following the RPG concept of a dungeon crawler, the player moves the character through the dungeon, collecting treasures that can include new weapons, armor, magical devices, potions, scrolls, food, and in-game money, while having to fight. against monsters that roam the dungeon. Most combat is done by simply trying to move the character to the same space as the monster. The game then calculates the damage that the character and monster deal. Other types of attacks can often be performed as well, such as shooting an arrow or casting an offensive magic spell.

Defeating monsters earns the character experience points, and after earning enough points, the character will gain one level of experience, improving their hit points, magical ability, and other attributes. Monsters can drop treasure to be looted. The character dies if he loses all of her life points. As most dungeon crawlers feature the concept of permadeath, this represents the end of the game, and the player will need to restart the game with a newly created character. Dungeon crawlers are almost always turn-based, and the game it only reacts when the player performs an action with the character. This allows players to assess a difficult situation, such as being cornered by various monsters, at their own pace and determine the best strategy.

The player usually has to explore the dungeon to reveal its contents, similar to a fog of war. Many dungeon crawling games include visibility elements, such as a torch to provide lighting to see monsters in nearby squares, or line of sight to limit which monsters are visible from the player's position. The dungeons are usually connected by stairs; lower dungeon levels are generally more difficult than higher ones, so an underdeveloped character will have a hard time progressing too quickly. Dungeon levels and the population of monsters and treasure within them are randomly generated using random procedural generation, so no game is the same in subsequent games. Most dungeon crawlers have the ultimate goal of either claiming an item located in the deepest level of the dungeon or defeating a specific monster that lives in that level. Typical dungeon crawlers assess the player's performance at the end of the dungeon. game through a score based on the amount of treasure, money, and experience gained, and how quickly the player finished the game, if they managed to do so. The score is displayed on a ranked scoreboard to compare the player's performance in successive matches.

Key Features

The dungeon crawler genre broadly encompasses gameplay that was popularized by the text-based video game Rogue (1980), which featured many variations due to its success; As of 2015, several hundred video games that claiming to be dungeon crawlers were available through the Steam game catalog, and the user-run RogueBasin wiki tracks hundreds of dungeon crawlers and their development. Due to the expansion of numerous variations on the game's theme of dungeon crawlers, the game elements that characterize the dungeon crawler genre were explicitly defined at the 2008 International Dungeon Crawler Game Development Conference held in Berlin, Germany; these factors encompass what is known as the "Berlin Interpretation".: ADOM, Angband, Linley's Dungeon Crawl, NetHack and Rogue. The Interpretation is designed to determine "how dungeon crawler a game is", noting that missing a factor does not eliminate a game from being a dungeon crawler, nor does having the features make a game a dungeon crawler. dungeons. John Harris of Game Set Watch exemplified this by using these criteria to numerically score some ostensibly dungeon crawler games; Linley's Dungeon Crawl and NetHack scored the highest, scoring 57.5 out of 60 available based on Interpretation, while Toe Jam & Earl and Diablo, commonly compared to dungeon crawlers, only scored half as many points.

Key high value drivers of the Berlin Interpretation include:

• The video game uses the random generation of dungeons to increase the playback capacity. Video games can include predetermined levels, such as a city level, common to the Moria family, where the player can buy and sell equipment, but they are considered to reduce the randomness established by the Berlin Interpretation.
• The video game uses a permanent death mechanic. Once a character dies, the player must start a new game, this factor is known as a "share", which will regenerate the levels of the video game again due to random generation. A "Save Game" feature will only provide the suspension of the video game and not a recoverable state without limits; the stored session is deleted when the character rests or dies. Creating a saving point before dying and loading it is an act that is generally considered trap; Rogue developers introduced the permanent death function after introducing a saving function, finding that players repeatedly loaded saved games to achieve the best results. According to Michael Toy de Rogue, they saw his approach to permanent death not as a means of making the video game painful or difficult, but to give importance to every decision the player made to create a more enveloping experience.
• The video game is based on shifts, which gives the player all the time necessary to make a decision. The video game is usually based on steps, where the player's actions are made in series and take a variable measure of time in the video game to be completed. The processes of videogame (e.g., Movement and interaction of monsters, progressive effects such as poisoning or starvation) advance according to the passage of time dictated by these actions.
• The video game is not modal, since all actions should be available to the player, regardless of where they are in the video game. Interpretation points out that shops like Angband break this non-modity.
• The video game has a degree of complexity due to the amount of different videogame systems that allow the player to complete certain goals in multiple ways, creating an emerging video game. For example, to go through a blocked door, the player can try to open the lock, kick it, burn it or even make a tunnel around it, depending on its current situation and inventory. A common phrase associated with NetHack is "The development team thinks of everything" in the sense that developers seem to have anticipated all possible combinations of actions that a player can try in their game strategy, such as wearing gloves to protect the character while handling the body of a Cocatriz as a weapon to petrify enemies for their touch.
• The player must use resource management to survive. Items that help support the player, such as food and healing objects, have a limited supply, and the player should find out how to use them more advantageously to survive in the dungeon. USGamer further considers the "Decrease of Resistance" as another feature related to resource management. The player's character constantly needs to find food to survive or starve, which prevents the player from exploiting the health regeneration by simply shifting over a long period of time or fighting against very weak monsters in low-level dungeons. Rich Carlson, one of the creators of Strange Adventures in Infinite Space, in the style of a dungeon video game, called this aspect a kind of "reloj", imposing some kind of deadline or limitation on how much the player can explore and creating tension in the video game.
• The video game is focused on hack and slash, where the goal is to kill many monsters and where there are no other peaceful options.
• The video game requires the player to explore the map and discover the purpose of unidentified elements so that all video games are reinitial. The identity of magical objects, including magically enchanted objects, varies from one execution to another. Newly discovered objects only offer a vague physical description that is randomly assigned to video games, for purposes and capabilities that are not mentioned. For example, a "bubble" potion could heal wounds in a video game and then poison the player's character in the next. Objects are often subject to alteration, acquiring specific traits, such as a curse or direct modification of the player.

The low value factors of the Berlin Interpretation are:

• The video game is based on the control of a single character through a game.

• Monsters have a behavior similar to the player/personage, such as the ability to collect objects and use them, or cast spells.

• The objective of the video game was to provide a tactical challenge that requires players to play several times to learn the right tactics to survive.

• The video game is presented using ASCII characters on a tile-based map.

• The video game consists of exploring dungeons that are formed by interconnected rooms and corridors. Some video games may have open areas or natural features, such as rivers, although they are considered against the Interpretation of Berlin.

• The video game presents the status of the player and the game through numbers on the video game screen/interface.

Though not addressed in the Berlin Interpretation, dungeon crawlers are generally single player games. In multi-user systems, leaderboards are often shared between players. Some dungeon crawling games allow traces of previous player's characters to appear in later sessions of the game in the form of ghosts or grave marks. Some video games like NetHack even make old player characters reappear as enemies within the dungeon. Turn-based multiplayer derivatives such as TomeNET, MAngband, and Crossfire exist and can be played online.

First Dungeon Crawler Games

Early dungeon crawling video games were developed to be played on text-based user interfaces, commonly on UNIX-based mainframes and terminals used in colleges and universities before transitioning to personal computers. The games used a mix of ASCII or ANSI characters to represent dungeon level elements, creatures, and items in the level. These games typically include one or two lines of text presenting the player's current status at the bottom of the screen, and text-based menu screens for managing inventory, stats, and other details.

The player character was almost always represented by text-based @roguelike, which had been chosen by Rogue's developers to represent "where you are". Other examples would include $ for monetary treasure and D for a dragon. Later games would take advantage of color-based text graphics to increase variation of creature types, such as a red D for a red dragon that would shoot fire, while a green D could indicate a green dragon that would shoot acid. Players would use the keyboard, pressing a key to enter a command. With modern computer systems, users developed alternative means of displaying the game, such as isometric graphics-based graphics sets and interfaces, as well as interfaces that took advantage of keyboard and mouse user interface controls.

As computers offered more advanced user interfaces, such as windows and point-and-click menus, many traditional dungeon crawlers were modified to include support for multiple windows. This was useful for not only displaying the character-based dungeon, but also details about the character's inventory, the monster they were fighting, and other status messages in separate windows. Having access to multiple windows also allowed for menus to complete more complex commands.

Similar/Style Rogue-lites and Procedural Death Maze Games

With computers and video game consoles capable of more advanced graphics and gameplay, numerous video games have emerged that are loosely based on the classic dungeon crawler design but diverge in one or more features. Many of these games use the concepts of procedurally generated maps and permadeath, while moving away from tile-based movement and turn-based gameplay, often using another game genre such as action or platform games. Other spin-off titles of dungeon crawlers are based on the observation that traditional dungeon crawlers are difficult, with a steep learning curve, and a player can never complete these games over numerous play sessions, making these titles a hard sell to a wider audience. These new games would include elements to reduce the difficulty and appeal to a broader audience. Many games with some of the elements of the Berlin Interpretation call themselves "dungeon crawlers", but bear little resemblance. to the original Rogue, causing confusion and dilution of the term.

As such, the term "Dungeon-like" or "rogue-lite" has been used to distinguish those games that possess some, but not all, of the characteristics of the Berlin Interpretation, from those that exactly meet the definition of a Berlin dungeon crawler. The phrase "procedural death maze" 3. 4; it has also been applied to such games, as they retain the notion of permadeath and random level generation, but lack other high-value factors normally associated with dungeon crawlers.

Dungeon crawlers are generally shorter games that can be won in a single play session, in contrast to traditional dungeon crawlers which are designed for multiple play sessions. Associated with its short duration, many Dungeon-like games feature a metagame, in which achieving certain objectives will unlock features such as the ability to select a new character at the start of the game or the addition of new items and monsters in procedural generation of dungeons. game levels. Several dungeon-like games feature daily challenges, in which a predetermined random seed is used to generate the game's levels in a deterministic manner so that each player has the same encounters; players try to complete the game through those levels or else get the highest score through online leaderboards. Dungeon-likes also allows the player to enter the random seed directly in order to challenge the game again. same set of levels or share a difficult set of levels with other players.

US Gamer further identified games that they consider to be extreme cases of being dungeon crawlers or Dungeon-like games, as they are inspired by Rogue, and that "stray a bit further from the genre, but still manage to squeeze in. like a great dungeon crawler game". These include video games like the Diablo series, ToeJam & Earl and Dwarf Fortress.

History

Early history (1975–1980)

Genealogical tree of the first video games of dungeons.

Creation of dungeon crawling games came from hobbyist programmers and hackers, who attempted to create video games for the fledgling field of computers in the early 1980s, especially influenced by the 1975 text adventure game Colossal Cave Adventure (often simply titled Adventure), and high fantasy. Setting of the board game Dungeons & dragons. Some elements of the dungeon crawler genre were present in dungeon crawlers written for the PLATO system. This includes pedit5 (1975) which is believed to be the first dungeon crawler video game, and featured random monster encounters, although it only used a single fixed dungeon level. pedit5 inspired similar PLATO dnd-based dungeon crawlers (1975), orthanc (1978), Moria (1978) and avatar (1979). It is unclear if these PLATO games inspired the dungeon crawler genre as there is no evidence that early dungeon crawler creators had access to these games. The basic dungeon crawler games were developed independently, many of the developers not learning about their respective projects until several years after the genre's takeoff.

Dungeon crawlers were initially developed for memory-limited computing environments, including mainframe shared systems and early home computers; this limitation prevented the developers from keeping all but one of the dungeon levels in memory while the game was running, leading to the generation of random procedures to avoid the memory buffer problem. they wrote in languages such as BASIC, which are not as efficient in data and memory management compared to modern languages, further limiting the scope that the game could cover.

Frequent variants

Although the term "dungeon crawler game" Derived from the 1980 video game Rogue, the first known game with core dungeon crawler elements was Beneath Apple Manor (1978), written by Don Worth for the Apple II; Beneath Apple Manor is also credited as the first commercial game in the dungeon crawler genre. The game, inspired by Worth's enjoyment of Dungeons and Dragons role-playing games, featured procedural generation via a generator modification. of Dragon Maze, character role-playing elements, token-based movement, and turn-based combat. Although Beneath Apple Manor pre-dated Rogue, it was not as popular as Rogue: Rogue had the advantage of being distributed on the ARPANET, which many college students had easy access to, while Beneath Apple Manor was hand-packed and sold around Worth, either at local stores or by mail order.

Another early dungeon crawler game like Rogue whose development predated Rogue was Sword of Fargoal (1982), developed by Jeff McCord starting in 1979. The game was based on GammaQuest, an earlier title McCord had created at the Commodore PET, which he shared locally with friends while studying at Henry Clay High School in Kentucky; the game itself was based on a Dungeons & Dragons campaign that he had run himself in the previous years. Before graduating and attending the University of Tennessee in 1981, he had begun work on GammaQuest II, which required the player to Navigate through randomly generated dungeon levels, acquire a sword, and return to the surface with that sword through more randomly generated levels. The most advanced computers available at the school, such as the Commodore VIC-20, allowed him to expand the game beyond the PET's highly limited memory. Seeing the possibilities of selling computer software, he eventually landed a publishing contract with Epyx, where they helped him refine the marketing of the game, renaming it Sword of Fargoal and giving it access to the more powerful Commodore 64, which allows it to use graphics. and sound as part of the game. The game was considered a success, and when it was ported to the PC in 1983, it shone outside with Rogue ' PC version same year due to Sword of Fargoal and its superior graphics and sound.

Rogue

Rogue was written by Glenn Wichman and Michael Toy in 1980 while they were students at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The game was inspired by Toy's previous experience playing the 1971 Star Trek video game and programming clones for other computer systems. It was also inspired by the interactive fiction Adventure. As they searched for a way to randomize the Adventure experience., they came across Ken Arnold's Curses library that allowed them to better manipulate characters on the terminal screen, which led Toy and Wichman to create a graphically-type randomized adventure game. They created the game's story. by having the player search for the "Amulet of Yendor", "Yendor" with "Rodney" spelled backwards, the name of the wizard they imagined had created the dungeon. Rogue was originally run on a VAX-11/780 computer; their limited memory forced them to use a simple text-based interface for the game.Toy eventually dropped out of school but got a job at the computer labs at the University of California, Berkeley, where he met Arnold. Arnold helped optimize the curse code and implement more features in the game.

Rogue became popular with college students and computing researchers at the time, including Ken Thompson; Dennis Ritchie had joked at the time that Rogue was "the biggest waste of CPU cycles in history". Its popularity led to the game's inclusion in BSD UNIX v4.2 in 1984, although at that time at the time, without its source code. Toy and Arnold had anticipated the commercial sale of Rogue and had doubts about its release; Toy would go on to meet Jon Lane at Olivetti, and together they would create the AI Design company to port the games for various home systems along with Epyx publishing support, which would later come back to help Wichman.

Following Evolution (1980–1995)

The popularity of Rogue led developers to create their own versions of the game, though their efforts were initially limited by a lack of access to Rogue's source code, which was not released until v4.3 BSD in 1986. These developers resorted to creating games from scratch, similar to Rogue but with features they wanted to see. These versions would be distributed with the source code, and along with the original Rogue source, other developers were able to create software forks of the games. video games, adding new monsters, items, and gameplay features, creating several dozen variants. This process was facilitated by shifting the code to languages with better data typing, including object-oriented and scripting languages, and by Clean up and modularize code so contributors can better track where changes can be made.

While there are some direct variants of Rogue, such as Brogue, most Rogue variants could be categorized into two branches based on two key games, Moria and Hack, which were developed in the spirit of Rogue.

Based on Moria

Moria (1983) was developed by Robert Alan Koeneke while a student at the University of Oklahoma, inspired by Adventure and Rogue. Having access to a VAX-11/780, but without the Rogue source due to computer administrator restrictions, he began trying to recreate Rogue but specifically resembling JRR Tolkien's complex labyrinthine cave of the same name and its Stories from Middle Earth. Following Tolkien's fiction, the player's goal was to descend into the depths of Moria to defeat the Balrog, similar to a boss battle. As with Rogue, the levels were not persistent: when the player left the level and then tried to return, a new level was procedurally generated. Among other enhancements for Rogue, Koeneke included a persistent top-level city where players could buy and sell equipment, and the use of data structures within the Pascal language allowed him to create a more diverse bestiary within the game. from various game testers and from another student, Jimmey Wayne Todd, who helped program a deeper character generation system. UMoria (short for UNIX Moria) is a close variation of Jim E. Wilson's Moria, which makes the game to be more portable to a larger variety of computers while fixing various bugs.

Angband (1990) was developed by Alex Cutler and Andy Astrand while attending the University of Warwick. Having played UMoria, they wanted to expand the game further. Working from UMoria and its code, they increased the number of levels and monsters, with dungeon crawler-like games based on Angband, the massive Morgoth-controlled fortress of Tolkien's fiction, and incorporating more of the deadliest creatures that They are described within the mythology of Middle Earth. They kept the Balrog as a difficult creature that must be beaten at the mid-game level, while Morgoth became the final boss that the player must defeat to win the game. After the graduation of Cutler and Astrand, Sean March and Geoff Hill took over development to bring the game to a public release outside of the university, adding elements such as giving the player an idea of the rewards and dangers of a level when they first enter it.

Once Angband was released to the public via USENET, efforts were made to have code maintainers (the "development team") fix bugs, clean up the code and implement code hints Due to numerous changes in code maintainers (due to other obligations), and the number of possible user suggestions to include, Angband would become one major derivation, leading to several Angband variants; there are at least sixty known variants with a half dozen still in active development. One significant spinoff was Zangband (1994) (short for Zelazny Angband), which expanded on Angband and altered the theme towards Roger Zelazny and his The Chronicles of Amber. The ZAngband codebase would be used to create the Troubles of Middle-earth (ToME) in 2002, which later swapped out Tolkien and Zelazny's fictional setting for a new original to become Tales of Maj' Eyal (2009). The vanila Angband is still in development today by (the "development team").

Hack-Based

Hack (1985) was developed by Jay Fenlason with the help of Kenny Woodland, Mike Thome, and Jonathan Payne, students at Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School at the time, while participating in the supervised school computer lab by Brian Harvey. Harvey had been able to acquire a PDP-11/7 minicomputer for the school and instituted a course curriculum that allowed students to do whatever they wanted on the computers, including video games, as long as they had completed the homework by the end of each semester. Fenlason, Woodland, Thome, and Payne met through these courses and became a close group of friends and proficient programmers. Harvey had invited the group to the computer labs at UC Berkeley, where they had the opportunity to use the systems. from there, and were introduced to Rogue, inspiring them to create their own version as their class project. Fenlason had created a list of features they wanted to improve in Rogue, such as having a level's layout save once the player exited that level. They approached Toy and Arnold at a local USENIX conference for the source code for Rogue, but were turned down, forcing them to develop the routines from scratch. The resulting program, Hack, stayed true to the original Dungeons & Dragons influences., and derived its name from being both a "hack and slice" (hack and slash) as a hack in his programming to recreate Rogue without having access to its source code. Fenlason was unable to include all the desired features, and his involvement in the development of the Hack ended after the students dropped out of school. Fenlason had provided the Hack's source code to the USENIX conferences for distribution on their digital tapes, from which it was subsequently discovered and built via USENET newsgroups, porting it to various systems. Like Angband, Hack's code maintenance passed through several hands, with some variants being created by different forks.

Hack would eventually be dropped in favor of NetHack (1987). When Mike Stephenson, an analyst for a computer hardware manufacturer, took maintenance on Hack's code, he improved it, taking suggestions from Izchak Miller, a philosophy professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and Janet Walz, another hacker. Calling themselves the DevTeam, they began making major modifications to the Hack's code. They named their new version NetHack, in part because their collaboration on the game was done over USENET. Hack's main departures from NetHack were the introduction of a wider variety of monsters, borrowed from other mythologies and lords, including anachronistic and contemporary cultural elements (such as a class of tourists with a flash camera, inspired by Terry Pratchett's Discworld series), in the high-fantasy setting, and the use of predefined levels with some procedural elements that the player would be found deeper in the dungeons. Other iterations of the game featured branching paths through the dungeon and optional character-based quests that could grant the player an extremely useful item to complete the game. Despite DevTeam cracking open the code publicly, they carefully kept who could contribute to the codebase to avoid excessive forking of the vanilla game, and remained relatively quiet about suggested improvements for each release, working in secrecy regarding their player base. There are separate spin-offs of NetHack, like Slash'EM.

Ancient Domains of Mystery (1994), or ADOM for short, derived from the concepts presented in NetHack. ADOM was originally developed by Thomas Biskup while studying at the Technical University of Dortmund.After playing through Rogue and Hack, he came to NetHack and was inspired by the game, but was dismayed by the complexity and elements that he found unnecessary. or that they distracted him. Biskup created ADOM from scratch with the goal of creating a story-driven game rather than NetHack that maintained the game's depth with a specific theme and setting. The resulting game included several different dungeons, many procedurally generated, connected via a overworld map of the fictional sphere of Ancardia, and would have the player complete various quests in the dungeons to progress through the game. An important feature was the influence of the forces of Chaos through unsealed portals, which the player would have to close. While in areas affected by Chaos, the player character becomes contaminated, causing mutations that can be harmful or beneficial. Both ADOM, NetHack and Angband would get a development team to maintain the code and implement updates and patches to avoid excess forking. [54

Other variants

Not all early dungeon crawlers were easily classified as descendants of Hack or Moria. Larn (1986), developed by Noah Morgan, borrowed the concepts of both Hack (in the sense that there are persistent and fixed levels) and Moria (in the availability of a store level and general difficulty that increases with the level of dungeon), but while these two games are the size of the spiral to take multiple play sessions to complete, Larn was designed to be completed in a single session. Larn also uses a fixed time feature, in that the player only had so many turns to complete an objective, although there were ways to jump through time to extend the game. Developed by Laurence Brothers in the late 1980s, Omega is credited with introducing an overworld concept to the dungeon crawler genre, prior to its appearance in ADOM. Omega was often remembered for its bizarre inventory approach in which the player would have to pick up an item, considering it was being held, and then move that item into a bag or equipment slot. Linley's Dungeon Crawl (1995) was created by Linley Henzell and featured a skill-based character progression system, in which experience points could be used to upgrade specific abilities, such as weapon mastery or trap detection. A spin-off of this would form the basis for Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup (2006). SSI's Dungeon Hack (1993) offered randomized dungeons and permadeath within the AD&D 2nd Edition rules.

Mystery Dungeon Games (1993 - Onwards)

Until 1993, dungeon crawlers existed primarily in the computer space, and there were no home console variants yet. Two of the first known attempts were Fatal Labyrinth (1990) and Dragon Crystal (1990) both from Sega, but which lacked the depth of a typical dungeon crawler based on computer. They also did not prove to be successful video games.

Chunsoft succeeded in developing the Dragon Quest series, a series that established fundamental aspects of the PC role-playing game genre, popular with Western PC audiences, into a more streamlined and more streamlined approach. suitable for Japanese gamers who prefer consoles. With dungeon crawlers starting to gain popularity, the developers at Chunsoft believed that they could do a similar treatment for that genre to make it more suitable for Japanese audiences. Chunsoft's Koichi Nakamura stated that his intention was to take Rogue and make it "a more understandable, easier-to-play version"; of the title to be playable on consoles. This led to the creation of Mystery Dungeon, with the first title being Torneko no Daibōken: Fushigi no Dungeon (トルネコの大冒険不思議のダンジョン, Torneko no Daibōken: Fushigi no Dungeon^? Torneko's Great Adventure: Mysterious Dungeon) (1993) based on the Dragon Quest series. Several changes had to be made to the dungeon crawler formula for this conversion: they had developed ways to reduce the dungeon crawler difficulty by using progressively more difficult dungeons that were randomly generated, and they became an option per game level selection. difficulty. An additional benefit to Torneko no Daibōken was that it used the established settings from Dragon Quest 4 and the character Torneko, helping to make the game familiar to its intended audience. and giving a story for the player to follow. While Torneko no Daibōken did not sell as well as typical Dragon Quest video games, Chunsoft was successful enough to develop a second title based on a completely original character and setting, Mystery Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer, released in 1995. At Chunsoft they found that they were more creative with the way they developed the game without the need for respect an existing property. Since then, Chunsoft has developed over 25 games in the Mystery Dungeon series for various platforms. In addition to their Shiren titles, many of the other Mystery Dungeon games by Chunsoft span several franchises, including the Chocobo series based on Final Fantasy, Pokémon Mystery Dungeon based on Pokémon, and a crossover with Atlus's Odyssey Etrian in Etrian Mystery Dungeon. Several titles in the Mystery Dungeon series were popular and would become a staple of the Japanese video game market.

One of the main differences between the Mystery Dungeon games and the western dungeon crawlers that follow the Berlin Interpretation is the lack of permadeath. In Mystery Dungeon video games, player-characters can be killed or overly injured, resetting their progress to the start of the dungeon, but these games would generally provide a means of storing and retrieving equipment and other items from a dungeon. previous run. The Mystery Dungeon games weren't as successful in Western markets when they were released there, due to target gamers (younger players who probably hadn't experienced games like Rogue ) found the lack of a more traditional role-playing game save system to be a bit odd.

Other Japanese role-playing games would incorporate random dungeon generation as part of their design, mimicking part of the nature of dungeon crawlers, and were considered dungeon crawler titles when released in Western markets. Such titles include Vagrant Story, Shining Soul, and Baroque. Massively multiplayer online role-playing video game Final Fantasy XIV added the randomly generated Deep Dungeon level that was inspired by procedural generation of dungeon crawlers.

Continuous development in Western markets (2002 onwards)

Although new classic dungeon crawler variants would continue to be developed in the Western market, the genre languished as more advanced personal computers capable of enhanced graphical capabilities and video games using these features became popular., some of these new graphical video games drew influence from dungeon crawler video game concepts, particularly action role-playing video games such as Blizzard Entertainment's Diablo (1996). Diablo creator David Brevik acknowledged that games such as Rogue, NetHack, Telengard, and other dungeon crawlers influenced Diablo's design, including the nature of randomly generated dungeons and loot.

Existing dungeon crawlers continue to develop: a sequel to ADOM successfully received crowdfunding in 2012, while NetHack's first major release in ten years in 2015 is set to help the DevTeam expand even further. plus the game itself. New dungeon crawling games that adhere to the basic rules of the Berlin Interpretation continue to be created, including Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup (2006), Dungeons of Dredmor (2011), and Dragon Fin Soup (2015). A subclass of "coffeebreak dungeon crawler games" that could be completed in a short period of time, often stemming from participations in the seven day dungeon crawler challenge; examples include DoomRL (2013) and Desktop Dungeons (2013). Some games would also take advantage of the ease of development on the frame-based ASCII interfaces common to dungeon crawlers. For example, the very popular Dwarf Fortress (2006) uses the dungeon crawler interface in the building and management simulation, and would be a great inspiration for Minecraft, while SanctuaryRPG (2014) is a more traditional role-playing game based on in turns with a scripted story using an ASCII interface and dungeon crawler gameplay elements. of procedures to create the worlds in which players must survive, was developed by Sami Maaranen and was influenced by dungeon crawlers, with its initial interface similar to that of NetHack.

Growth of the dungeon crawler type (2005-onwards)

The dungeon crawler genre experienced a resurgence in Western markets after the year 2000 through independent developers creating a new subgenre called "dungeon crawler games". Indie developers began incorporating dungeon crawler elements into genres not normally associated with dungeon crawlers, creating games that would form the foundation of this new subgenre. Two of the earliest cited examples of dungeon-likes are Digital Eel's Strange Adventures in Infinite Space (2002) and its sequel Weird Worlds: Return to Infinite Space (2005), both of which featured randomly generated planets and encounters. and permeable. Digital Eel based their work on the space exploration video game Starflight along with dungeon crawlers like NetHack, but wanted to offer a shorter experience that was easier to play, similar to tabletop beer and pretzels games like Deathmaze and The Sorcerer&# 39;s Cave, which have elements in common with dungeon crawling video games.

Spelunky (2008), released shortly after the formation of the Berlin Interpretation, is considered an important contribution to the growth of indie-developed dungeon-like video games. Spelunky was developed by Derek Yu, who wanted to take the deep gameplay that dungeon crawler games offer and combine it with the ease of a platform game. The result was a platform game that incorporates the notion of permadeath in which the player leads an explorer character through randomly generated caves. The intent was to create "deep" gameplay; in which the game could be replayed over and over again, with randomly generated situations that make the player develop new emerging strategies on the fly. Developer Jason Rohrer stated that Spelunky "completely revamped my thinking about single-player game design".

The formula and success of Weird Worlds and Spelunky would influence other developers to create new "Look-alikes" dungeon crawler video game Edmund McMillen, the developer of The Binding of Isaac (2011), and Kenny and Teddy Lee, the co-developers of Rogue Legacy (2012), credit Yu's approach to Spelunky with showing how to distill the nature of a traditional dungeon crawler. to apply it to other game genres they had made for their dungeon-like games. Justin Ma and Matthew Davis, the co-developers of FTL: Faster Than Light (2012), gave credit to both Weird Worlds: Return to Infinite Space and Spelunky as part of his influence for FTL. All of these games garnered critical acclaim, and their success has led to a more modern revival in dungeon-crawling games since their release.

The new hit in dungeon crawler-like video games is seen as part of a larger trend among those who play board and computer games, looking for "rich gaming experiences," as described by the developer of 100 Rogues Keith Burgun, which the most popular titles don't always deliver. David Bamguart of Gaslight Games stated that there is great excitement about the risk inherent in dungeon crawler-like games with random generation and permadeath, which helps the game player to invest more in the fate of their player character: "The deadly precariousness inherent in the unknown. Dungeon-crawler environments give that investment great meaning". Additionally, many of these newer dungeon-crawler games strive to address the apparent high difficulty and cruelty that traditional dungeon-crawlers were known for., and new players will be able to find further help through user-generated video game guides and walkthroughs that are made possible through wide internet accessibility. Fabien Fischer offers that gamers have become fond of the "dungeon crawler-like video games" independently developed as they have grown tired of the "shallow gameplay, whitewashing spectacle, craze for Skinner Box content and design " in titles produced by AAA developers and publishers.

Particularly for smaller indie developers, the nature of the procedurally generated world allows teams to deliver many hours of game content without having to spend resources and development time to develop detailed worlds. This also allows developers to developers spend more time developing complex game features and their interactive systems that are part of the enjoyment of dungeon-crawling and dungeon-like (or dungeon-like) video games. McMillen of The Binding of Isaac stated that incorporating elements of Dungeon crawling in other game genres can be difficult due to overcoming the complex interfaces that dungeon crawlers often have, but once a means is found to do it, it becomes more and more beautiful and deep", and a timeless design that allows you to create a seemingly dynamic experience for players, so every time they play your game they get a whole new adventure".

Community

The dungeon crawler genre has developed with the expansion of classic dungeon crawlers and modern "rogue-lite" style dungeon crawler titles, a community of fans dedicated to not only discuss games within it, but also to create their own near-death adventure stories or funny stories about dungeon crawlers. Within this community, there is great interest in developing dungeon crawlers. The 7 Day Dungeon Crawler Challenge (7DRL) was born out of a USENET newsgroup in 2005 for dungeon crawler developers, informally challenging them to create the core of a dungeon crawler novel within 7 days of being released. for the public to judge and play. The competition has continued each year, since growing from 5-6 entries in 2005 to over 130 in 2014. In the spirit of the International Conference on Dungeon Crawler of the Year 2008, the "Game Dungeon Celebration" It was first held in September 2016 in San Francisco, where various past and present dungeon crawler developers came together to discuss the history and future direction of the genre. It has since been re-hosted in the 2017s., 2018 and 2019.

List of dungeon crawlers