Preview: Hack, Slash, Loot
Yesterday I had the pleasure of spending some time in between setting up our new Minecraft server to play a new roguelike in development by David Williamson, also known as OddBallDave on Twitter and TIGSource. His new project is called Hack, Slash, Loot and it is the very embodiment of what makes roguelikes appealing. He’s stated he’s going for a coffeebreak roguelike feel for HSL, but considering I spent the better part of three hours glued to my screen while I played, I’d say he has a different beast on his hands all together.
Even in this early testing phase, the game features an amazing amount of depth and replayability, so when Dave tells me he’s not finished with the game, I have to shake my head and wonder at what else can be featured in terms of game mechanics. It’s a little rough around the edges, but the basic gist of the game has all the makings of being as popular as Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup, or Desktop Dungeons for the quick crowd.
The build of HSL that I played only had three available classes, but a conversation with Dave yielded that he would like to feature 32 playable characters. No doubt this will be a combination of classes and races, so fans of Stone Soup should feel right at home in HSL. The three basic classes that were playable included wizard, archer, and knight and each of them played rather well for what they are.
As expected the wizard is rather squishy but becomes the Wrath of God as you find magically inclined items and the archer is a nice kiss of death from far across the room. It speaks to the origins of the game that despite playing with all three classes extensively, I never made it to the bottom of the five floor dungeons in the alpha build. Seeing as how that’s how most Stone Soup runs end, I’d say Dave has that challenge down just right.
The interface is pretty easy to follow and the extended turn descriptions you see in these screenshots are easy to turn off. Dave has included several interesting enchantments for the hundreds of items he plans on including in the game, with your standard poison, lightning, cold affairs, but the two that intrigued me the most were Swift and Shadeform. Swift gives a player two turns to the enemies’ one, making it a particularly deadly enchantment to have for the archer and the wizard, while Shadeform makes damaging you almost impossible.
Along my journey through the cobalt halls, I found plenty of chests, barrels, and weapon racks to loot with a fair share of other loot dropping from the enemies in the game. One feature that I really enjoyed was the announcement of a “boss” mob appearing. The announcement wasn’t intrusive but made it known that I’d stumbled across something that required my full attention instead of just idly clicking through the monsters and hoping for more loot.
Dave hasn’t forgotten about those of us who love to mercilessly track our stats, either. When starting up the game, a small panel at the bottom tells you how many turns you’ve taken, how many monsters you’ve slain, and how many deaths it’s taken you to do said amounts. I mentioned to him the possibility of recording a player’s most successful character in a similar style to Dungeon Crawl and while he said he doesn’t want to cater too much to the achievement whoring attitude, it is something to consider.
Overall, the experience I had with the game yesterday was a positive one. Upon release Dave hopes to have 32 playable characters with seven different dungeon themes, so even if you make it to the bottom of a dungeon, playing through a second time will never be the same. For those worrying about staying power in a procedurally generated game (hah!), Dave mentioned that the game would be extremely easy to update, so it seems if it takes off we’ll have a great little roguelike on our hands.
If you’re interested in keeping track of Dave’s development, you can follow him on Twitter or check out his TIGSource thread for more detailed developmental aspects of the game. There’s a great post mentioning how each monster’s AI responds according to their own class. It definitely makes for some interesting reading.
