Martin's Dungeon Bash

You arrive at Martin's Infinite Dungeon, with only a dagger and an iron ration. The game is Martin's Dungeon Bash, and your only goal is advance as far as possible through rooms and corridors guarded by hostile monsters. There is no win condition, no amulet or some such thing that causes you to end and win the game.

Martin's Dungeon Bash is a game (under a permissive BSD license) for Unix, authored by Martin Read. The official release contains only C source code, and a Makefile for. A GNU/Linux system with gcc can build a playable game, as can similar systems such as BSD.

From the included notes.txt file:


 * Martin's Dungeon Bash v1.6 is conceptually trivial: You are trapped in an (approximately) infinitely deep dungeon complex from which there is said to be no possible escape. Not being ready to give up on life just yet, you decide to kill as many of the denizens as possible before you yourself succumb.


 * As you dive deeper into the dungeon, you will meet more fearsome foes, and familiar foes will increase in power. It is said that eventually, the beasts of the dungeon grow so mighty that they can slay even the boldest of heroes with a single blow.

As the player goes down through the dungeon levels, new monster types appear, and existing monster types become more powerful. For example, a thug on level 5 may have a stronger attack and more hit points than a thug on level 1.

Martin's Dungeon Bash employs a roguelike, text-only interface. The keyboard controls seem to be a cross between Angband and NetHack. For example, to grab an item from the floor, the player may use either the Angband key [g] or the NetHack key [,]. To move the player's character, the game accepts both the vi-like yuhjklbn keys and the numeric keypad. The onscreen map centers on the  sign representing the player's character, as does the map of Linley's Dungeon Crawl.

The dungeon layout resembles the original Rogue, in that each level consists of exactly nine rooms, connected with corridors, and one of the rooms contains the staircase down to the next level; there are never any upward staircases. As in Rogue, the player cannot see through a door, but can see one square away in either direction while in a dark corridor, or anywhere while in a lit room. Unlike Rogue, Dungeon Bash does allow diagonal moves to and from doors. This ability can be useful if the player wants to flee the room but a monster is on the square in front of the door.

As in so many other roguelike games, players in Dungeon Bash will randomly find items on the floor, and from the death drops of some monsters. Some items have a scrambled appearance; the player may have to try each item to determine whether it is good or bad.

Weapons and armor have a durability rating that starts at (100/100). Whenever the weapon hits or the armor blocks a blow, the durability decreases. If it reaches (0/100), the item falls apart. Thus, players will learn to carry spare weapons an armor.

Game Data
Martin's Dungeon Bash began in 2005 as a "7DRL" game, a successful attempt to pass a challenge to program a new roguelike game in only seven days. That version had so many new bugs, but Martin Read continued to maintain the game. The current version 1.6 is stable and playable.

There also exists the beta version 1.99.0, which will eventually become version 2.0, though the web page states that "will probably never happen".

Links

 * Official site: Martin's Dungeon Bash