The_Snail

After 3 days of coding tools and scripts, and another half a day of tweaking, I have completed my anual Pixel Dungeon archive report.

Over 400 version's covered, more details, more icons, searchable content (prior PDF was image only).

PDF available HERE 8.2MB

Updated Nov. 01st

Several icons corrected.

Summoning SPD Reincarnated updated to v0.3.2.

Experienced Pixel Dungeon v1.3.1.apk added to database.

Download link updated.

JoJo's Bizarre Adventure is a Japanese manga comic series.

JoJo's Bizarre Dungeon is a graphical retheme of SPD by Ongoro.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.shatteredpixel.shatteredpixeldungeon7&hl=en-US

A few versions back, it stopped working. I thought it was due to API changes with Android 14, but it wasn't. The discussion can be read on this Reddit post -

https://www.reddit.com/r/PixelDungeon/comments/1drrhh6/help_running_a_modreskin_forsatteredpdjojos/

I have decompiled 2.0L, based on SPD v2.5.4, and patched it.

This version works great on my Samsung Galaxy running Android 13 English 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿

It is hosted on a temporary share server. I ask that someone download and share it.

https://filetransfer.io/data-package/OrjxMyYR#link

I'm doing a 6 challenge and got trapped in a treasure room. The Great Crab 🦀 cannot be injured and I cannot escape. Had to end this game. I've played hundreds if not thousands of games and never had this happen before.

Huntress made it on the first run. I really like the new Upgrade system.

One creepy thing... killed a Monk rushing at me just as he was passing a chest. His remains ended up inside. So wrong. I had to open that chest once I found the key. You don't want to know how bad it smelled inside.

Gladiator ascended. No obvious bugs. I like the remade menu. Balance is decent.

I just had to test the newest SPD 2.5.0b3 on the oldest Android device I have, and I am proud to say that it works great!

My old Zeki nearly went into the trash this month as nearly all support for 4x has ceased. Then I discovered XPlayer, a 3rd party app designed to run MKV movies in h265 format. Along with WiFi FTP I am able to stream quality movies on this old tablet.

Better still, I can now play one of the best roguelikes ever on it! Thank you 00-Evan for not writing off older hardware.

I have recently updated the GD archive of PD's as my friends site is no longer availble.

Added or updated:

CloverPD-v2.4.2.2-Android.apk

Community SPD v1.0.apk

DHAlpha's SPD v2.4.0 Mod.apk

Experienced Pixel Dungeon Redone v2.18.2.apk

ismvru's Easier SPD v2.4.2m1.apk

Pixel Towers v0.0.3.apk

Shattered Pixel Dungeon v2.4.2 gold mod.apk

TweakedPD-v2.4.2.0-Android.apk

More than 300 versions of PD.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1v243hncvyAGpPtxR7VSgg1E-n4tajdPd

Please do not download the entire archive or Google will suspend the account and nobody will be able to get anything. Just grab what you need. I stronly urge other PD archivers to add these to their collections and share them. About 75% of these PD's are available from the author's site or Github and I ask you download from those places first.

Although my archive has been posted and available for nearly a year, even after Fandom's recent overhaul they include only a fraction of what is available.

Also, if anyone can contact Dominowood, I'm sure he would like to fill in his missing files, most if not all of which are available in my archive.

There is a rather interesting effort to create a multiplayer 3D version of Pixel Dungeon that reminds me of a mix between Shattered and Gauntlet. It isn't ready just yet and because it will be on Steam it is guarenteed to be massively bloated, so hopefully it will get ported to Android.

After 4 days on one of my best runs ever, I came so close to a perfect score on a 9 Challenge. Almost want to cry 😢

Although I prefer to use the Huntress, for my first run through the new v2.4.1 I took the Fighter/Gladiator the entire way in a single run.

Huntress, 3 challenge, Wand of Regrowth +9.

Scrolls of Recharging.

I have not only grown the elusive Golden Lotus in a garden, I managed to grow 4 at once!

Died fighting Yog with harder boses and not destroying spawners, but good run with Flaming Bow, Gauntlet of Fire, and Brimstone Armour.

What do Spelunky, The Binding of Isaac, FTL: Faster Than Light, and Rogue Legacy have in common?

Well, they've all incorporated roguelike elements as part of their core gameplay loops, and have each stirred up controversy as to what truly constitutes a "roguelike," whether the term "roguelite" is more appropriate, and what exactly is the difference between roguelike, roguelike-like, and roguelite.

Why is this controversial?

Because many developers, especially indie developers who want to see success for their games, label their games as roguelikes in order to capitalize on search trends and marketing hype.

But fans of roguelikes—that is, true roguelikes—have grown tired of hearing, time after time, that a new roguelike has been released only to check it out and realize that it doesn't meet their expectations of what a roguelike ought to be.

This may not seem like a big deal, but the complaint is reasonable. Genre terms exist to prime expectations for players.

Imagine spending $30 on a game marketed as an RTS only to discover that it actually plays more like an ARPG? Or you thought you were buying into a MOBA that turned out to be a FPS with MOBA elements?

So if you've ever wondered what exactly the differences are between roguelikes, roguelike-likes, and roguelites, then here's a quick explainer.

What Is a Roguelike?

The term "roguelike" came about as a way to describe games that played similarly to Rogue, an ASCII dungeon crawler released way back in 1980.

(You can also check this post - https://lemmy.world/post/10970445 )

Inspired by text-based games from the 1970s, Rogue was notable for its use of permadeath, procedural generation, and ASCII characters to represent in-world entities (as opposed to full-on text sentences a la Zork) to ensure a different adventure experience with each playthrough.

But there are different interpretations as to what a roguelike entails, and even to this day there are debates as to which elements are essential for a game to be considered "like Rogue."

The most widely accepted definition is the Berlin Interpretation, which is the definition that was settled on by at the 2008 International Roguelike Development Conference and upheld by Rogue Bassin, Temple of the Rogue, and the 7DRL.

According to the Berlin Interpretation, a roguelike must have:

Permadeath

Random environment generation

Exploration and discovery

Turn-based, grid-based, non-modal gameplay

Hack-n-slash (e.g. lots of monsters to kill)

Resource management (e.g. inventory)

Some enthusiasts also impose a few extra requirements, such as ASCII graphics, level-based dungeons, top-down RPG gameplay, only one player character to control, and hard numbers for attributes like health and damage.

However, according to the Berlin Interpretation, these are "low-value factors" that don't disqualify a game from being a roguelike if they're missing.

The games that were analyzed to arrive at this definition are Rogue, Nethack, ADOM, Angband, and Crawl.

What Is a Roguelike-Like?

The release of Spelunky in 2008 put the Berlin Interpretation, and other roguelike interpretations with it, to the test.

Here we had an indie game that played a lot like classic roguelikes: levels were randomly generated and required exploration, there was resource management on the part of the player, there were plenty of monsters to defeat, and the player had to start over from scratch upon death.

The only thing missing was turn-based, grid-based gameplay—Spelunky was a sidescrolling platformer.

Despite the borrowing of so many elements, Spelunky certainly lacked the spirit of a roguelike, leading to the birth of a new term: the roguelike-like, or a game that applies one or more roguelike elements to a different genre.

In the case of Spelunky, it was the "roguelikification" of a sidescrolling platformer. In 2012, the release of FTL: Faster Than Light showed what it would be like to introduce roguelike elements to RTS gameplay—and the result was a smash hit.

But the most puzzling roguelike-like was 2011's The Binding of Isaac, which fulfilled even more of the Berlin Interpretation and arguably felt the most like a roguelike but was rejected by roguelike enthusiasts as decidedly not a roguelike.

The Binding of Isaac had pretty much everything: top-down view a la The Legend of Zelda, procedurally generated levels, dungeon-based exploration, a tile-based environment, item collection and inventory management, plenty of monsters to hack-n-slash through, and permadeath.

So what was the problem?

Well, The Binding of Isaac was a twin-stick shooter, and it was this aspect that didn't sit well with roguelike fans. Combat in classic roguelikes was turn-based and tactical, and The Binding of Isaac was, at its core, an action-packed shooting game.

Since then, there have been dozens of successful roguelike-likes, including Darkest Dungeon, Nuclear Throne, and Enter the Gungeon.

What Is a Roguelite?

In 2013, Cellar Door Games released Rogue Legacy and intentionally avoided calling it a roguelike or even a roguelike-like, instead opting to forge a new term: the roguelite.

Much in the same vein as roguelike-likes, Rogue Legacy borrowed roguelike elements and applied them to its sidescrolling platformer gameplay, but introduced a new element that offset the permadeath mechanic that roguelikes and roguelike-likes were so famous for: carry-over progression.

While the current character truly dies upon death, the player continues on in the role of a descendant who retains the same equipment, upgrades, and stats that were unlocked by ancestors (the player's previous runs), but with different characteristics and abilities. The castle, which is the game's main dungeon, remains persistent across deaths.

Just as there's disunity over the definition of roguelike, not everyone agrees on what it means to be a roguelite.

For some, the terms roguelike-like and roguelite are synonymous. For others, myself included, roguelites are defined by the one feature that truly makes them "lite" (or more palatable to players at large) compared to roguelike-likes, and that's the carry-over of progress across playthroughs, also known as meta-progression.

Whereas one of the main draws of roguelikes and roguelike-likes is permadeath—the complete and utter loss of everything upon death—it's a bit too harsh for most gamers to stomach (whimps), which is why roguelites have boomed in popularity.

The threat of death is still there in the form of having to start over, but each loss still contributes to forward momentum. No run is ever wasted. This is the defining trait of roguelites that differentiates them from their less forgiving siblings.

Note that unlocking content isn't necessarily the same as carry-over progress. For example, Nuclear Throne has characters that can be unlocked through gameplay, but each character starts each new game as a blank slate.

The persistence in roguelites necessitates that you can start off from where you died, at least in terms of overall game state, on your subsequent runs.

Incremental games, also known as clicker games, clicking games (on PCs) or tap games (in mobile games), are video games whose gameplay consists of the player doing simple actions such as clicking on the screen repeatedly (resulting in carpel tunnel and joint damage). This "grinding" earns the player in-game currency which can be used to increase the rate of currency acquisition. In some games, even the clicking becomes unnecessary at some point, as the game plays itself, including in the player's absence, hence the moniker idle game (the absolute ultimate in laziness). The question thus becomes, is a game that you don't play even truly a game? Does a computer generated dungeon of monsters beaten by the same computer controlled Warrior constitute a win?

According to Anthony Pecorella in his GDC summit talks, the first idle game was attributed to Progress Quest (2002) by Eric Fredriksen, which is a parody of MMORPG's stats and auto-attack. He argued that Kongregate was an early breeding ground for the genre, as some people just want to chat, so, the first game of the genre was aptly titled Kongregate Chat (July 24, 2007, by John Cooney), where the game just run by itself, and people are just chatting in the chat section of the game. While one of the first visual idle games ("rudimentary RPG" according to Pecorella) was Ayumilove's HackerStory v1 (2008, by Ayumilove), which was a parody of bot grinding in a Maple Story game, a famous MMORPG from Korea at that time.

Lastly, we have a more recent entry into the so-called roguelike games, and one that diehard Rogue fans loath passionately, card games. Most gamers who have been into Rogue/Roguelikes when asked how they feel about cards being added to the game will get downright nasty. This isn't because a game is bad, rather, it is because it doesn't fit into the Roguelike definition. Even though this type of game has been around longer than Roguelites, it did't gain popularity until much later.

Slay the Spire is a roguelike deck-building video game, developed by the American indie studio Mega Crit and published by Humble Bundle, is attributed with releasing the first such game. Ever since then, hardcore gamers have demanded a new genre' title other than "rogue" be used. Unfortunately, sellers used the "rogue" fame to sell these card games and various companies have now made games that breech card gaming and rogue. The best gamers have managed is to push the games into the Rogue-Lite genre' even though that too is not proper.

For roguelike purists who prefer the hardcore, traditional gameplay that's core to real roguelikes, the terms do matter.

Because if they're looking for new roguelikes to play and stumble across a new game that claims to be a "roguelike" but is truly more of a "roguelite"... well, that can be pretty disappointing.