POWDER is a roguelike game, which is not a port of an existing roguelike. It is built around replayability and long term ergonomics, not short term learning. Author of this piece of software is Jeff Lait.
Release notes:
This release is a bit late coming out due to my participation in the fourth annual seven day roguelike competition. My submission was Fatherhood.
Spent some time improving environmental interactions, adding some relatively useless spells that people more clever than I will find ways to abuse, and performing the usual grammar fixes.
An exciting change which hopefully you won’t notice is that the SDL based builds are no longer tied to a fixed 8×8 tile size. This was no small change as I had happily spread hard-coded constants everywhere, confident that the Gameboy Advance hardware wasn’t going to change on me. It never did, but POWDER escaped that world and now lives places where 8×8 feels a bit cramped. One intriguing tileset would be to build a 10×10 based set that would then run at a native res of 320×240. See the ArtPack for details. Note I said I hope you don’t notice this. No doubt, I have screwed up somewhere and some menu or stylus input won’t work properly – I look forward to having my error pointed out.
Note: While the highscore is kept, save games are never preserved between versions. Please wait until your current character dies before upgrading.
Changes:
[DS] Pressing keys on on-screen keyboard will move the button-based cursor to the pressed location.
Flavour text for empty bottles. (R. Dan Henry)
Zombies, skeletons, ghasts, and liches that are made by magic will have their original creature type prefixed to the name: rat zombie, tridude lich, etc. (Adam Boyd)
Trolls that resurrect inside lava will remain inside the lava rather than being teleported out. (Oohara Yuuma)
Acid Pool can now be cast at range rather than only on adjacent squares.
When you suffer system shock due to ending a polymorph or possession by dying a “You feel a little dead inside” is reported to alert you to the damage done. The Possess spell help has been updated to point out the dangers of dying while possessing creatures. (Derek S. Ray)
You can now wish for specific spells. Well, provided you can wish at all. If only you knew how to wish.
Wands of light will now slightly damage creatures and blind them for a turn or two.
Floating eyes that are blind can no longer paralyse you. (Michael Brough)
A Grow Forest spell that… grows a forest. I guess you could use it to block line of sight of those that chase you? (Adam Boyd)
Being hit by water has more consistent effects.
To hit bonus of weapons now shown in [] after weapon damage to make it clear that rapiers have a bonus.
A Down Pour spell to sodden excessively cheerful spirits.
Extra commas in the monster descriptions (R. Dan Henry)
The character dump will now give you your playtime and which platform you are playing on.
Option to turn off colouring of hp and mp. (David Damerell)
“Your spear glows grey” from Detect Curse spell now has punctuation. (Michael Brough)
Forest tiles can catch on fire and turn into forest fires. Be careful, these spread.
Support for tilesets with a base tile size other than 8×8 in SDL builds. (Ibson the Grey)
Your tileset, name choice, and button mappings are now saved with the highscores, not with your save game. This means the settings from when you last died or saved will be restored when you power back on again. (Matthew Rollins, Tim Allen, Robert, Irashtar, Matt, likely many others)
[PSP] Quit removed from PSP menu pending me figuring out how to properly boot back to the host system. (stabwound)