Apologies, but why even mention “free” and “free-beer” terms the first time someone has a desire to dive in such miracles… or ineffably magnificent work of lore, characters, items, balances… art? How low should you even look at such art to even consider the hecking price almost instantly…?
The title has been in development since the very Crawl and Dungeon Crawl of 1997, 1995, or even before that…
Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup
Copyright 1997-2025 Linley Henzell, the dev team, and the contributors Source (License)
Some of the Crawl developers hang out on the #crawl-dev IRC channel on Libera: ircs://irc.libera.chat:6697/#crawl.
The current binaries are cross-platform, support TTY (terminal), web (“WebTiles” or “web-tiles”, former “NetTiles”), and desktop-native (“tiles”; SDL - the library) portals to adventure the universe…
You may self-host any of course, including web-tiles, but due to how authentication is organized since the beginning still, the current version authentication is based on the operating system, and you may want to isolate that in containers nowadays; there are examples.
Some hosts support live-streaming, e.g.: underhound.eu:8080/#lobby
Relatively recently, when someone asked about artwork contributions in the IRC channel, they updated the contribution guide, too!
Submitting artwork
If you want to submit artwork (tiles, icons, splash screens) for consideration, you can link it to us in #crawl-dev, or you can open a github issue, or you can submit a pull request.
If you’re doing tiles art, or splash screen art, then it’s recommended to look at our existing artwork and try to match the general style presented there. This is not a hard-and-fast rule, and clear improvements are always welcome.
Q: Does DCSS accept donations?
The DCSS dev team doesn’t currently accept donations. The online server admins, some of whom are DCSS devs themselves, kindly pay all server costs. See your online server’s lobby page for the admin’s contact info if you’d like to offer them a donation. You can donate to me if you’d like to support my dev work and stream. Source
There have been discussions for release at Steam, too, relatively similar to Dwarf Fortress or Xonotic even have.
I am sorry, but… how may not you even heard about Dungeon Crawl hearing about the genre almost everywhere…
And… again… money? What does “free” mean? How is that even related here…?
Because, if it’s free, you can just try it out, no? Some people (including me) are broke and need to carefully manage their expenses. It often means I wait for months before getting a new game, however much I desire it. A free game though? I can check it out at any moment, as long as I have a time for myself.
It would be nice to live in a naive world where I can just get whatever I want, whenever I want to.
I am sorry, but… how may not you even heard about Dungeon Crawl hearing about the genre almost everywhere…
I’m not sure what you mean by that. Of course I know about Dungeon Crawl and its genre…
This is number of copies sold. It really did sell that high. And if that blows your mind, wait until you find out Human Fall Flat sold like 40M copies.
It’s a line from the movie “The Exorcist”. Coincidentally just watched Ricky Gervais’ new standup special that just came out in which he riffs on this exact line.
Seriously… that’s basically what you’re doing, curating your own list based on what you think is important. And it’s great! I’m the next step down on the food chain, the guy who devours the curated lists that people like you spend time putting together. Thanks!
Hideo Kojima rewrote parts of Death Stranding 2 late in development because the beta testers were unanimous in praising it. He said something along the lines of if nobody hated it, he was playing things too safe.
I also read something about him saying something like that in an interview. I’ve not seen much of the actual game, but ironically it has still been accused of being too safe, in spite of what Kojima said
I get what you mean but at the same time, it’s not that big of a deal. Because if a game that is really complained about seems good to me, I may still include it because the reviews arent managing to convince me. Though realistically, I may fail to catch that.
As for the opposite case, where a game that passes the review stage turns out to not be so bold, well… tough luck. I mean it could still be good and be safe, like Mario Kart 8, and that isnt really a problem I feel.
If you just discovered Steam Link and you’re not married to it, you could use Sunshine as your gamestreaming host and Moonlight as the client. you can set it up so that you can launch Steam Big Picture on your host and play any games that are listed under your steam, even if they are non-steam games.
Apparently the dev got banned. The reason is unclear and I would love to understand the other side but this is on their Github.
I got kicked from Moonlight and Sunshine’s Discord server and banned from Sunshine’s GitHub repo literally for helping people out. This is what I got for finding a bug, opened an issue, getting no response, troubleshoot myself, fixed the issue myself, shared it by PR to the main repo hoping my efforts can help someone else during the maintenance gap.
Turns out the major difference is the thing I use most: virtual display in headless mode.
When I connect as a virtual display, I have Apollo set to treat the new virtual display (whose resolution is set by Moonlight’s settings, so I can control it on the client end). Headless mode means all apps open in the virtual display, so I never need to go to the PC itself. And finally, in the advanced settings I have it set up so the virtual display is treated as the only display, so existing applications move to the virtual display (in case I already had Steam or Battle.net or whatever open).
So I’ve been seeing some discussion online about how Apollo has solved some user’s problems with virtual display
Do you mind me asking what you’re running? I’m on Ubuntu 25.10 w/ Plasma 6.4 running wayland, and I’ve had issues forever setting up a virtual display. I’ve just accepted that I have to go with whatever modes the edid my monitor/dummy hdmi plug offers, which means I havent been able to stream 1260x800 or 2560x1600 to my steamdeck (so it is black-barred)
I guess Plasma 6.6 is going to add the ability to add custom modes via kscreen-doctor, but thats at least a few months out I think. I’d much rather use a native virtual display if apollo is magically able to do that.
Oh I’m still a Windows user, haven’t yet migrated over (though I do have a Nobara install I’ve played with a bit, I haven’t tried to get Apollo working on it). I stream 2560x1440 and just ignore the black bars, but I could request 2560x1600 and I think it would work just fine (I prefer the higher resolution for higher quality, rather than the native 1280x800, though I can confirm that requesting 1280x800 works when my bandwidth is limited).
That setting is handled within Moonlight, and Apollo respects that setting by default, so Apollo presents itself as a virtual display with the resolution requested by Moonlight. At least that’s my understanding.
The thing is, for a game like Clair Obscur or Elden Ring, I’d echo those same complaints, but I still enjoyed them; in Elden Ring’s case, despite those complaints, I’d still call it one of the best games ever made. You might share those criticisms but still find plenty to love about it.
I do agree, as only reading reviews feels like getting to know a game only at a surface level. I’d like to believe that I won’t miss anything by ignoring those games that I excluded but really it is inevitable.
But horror isn’t CoD. I will never be that big. But Konami thinks it can be, and will either sacrifice the quality of the games in order to appeal to a wider audience, or keep the games as scary as they are, and fail to meet their own unrealistic expectations.
The scariness of the games is an additional complication that AAA publishers don’t seem to get.
A bad Call of Duty still lets you click heads and scream slurs in a match lobby.
But make a horror game that isn’t scary? Or even the wrong amount, or type of scary? Complete failure.
If you target hardcore horror fans, your game has to be good enough to scare them, and you’ll never be able to sell to everyone. And if you can’t scare the hardcore fans, you need to be interesting enough for the casual fans to buy in. Getting both is near impossible, which is why indies do so well in the genre. It’s REALLY hard to make horror for everyone. Usually, a horror game interests only a subset of gamers.
And when you have a franchise, every new game needs to figure out how to scare people who have played the previous games. Or else interest them in other ways.
Horror is really easy to overplay. If your game is too long, the scares stop working because the player gets used to them. If sequels just do the same thing as the last game, entire games can stop being effective. And once you start trying to reinvent things every game, they can end up losing their identity (see RE5 and 6).
Doing this every 12 months? Just no.
Resident Evil is an excellent example. Capcom has tried and failed to increase release frequency, but titles that actually sell are about two or three years apart no matter what they seem to do. And that is WITH their new formula of using two completely different styles to reduce the sameness of the titles.
If Konami wants to release more games, they should tap their other IPs, not oversaturate the already crowded horror genre even more.
I feel like another option for horror is to spam the effort. Literally have 5 to 10 studios all making horror games, with a fraction of the budget. One of the big successes in horror is that some of the best ones were made with large restrictions on technology, effects, budget, etc. If you search the “Survival horror” tag on Steam, there’s a pretty large wash of games succeeding in the space now.
You could also note how many “horror-focused” Resident Evil games go through some form of reset where you lose your buildup of equipment, or change pace. They recognize that the genre isn’t well-suited for a constant escalation of power until you fight god, the way JRPGs do. Thus, people who enjoy those games are more likely to munch through them like doritos. Many streamers even have nights where they will buy some half-dozen of the games on Steam and just keep going through them.
Thanks, I had taken an English word and replaced it with Japanese characters, and I didn’t know because I’m Brazilian. But I’m always learning Japanese since I live here. Thank you for correcting me
Jisho.org is a fairly helpful site for finding words like that. Sometimes you have to scroll a bit to find the “loanword” version of a term, but it helps with showing different nuances of translated words when looking them up.
Unfortunately I think it’s EN-JP only, but helpful if you know the English word you want.
bin.pol.social
Aktywne