SilQ Heroes – a new version of SilQ (by me)

[k0rtes]

Hi all lovers of Angband and SilQ specifically.

I recently embarked on a quest to create my own variant of SilQ, and things got a bit out of hand. But let me start from the beginning. When I was a kid, I was a huge Lord of the Rings fan. One summer, staying at my grandma's village, I heard from a friend that there wasn't just one Tolkien book but another one called The Silmarillion. I visited every library in town, but the librarians gave me strange looks and said no.

When I returned home to the capital city where I lived at the time, I eventually found a copy-but I still vividly remember wandering through all those libraries and bookshops searching for The Silmaril(lion). I’m grown up now, but the kid in me stays forever. Recently, I bought myself a big beautiful edition of LOTR and finally read it. It was tough, as it was my first time reading it in English and not in my native language. I was really impressed by how different it feels in different languages. But then I remembered there was another Tolkien book.

So, I opened my Kindle, started reading The Silmarillion, and was completely hypnotized. It was so good-the songs, the Silmarils, Angband-I was enchanted. Immediately, I wanted to play a game based on it, but I didn't know of any. I googled and found Angband, a game I wasn't so sure about. After further research, I finally decided to try SilQ, as it seemed more lore-friendly and shorter. It’s worth mentioning that I’m a fan of roguelikes and roguelites in general-games like Hades, Dead Cells, Slay the Spire, Balatro, etc. And I'm also interested in the game development industry as a whole.

Anyway, back to Angband. I was so captivated that I spent entire nights playing it, creating new builds, stealing Silmarils, and killing the big bad guy (Morgoth, of course). But at some point, a thought struck me: I didn't want to play A hero-I wanted to be THE hero. I wanted to play as Feanor, Fingolfin, or Beren.

Then I had the idea that it might be cool to tweak SilQ just a little to allow this, so I downloaded the repo, tried to recall those bits of C programming I learned at university, and began making small edits. Soon after, another thought popped into my head-why not modernize it a bit and introduce meta mechanics, letting some nice and shiny things carry over to your next run? But "nice and shiny" didn't seem good-I decided instead to recreate the Doom of the Noldor, making each subsequent run not easier but harder.

Step by step, I found myself not playing all night, but coding, reading Tolkien Gateway, watching videos, and arguing with my friend about whether the Doom of Mandos is a curse or a prophecy-important stuff for the game, you know! Then another crazy idea appeared-to add a storyline, followed by multiple storylines that you could complete one by one, each offering different difficulty levels and storytelling.

I aimed for an experience where playing as Feanor would make you feel as badass as he is. But every success makes the next run even harder, quickly turning into a real struggle for survival-in my opinion, reflecting Tolkien’s ideas about the decay of the world. Importantly, this struggle is tied not just to gameplay, but also to storyline progression. Gameplay-wise, these unique heroes give you a fresh feeling, incentivizing special abilities and less popular builds.

So, long story long: today I've released an alpha version (0.7). As I can't play it anymore but prefer developing instead, I really hope you’ll give it a try and provide honest feedback and bug reports.

Here’s the GitHub link and the Windows release:

https://github.com/k0rtesss/sil-qh/releases/tag/v0.7-alpha

To summarize, the new ideas I’ve introduced:

* Storyline.
* Unique, very lore-friendly heroes with their own abilities.
* Meta progression with a curse system.

[Nick]

This sounds absolutely amazing. Thank you for the backstory as well. I don't know how much time I can devote to playing it right now, but I hope a lot of people do and you get the feedback you need. This is really exciting!

I have a variant of Sil (not Sil-q) called NarSil which started as Sil 1.3 rewritten with modern Angband code, and was created to be a basis for my open world game Beleriand which should be out in alpha before too long. Please take anything from any of those that you find useful.

[Nick]

My first attempt at playing after a routine 50' level I went down the stairs and couldn't see (bumping into walls, etc) although my torch still has plenty of turns. Is this deliberate?

EDIT: I think not, as the @ menu also fails to clear if I open it. I'm playing with ascii, not tiles.

[Cryomaniac]

So, as a loose comparison, it's like Gensouband's mechanic where you play as a canon Touhou character instead of picking race/class?

[k0rtes]

This sounds absolutely amazing. Thank you for the backstory as well. I don't know how much time I can devote to playing it right now, but I hope a lot of people do and you get the feedback you need. This is really exciting!

I have a variant of Sil (not Sil-q) called NarSil which started as Sil 1.3 rewritten with modern Angband code, and was created to be a basis for my open world game Beleriand which should be out in alpha before too long. Please take anything from any of those that you find useful.

Thank you so much for your kind words, Nick! I know Narsil, and was thinking about using it as a starting point for my variant, but alredy got too deep into the SilQ code and decided just to go on, and refactor super old parts myself if nedeed. I also saw your plans for Beleriand and tbh the idea is just super cool and I'm really waiting for your release to try it. Having Tolkien First Age come to life is actually what I was trying to achieve as well.

In regards to the bug, it's defenitely not expected. Can you please snd me the log.txt and the platrform you are playing at? I was debugging only for windows (and mostly) tiles, so I need some staring point. I have added plentifull of logs inside (not just bugs) to figure it out quickly.

[k0rtes]

So, as a loose comparison, it's like Gensouband's mechanic where you play as a canon Touhou character instead of picking race/class?

In my first post, I focused more on the backstory and my personal experience; now let's focus more on the actual mechanics.

As I mentioned before, the idea is to have a lore-friendly, narrative-driven story that arches through multiple runs. The story always revolves around the struggle between good and evil within you, represented by Valar and Morgoth. Different stories vary-sometimes you know who you are, sometimes you don't-but you are always a fixed character going through an inner struggle. Valar send you challenges to figure out good and evil by embodying other prominent heroes and attempting to conquer evil by stealing a Silmaril from Morgoth. That's why playing already dead heroes is lore-friendly, as it happens within your mind.

Now let's go back and start the run. First, you see the intro story, which poetically describes the ideas and mechanics. Read it carefully-you'll only see it once.

Then, you see the menu and proceed to character selection. You will notice characters are quite powerful, and many have special abilities. There are no detailed descriptions-only names-and that's intentional. Another storytelling idea in the game is that there's lots of poetry and mystery; the game should surprise you.

For instance, you see "Master Artisan" with Feanor. What is it? It's connected to smithing-he is the greatest smith ever-but you'll need to figure it out yourself. Then there's Fingolfin, "Orome himself!" If you recognize the quote, you might have an idea; otherwise, no.

Not all heroes are created equal. You'll see characters like Mim, the petty dwarf, or Haleth, the Edain. Why even play them when you have Feanor or Thingol? The thing is, the game isn't about just one run-you need 15 Silmarils total to win. Each Silmaril brings a curse, and these curses are tough. A -1 stat isn't even the worst curse you can get. So maybe start with average heroes and save the mighty ones for later? Or perhaps you risk it all and play a super-powerful hero first to secure multiple Silmarils at once? The strategy is up to you!

Also, there's permadeath. Play your shiny Feanor badly, and he's gone until your next run. Additionally, your death counter increases; if you hit 15, you lose entirely.

Back at the selection screen, you'll notice "Master Artisan" in shiny violet, but also "Treacherous" and "Kinslayer" in brown. You remember Feanor wasn't always a good guy-Alqualonde, anyone? What does this mean? That's for you to find out-but it's probably not good.

Now you've figured everything out, started playing, survived, and escaped with Silmaril(s)! You now get your portion of storytelling. Morgoth didn't appreciate your triumph and forces you to pick one curse out of three. They come with only poetic names and descriptions. What exactly does each mean? Again, you'll have to discover later. Morgoth wouldn't give you exact descriptions of curse effects beforehand. Small hint: the Stave of Self Knowledge might help a bit.

I focused heavily on visual narrative design to convey the idea of your character's internal struggle and ensure unique gameplay for different heroes. Trust me, Feanor and Mim have very distinct playstyles!

Enjoy, and let me know your thoughts!
And bug reports..

P.S. My friend is helping me to fix that bug, it's not happening on windows. But if you still want to try and play not on Windows, workaround is to save and load and you will see the dungeon.