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Comment by Borealid | Hacker News Reader

I'm not really sure what this is doing on Hacker News, but the game (Shattered Pixel Dungeon) is fun.

One of the nicest features is that whenever you observe an effect that unambiguously tells you what a potion/scroll does - such as throwing a potion - that type of object is automatically identified for you. In more "traditional" hack games you'd have to write notes yourself even though obviously a thrown potion exploding into fire means it's a potion of liquid fire, right?

Shattered Pixel is a good way to kill some time on public transit or similar.

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> I'm not really sure what this is doing on Hacker News

Incredibly fun game, open source, and in a genre that likely fits well into many HN users' interests. I rediscovered it recently and remembered it was open source, so why not submit it?

The title should include a [year], to save people like me from needing to check if anything significant changed in the game that made me miss half of a trip to Thailand in 2014.

The game has regular updates, so sort of.

Thanks for submitting it, I have never heard of it. Maybe because I exist in the iOS "walled garden" and generally game on console only.

Do you know what game engine its based on? Or is it a custom thing?

Custom AFAIK. There's an iOS version: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/shattered-pixel-dungeon/id1563...

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39775664

I think the open source part is the main justification. Getting kids into tech and programming seems a HN sort of article, and an open source game is one way of doing it. Much more advanced than the entry level things like Scratch Jr. and not nearly as wide spread an audience, but a great step around the high school level for the few who wants to get deeper without committing to some formal education.

I saw this post and immediately thought “there’s probably a lot of potential trad roguelike fans on hacker news”, for one thing it’s probably the genre with highest percentage of fans are devs or have dabbled into game dev.

SPD is a good gateway to brogue, DCSS, cogmind, qud, etc

I’ve already mentioned Cogmind, but Brogue is a beautiful game with tight gameplay. Another great recommendation.

It's not a roguelike really, but Brogue was my gateway to CDDA (Catalysm: Dark Days Ahead). Not sure if I've lost more of my life to one of those or to Slay the Spire. I don't regret it one bit.

Been meaning to get into Cogmind (which seems even more aesthetically appealing than Brogue) and Caves of Qud, but I have children now, and must wait until they are of age before re-engaging with such things.

Brogue was my introduction to the genre. I also tried Golden Krone Hotel, a beginner-friendly title (and the first one I beat)! I played CoQ for a while, too, but there's something about Cogmind that clicked with me. I'm not very good at it, but it's a _total_ blast.

And I agree with you -- it is, imo, the most beautiful roguelike that I've seen or played. And it's got hundreds of unique sound effects, too, which makes a huge difference.

I've thought about CDDA, but honestly, the amount of material there is intimidating. But it looks very cool.

These games are indeed dangerous! I don't have kids, but I'm still in school, so I have to be careful. When you have some time, definitely give Cogmind a try. Hope you enjoy it!

You probably know all this, but for others:

Cogmind is a lot of really thought out small touches that sum up to an engaging experience despite at first glance looking like any other roguelike. It's got great animations/explosions and an intuitive UI.

The developer is the main mod of r/roguelikedev, has been running a great blog for years where he dives deep into aspects of roguelike dev (https://www.gridsagegames.com/blog/), and is also just a wonderful human who genuinely loves supporting the community and playing roguelike games.

Sure, CDDA is a roguelike -- the word was supposed to mean primarily a specific way of controlling the character, introduced in Rogue. Everybody in the roguelike community calls it a roguelike.

I spend some time in Cogmind and can confirm that it is one of the most aesthetical pleasing ones.

But these days I don't really have the time to really get into games and after discovering only little of the lore I lost interest :-/

The fun part is trying to identify certain items before actually using them. (The guesses won't always be perfect, but you can greatly improve your odds.)

Skyrim had that mechanic. You could eat ingredients for potions and if you had a duplicate it would tell you the effects, and the next time you found the ingredient again you would know what it was.

Good that they also have potions, so that no poison in the world is strong enough to kill you in Skyrim (or is there one?)

There is one raw ingredient in Skyrim which will kill the player. But it can't be found in the wild. It's given to you for a Dark Brotherhood quest. But you don't have to use it in the quest. Can keep it for later use.

Nethack identifies objects once you've observed their effect as well

Only in the most obvious of cases. Your cat reluctantly steps on an item? Cursed. Grey stone moved less than X tiles when kicked? Loadstone. Hundreds of these.

Some, but not all. For example, "Call a white potion:" or "Call a scroll labeled VE FORBRYDERNE:" prompts. These often appear after observing an effect where an experienced player or one consulting spoilers knows what the potion or scroll must be, but the game didn't auto-ID it.

Game dev is historically pretty popular on hn.

Don't Nethack and DCSS do that as well?

DCSS does; NetHack sometimes does but there are very many cases in which you observe some effect and are then asked "Call a milky potion:" or "Call a scroll labeled ANDOVA BEGARIN:".

It would be nice if you could manually identity items though; sometimes the context you get a potion from tells you what the potion is but you have to remember that until you use it. Using the stones of intuition for this kind of seems wasteful.

I can also recommend POWDER as a solid not-many-frills classic roguelite.

It's reminding me I need to rebuild my very-slightly-modified version to keep my Google Play developer account active!

Shattered Pixel encourages variants and branches, though sometimes Google tries to block the blatant clones that want to publish on Google Play, even though the license and developers want that outcome.

On the other thread of "brutally punishing", there is the "Too Cruel" variant of an earlier version of Shattered for those of us who need more difficulty. PD is more like a long game of chess than a dungeon crawler.

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