Artists interpretation of a graveling. Illustration by Elin Karlsmo.
The most important component of being a roguelike game is actually being a game.
- Jeff Lait, rec.games.roguelike.development
Make a giant slimy skeletal rat bat ghoul lichmummy with a severed hand and floating skull.
- smatthews, #udic
Artists interpretation of a graveling. Illustration by Elin Karlsmo.
TSL is an adventure game by Ulf Åström, similar in style to the classic "Rogue".
You play the role of an adventurer exploring a bleak and hostile world. Battle peculiar beasts and overcome sinister traps. Improve your character by replacing body parts with machinery. This is no ordinary "fantasy" setting. Everyone loses, everyone dies.
TSL has quick gameplay and high replay value. Each game is randomly generated and has different levels, item and monster placement. Turn-based gameplay gives you ample time to think about each move. There is more than one way to deal with each situation. There is no need to "grind" and "level up" - only player skill counts. You start each game with the accumulated knowledge of previous sessions.
TSL is not easy and forgiving - it is actively trying to kill you and requires great skill to outsmart. Death is permanent: when you die, there is no way to bring a character back. While this might sound discouraging at first, the appeal lies in the trial and error, discovery itself. Even death tries to be fair and educational: every time you die, you will know what killed you and learn not to do that again. Eventually you will master rules.
TSL has a delicious grayscale interface (SDL for graphics or curses for textmode) and runs on Windows and most UNIX-like systems. You can also build the game from source code.
For more information about roguelikes, pay the RogueBasin wiki a visit! There is also a TSL page that discusses technical details in greater depth.
Have a look at some TSL screenshots!
The latest version is 0.37 and was released 2011-12-01. It is available as:
SDL)Building TSL should work something like this, assuming you are using a UNIX(-like) environment with GCC and ncurses/SDL:
gzip -d tsl-version.tar.gz tar xvpf tsl-version.tar cd tsl-version
Now you can now either
./build_console.sh (to link with curses and play in a terminal)
./build_sdl.sh (to link with SDL and play in a graphical mode)
The game binary is called tsl.
Q: Why can't I save my game?
A: Saving is disabled under Windows. I just haven't had time to fix it. It's not my development platform, so it's almost guaranteed to have more bugs.
Q: I'm playing in textmode but the floor tiles look terrible. What can I do?
A: There are two possible solutions. 1) Adjust your terminal font (odd fontsizes don't go well with the dither). 2) Turn on "dotfloors" for traditional . floors. See README for instructions.
Q: Why are the walls garbled in PuTTY?
A: There is a mismatch between codepage translation (most probably), shell environment and curses capabilities. Your server is sending characters PuTTY does not understand. Experiment with Configuration - Window - Translation and let me know if you find a solution.
Q: Why did you add a graphical mode, after stating for 6 years that you would not?
A: To prove my skill as a programmer. There still won't be any 3D, multiplayer or realtime modes, sorry.
TSL is written in C using the ncurses API. The source should compile and run without problems on most GNU/Linux and BSD systems. It has also been run on Windows, Solaris, Mac and probably a couple of other systems. Portability needs a bit of tweaking, but I'm trying to resolve any problems that appear.
TSL has been in development since 2006, with some code originating from an older project called HASAD. Development usually happens in bursts of a couple creative months followed by long spans of inactivity.
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