Info

What is Frozen Depths?
Frozen Depths is a roguelike game with a cold theme and ASCII graphics. If you don't know what roguelike games are, click here.

What's the idea or story of the game?
The world of Glacia has started to freeze all over. The surface people will perish, should the temperature drop much lower. The high council of Glacia has selected you to go to the Frozen Depths of Glacia, find out the source of coldness and get rid of it. If you return to the surface, you'll be executed as a coward, if you die on the way, another poor one will be sent down, but if you succeed in your quest, you'll become a hero. Many have failed and many will fail... Now you're all alone in the Frozen Depths, will you make it?

Describe it a little, is there anything unique or special?
It has only one dungeon and no outer world like the story says. You can freeze to death if you can't keep yourself warm. It will get colder when you travel deeper into the dungeon. You can find clothes and wear them. The clothes will warm you and thus they'll slow the freezing process. Like in other roguelike games, you have only one life and then it's over. It has frozen levels (slippery), snowy levels and, of course, normal levels and four different dungeon generators. You will face five cunning bosses before your ultimate victory. There are also different kinds of superior monsters, slightly adjusted and better than normal ones but easier than bosses. They are randomly generated.

When you level up, you can pick one of the stats to improve. A second one will improve too, randomly. The special moves require stats. For example, if you want to learn Critical Strike, but you don't have enough agility, you have to improve it before you can learn it. There was no magic in the world of Glacia originally, but the demons and monsters who have invaded the dungeons have brought magical wands, rings, amulets and potions from their world. You can choose to become a warrior, an archer or a ranger, because the people of Glacia don't know enough about magic to train mages. A ranger can shoot and fight in melee combat, but isn't specialized in either. The starting trainings (classes) are flexible and a warrior can learn bowcraft if he wants to.

The shops are a bit different in this one. You can only buy arrows from the shoplike things, Sages, but they have other services: They can identify and uncurse items (because there is limited magic, no scrolls, this is the way of doing it) and they can also heat you. Of course, that costs some coins, but you can sell useless items to Sages to get some money. They do buy things from you, but they sell only arrows. There are also Deep Smiths that let you decide how much you pay them for repairing your items or crafting items from the material that you supply them and the quality of their work depends on the payment. There is no food for hunger, because of the freezing system, but there are items that warm you when consumed. There is only one Goddess to worship, so there are no alignments. You don't have to sacrifice items to the Goddess, but praying can save your life in a bad situation and the Goddess won't help you if you haven't done anything for Her. You won't be collecting elemental resistances to survive (only two elements survive in the depths: it's the home of the cold creatures and the extremely hot creatures can keep themselves alive there), instead your armor and clothing has a greater importance. Your equipment, excluding throwing weapons, rings and amulets, can and will break. The durability is visible.

What are you trying to create?
I'm trying to create something easy-going, but fun, so don't expect [insert your favorite roguelike's name] the second or anything compared to the major ones. It's not very tactical with many easy-to-die situations like Dungeon Crawl or Nethack, nor does it have puzzles or anything that can't be handled with a sword (expect the temperature). For example, there is no weak and harder to start class like tourist or wizard. Also, I'll try to make it easy to jump in for new roguelikers by having a small set of keys, straightforward gameplay and easy beginning. In a few words, it's a pretty traditional, combat-oriented roguelike with some spice added.

Why can't I be a wizard?
Read the description first. Adding magic would greatly increase the amount of work for me and because my time is limited, I want to keep things simple enough. I want to polish the current content and add more similar content, magic would add too much things to polish. Too much things to polish means that the game wouldn't be polished even after many years of development and that's not my goal.

Is it free? Can I have the source?
The game is free, but not open source.

What other roguelikes have influenced it?
Mostly ADOM, Nethack a bit too and some others like Dungeon Crawl and DoomRL have inspired me.

Which operating systems does it support?
At first it was only for Windows, but version 1.00 introduced a Linux port and later 1.03 added a Macintosh port too.

Which programming language do you use?
C++.

How can I contact the developer?
drizzt_888{at}hotmail{dot}com is my e-mail address, which can be used with MSN Messenger too. You can find me on IRC, QuakeNet, the name is Glowie. And you can use the contact page too.