UltraRogue is an old ascii-graphics game developed by Herb Chong in the 1980s and 1990s. It's one of many roguelike games inspired by Dungeons and Dragons and by the original Unix game Rogue.
I fell in love with urogue in the mid-1980s. Later versions added more features and monsters, but the game also became more cumbersome to play.
This feels like the original urogue, but with more monsters, working save/restore code, some new and backported features and many bug fixes. I also streamlined gameplay to reduce typing and to lessen the strain on aging wrists.
If you have fond memories of the original urogue or other early roguelikes, then you may like this one too.
A variety of bug fixes and tweaks, most of which are detailed in the CHANGELOG. Also, ...
There are two command line options to adjust the level of difficulty of the game, -easy and -hard.
In easy games, your pack can hold more items and you start out with more stuff. There are fewer traps and fewer cursed items, and you are less likely to be summoned to a throne room. Also, armor is more effective.
In hard games, there are fewer blessed items, artifacts are more dangerous, and armor is less effective. You are more vulnerable to magical attacks and your ability to do magic is reduced. You can't start a hard game with plate, mithril or crystalline armor, but you may find some later.
There is also a Very Hard level. Getting into this difficulty level is left as an exercise for the player.
If you turn on Autosave, urogue will save the game periodically and lets you roll back to the most recent save point when you die. I.e, no permadeath.
If you turn off Autopickup (i.e. noautopickup) then your character won't pick things up automatically when you step on them.
If you turn on Cutcorners, you can move and fight around corners, as can the more dexterous monsters.
You can set these (and most other) options using the 'o' command in urogue, or via the SROGUEOPTS environment variable.
To keep things interesting, urogue chooses a random selection of monsters each time you play. By default, that includes the classic monsters from urogue 1.0.2 plus a random assortment of others. If you want, you can use command line options to change this:
* -mc: use only the classic monsters from urogue 1.0.2
* -mr: use a random selection of monsters
* -ma: use all 400+ monsters
Use the 'f' command to fight a single monster. If there is more than one monster in reach, urogue asks which you want to fight.
Use the 'F' command to fight a group of monsters. I.e., when the monster you are fighting moves or dies, urogue picks another and keeps going. Fights end when there are no more monsters in reach, or when you are too weak, sick, hungry or injured to continue.
There are fewer interruptions when fighting, and fewer messages to distract you. If you are much stronger than the monsters around you, this means you can press 'F' and then press space until they all disappear.
With the 'F' command, urogue tries to avoid friendly monsters and monsters that divide when hit.
<CTRL>-F (serious fight) is like 'F' but fights last longer and include friendly and dividing monsters.
Pressing <SHIFT> and a direction key runs until you reach something interesting. There is an option (nodoorstop) that lets you run into things (as in classic rogue).
Pressing <CTRL> and a direction key does a controlled run -- where you stop and search after every step and don't pick things up when you step on them. This is particularly useful in treasure chambers, but it does mean that any monsters that are chasing you quickly catch up.
As in other early roguelikes, in urogue you use keyboard commands to wander through a dungeon fighting monsters and collecting treasure. The dungeon, monsters and treasure are all displayed on screen as text characters. For example, you are an '@' sign, and monsters are various letters of the alphabet. The dungeon itself is drawn with dots, dashes, vertical bars and so on.
There are 8 different magical artifacts in this version of rogue. The first is on level 25 and is relatively easy to pick up. The last is on level 100 and is very difficult to get. Carrying any of these treasures allows the rogue to go up the stairs. To win the game, work your way down through the dungeon collecting artifacts, and then climb back out again.
You can use the arrow keys to move around in this version of urogue, but it's generally more convenient to use the keyboard movement keys:
h left
j down
k up
l right
y up & left
u up & right
b down & left
n down & right
These keys move one space at a time. To speed things up, press <SHIFT> and a movement key to run until you reach something interesting. Press <CTRL> and a movement key to run, searching at each step.
Here are a few other commands to get you started:
? prints help
/ identify object
> go down a staircase
. rest
, pick up an object
c cast a spell
d drop an object
e eat food
i inventory
m move without picking up
o examine/set options
p pray
q quaff a potion
r read a scroll
s search for trap/secret door
z zap a magic wand
S save game
Q quit
To restore a saved game from the default location, just run urogue again. To restore a different saved game, use "urogue <filename>". If you don't want to restore a saved game, run "urogue -new" (or delete the save file).
Older urogue versions (which may no longer be playable) are available from the roguelike archive at: https://britzl.github.io/roguearchive/
A C compiler, a curses library, and make.
This software builds on linux and windows. Probably other unix's too, but I haven't tried any recently.
To build urogue, change to the rogue sub-directory and type make:
cd rogue
make
Then run 'urogue' in an 80x24 or larger terminal window.
See the INSTALL file if you'd like to build for Windows.
UltraRogue was originally written by Herb Chong, with many additional contributors. The Roguelike Restoration Project released urogue 1.0.7 in 2005.
This is version 1.0.8 of urogue, maintained by Earl Fogel.
See the LICENSE.TXT file for details.