HASAD (hack and slash adventure/dungeon) has been discontinued. I'm currently working on The Slimy Lichmummy, a much more complete (and fun) roguelike. This page exists for historical and educational purposes only.
HASAD was the name of a pen and paper RPG I was developing with a friend. Nothing came of it, so I reused the name for another project.
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 was in 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 how to get it done.
The making and release of the bloated version 0.5 led to a 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 more capable of really creating the gaming experience I strive for.
Here are some old screenshots!
Some (planned) features were (many of these also made it into TSL):
dragon corpse)
hasad.php was last modified on 2011-11-10 10:03:00 and should be valid XHTML 1.0 Strict.