“So I asked myself, what is it that makes Crawl so good and NetHack so bad?” (For the record, NetHack is great). I even resorted to silly things, like there’s one entry level where you have all the Tetris pieces.” After a while, I sat there and- you need a new idea, a concept for a level, and I had nothing. I would come home from university, and every day I would make ten new entry vaults. “ are so visible to the player, because they die so often. “For these to be fun, you don’t need ten, you need thousands,” he told me. He was particularly focused on entry vaults, which are the rooms that the player first spawns in. ![]() In 2002, David Ploog, who is a mathematician living in Berlin, worked his way onto the two-person Crawl development team by mapping hundreds of vaults in his free time. It’s endlessly replayable and it’s tremendous fun. The game is structured around twenty-two different branches which each have different enemies and level design patterns. The game has traditional randomly generated level layouts, but it’s also filled with vaults, which are hand-crafted areas or floors that are scattered throughout the dungeon. Players select their character from twenty-six species and twenty five backgrounds (classes) at the beginning of the game, and they choose to worship one of twenty-three gods somewhere along the way. The goal of the game is to gather between three and fifteen runes, retrieve the Orb of Zot, and ascend to the surface as the demons of hell chase after you. It has an ASCII version, which most of the developers use, and a tiles version, which most of the players use. Corin said, “almost certainly less than twenty, almost certainly more than five.”ĭungeon Crawl Stone Soup, which everyone refers to as Crawl, is one of the most popular and long-lived traditional roguelikes out there. How many are working on the game right now? “That’s impossible to answer, I’m afraid,” David told me, laughing. ![]() I spoke with David Ploog (dpeg) and Corin Buchanan-Howland (Lasty), two of the most prominent developers on the team, about how and why they make a game with such a sprawl of people. No design lead, no engineering lead, no art lead, no producer. In the sixteen-year history of Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, there has never been a lead. Of these, fifty have been core developers. Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup has had two hundred and fifty three contributors.
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