Sil

[Scatha]

I wanted to advertise Sil to the Wesnoth community, since I think some people here would really enjoy the game and appreciate the tactical depth.

Sil is a roguelike (and distant relative of Angband) with a First Age Tolkienian theme. The design and development are due to half (the primary author; also the person who introduced me to Wesnoth!) and myself. We released it at the beginning of the year, and it's had a very positive reception so far:

Selected quotes

Firstly, great game... Really the best I've played in a long time, of this genre - very well done, the feel/setting, the tactics - all great.

It's a lot of fun ... I don't know how, but the makers have managed to make the fights feel more epic and legendary.

Oh my goodness, this is nice.

The theme and UI are beautifully done, and the difficulty curve is just about perfect - I lose a lot of heros to stupid mistakes that would be minor in any other variant, but with patience and care and just a bit of luck, things work out, and when they do, there's a genuine feeling of accomplishment that's rare in games these days.

The game is marvellously bug-free, cleanly designed, and interesting. It's a huge achievement.

Sil is the best game of any type I've played in years, and I'm thrilled to see it keeps getting better!!

YES YES OH [expletive] YES.

For those interested, I'd definitely recommend starting with the tutorial, even if you've played roguelikes before. After you've got to grips with the basics, you might like to read the manual. It explains the details of all of the major game mechanics. We've designed the game to offer interesting choices even when you know how everything works: there is no single obvious "best strategy".

If you try it out, I hope you enjoy it! Feedback is very welcome.

[MCP]

Will check out asap. Looks really neat.

[taptap]

First rogue-like I actually like.

[johndh]

My typical experience with a rogue-like is staring blankly at the screen, trying a few buttons hoping to do what I want, and then shouting "HOW DO I DO THINGS!?" Sil, on the other hand, is much more intuitive to me. I ended up dying numerous times, but that is to be expected. Overall, pretty fun. There doesn't seem to be Linux support, but it ran just fine for me under Wine.

[Eleazar]

This is the first Rogue-like i've come across that i think i might like...

[max_torch]

Do you think I would like this if i liked the game "FTL: Faster than Light?"

[johndh]

Do you think I would like this if i liked the game "FTL: Faster than Light?"

Sil has some similar elements to FTL (like how it's different every time you play), but it's less forgiving and it's not really divided into individual encounters. In FTL, even a first-time player can easily make it through a big chunk of the game, but with Sil you'd be lucky to get past the first couple of fights. Combat is also less predictable in Sil. So... long story short, maybe.

[taptap]

I don't know about FTL, but I would say if you like Wesnoth and any roguelike you should give Sil a try.

If you start this week, you also have the chance to play in the new competition to celebrate version 1.2.1: http://angband.oook.cz/competition.php

[max_torch]

@taptap
I don't think there's even any chance that I could win at all the competition in that timeframe given even if i had the time
I already tried the tutorial. Im okay with the graphics and controls but im just wondering if more could be squeezed out of the graphics? Are there any tricks to make the graphics as nice as possible? I think the tileset usage had a tag that said experimental/beta or something.

[taptap]

@taptap
I don't think there's even any chance that I could win at all the competition in that timeframe given even if i had the time
I already tried the tutorial. Im okay with the graphics and controls but im just wondering if more could be squeezed out of the graphics? Are there any tricks to make the graphics as nice as possible? I think the tileset usage had a tag that said experimental/beta or something.

As in the olympics, participating is the goal.

I don't follow the graphics department, but I believe it is planned for 1.3 (likely that means next year). There are some discussions about it in the Sil subforum of angband.oook.cz, some tileset apparently does work, but isn't adapted to Sil at the moment. The amount of icons required for Sil is fairly small, so I guess the best option at the moment is to learn the icons by playing along a while (+ read a bit in the Silmarillion) and then lean back, close your eyes and add visuals off screen.

[max_torch]

@taptap
wow that's a very nice tip about appreciating the ASCII graphics. yeah the game does seem simple enough for the graphics not to bring the whole thing down - unlike dwarf fortress where I played it for a few hours then I said to myself "this is too much complexity for me to handle in only ASCII graphics! 3D physics represented as a 2d ASCII display? Much worse, the game is in real-time! My brain will overload.."