HASAD

HASAD has been discontinued.

This page exists for historical and educational purposes only. I'm currently working on The Slimy Lichmummy, a much more complete (and fun) roguelike.

Like many aspiring roguelike developers, I once nursed the dream of creating the roguelike. Glancing at amazing games like ADOM, Nethack and Angband, I wanted to do it too; an infinite world allowing complete freedom of action, with uncountable items, monsters, quests, classes, towns, dungeons and spells to populate it.

I had previously made some crude attempts at roguelike development (including one in PHP CLI!), but it wasn't before 2004 I got started for real. Needless to say, HASAD in its inception wasn't very impressive - I got past the initial humps though (dungeon generation, line of sight), and it eventually worked quite well. Except it wasn't fun - to play nor code.

The source was ugly (I barely knew C when I started), but I think I could have fixed it if I had really wanted to (in fact, a lot of the HASAD code was carried over to TSL). Instead, the real problem was that I lacked focus. I was adding bells and whistles while neglecting to get the prequisite systems in place first. I was writing a game, but had no plan on how to actually get it done.

The making and release of the bloated version 0.5 led to my decision to take the plunge and start over. The design guidelines for TSL described a much smaller, "back to the roots" game, focusing on fast and intense gameplay rather than quantity. Of course, my ambitions for TSL have shifted somewhat since then, but today I feel much more capable of actually delivering the gaming experience I strive for.

Some features of HASAD

• Predefined overworld and towns, random dungeons and encounters
• Several continents to travel between
• Several different dungeon level generation algorithms; halls connected by corridors, mazes, caves...
• No fixed classes; characters can evolve in (almost) any area they want
• Different kinds of merchants, selling different kinds of items
• Line-of-sight that supports lighting, nightvision...
• Poisoning, long-time wounding, paralysis, blindness...
• Custom corpses for monsters (a dragon would leave dragon scales rather than just a dragon corpse)
• As the player grows stronger, weaker monsters give less experience/kill
• Different damage types (crushing, piercing, cold...)
• Different creatures have different attack types; biting, tentacles...
• Lots of other stuff I don't recall right now :-)

Screenshots

• My own screenshot collection (higher number = more recent)
• 0.4 screenshot (and another one) by Gibbas. AFAIK, this is the first time ever it was compiled and run under Windows (with Cygwin).

Download

HASAD is available as source code only.

• 0.5
• 0.4
• 0.3
• 0.2
• 0.1