Dungeon of Doom

Welcome to Dungeon Of Doom!

Why did I write this game in all text?

     I miss the days of the text adventures where your imagination served up the graphics. This game brings those days back to me, therefore I did not use any graphics. Additionally, anything I add to the game is pure gameplay.  You will certainly be surprised at the depth of the game.

All ascii arts used are sourced from publicly available repositories, and are used with the creator's initials or name intact.

About the game

     You start out as an adventurer in the Kingdom of Koras. Commissioned by King Tomas Veeder, you are tasked to retrieve the "Cone Of Power" from the depths of the Dungeon Of Doom, but it won't be easy. 70 or more floors of labyrinthine rooms await you. Hope you don't get tired of combat, as you'll run across the bands of monsters that patrol the depths many, many times. You'll meet many other adventurers like yourself at the guild, all of whom are willing to help you in your quest, provided you have the funds to hire them. It's not unheard of that monsters will join your side as well, but don't count on it.

Dungeon Of Doom Features

1. A dungeon that is 80 floors deep (using the default map)

2. Over 50 weapons and 40 armors to equip your party members with.

3. 20 characters of varied backgrounds available to help you in your quest.

4. Monsters can join your party and fight for you.

5. Over 70 magic spells available to your party through pharmacological    experimentation.

6. Control of up to 6 player characters and monsters in your party.

7. Nearly 2000 different monsters that can attack in groups of up to 26.

8. Boss battles to fight upon retrieval of the key treasures.

9. 33 monster special attacks with 13 abnormal statuses that can be inflicted  upon your characters, curable with the items available from the apothecary.

10.Monsters are vulnerable to, affected by, unaffected by, or benefit from  fire, water, earth, wind, lightning and chaos spell attacks.

11.Monsters vary in strength and dexterity therefore you'll find that the  same monster can be faster/slower and/or stronger/weaker than others  of its kind.

12.Monsters can flee from the combat if your level is high enough.  Additionally, you can choose not to fight a group of monsters if your party is strong enough.

13.You can create a new set of mazes at any time with the DGEN program, and    generate dungeons of potentially unlimited depth. (*)

14.Five game modes and several optional modifiers make for exciting variation  in the way the game can  be played. You can even choose to start a  completely random game where your character is randomly generated, and  a random game mode with various options are selected.

15.Optional "carnage" mode in some game types allows the enemy to gradually    become stronger based on the number of battles your party has won.

16.A level differential system insures that grinding for levels is reduced  as weaker characters gain more experience than others based on a target  level for each of the first 70 floors. This is also an optional setting.

17. Floors below 70 (or the whole dungeon if Full Chaos mode is selected)  are chaos floors that have much stronger enemies with random elemental resistances or benefits and random special attacks that can scale to  nearly unlimited depths (*). Chaos generated monsters have their names spelled out with special characters and white blocks and are much more difficult to beat than the standard ones.

   *  How deep you want the dungeon to be depends on your patience in the time  it will take to generate that many floors, as well as how strong the  monsters will be at the bottom, which is where the Cone of Power will be placed.

Some ancient history here:

Originally in 1986 I wrote the game on the Apple II. The map was totally weird. You could get stuck between two rooms, etc... I don't even know if you could get to the bottom or not! You only had one character to play and you only had a weapon and armor. Tried to make a realistic aging system for your character but could never get that to work right. Also there were only about 40 or so monsters throughout the ENTIRE game!

Unfortunately (or fortunately), the Apple II version is lost to history as I never made a backup of it and the disk it was on failed. Not that it was fun to play though!

I began developing the game for the PC in 1998 in QBASIC for OS/2. Since then it has been translated across several dialects of BASIC and is now compiled under FreeBasic  for Linux and Windows.