Vapors of Insanity
Vapors of Insanity is a roguelike game set on a paradise island of Fortarica, where the common Humans, mighty Dwarves and Orcs, insect-like Melissans and Formicans, and many more people lived in peace and harmony... until now. One day, you wake up, and see magical fog everywhere around you, and every man and beast around seems to become a mindless machine, wanting only to kill you! The only way to find the source of the problem is to fight the crazy beasts, hoping that you will find a way to remove the vapors, and the beasts will be sane again... Will you be able to win?
Read the online manual
Vapors of Insanity features:
- A big three-dimensional world, consisting of a big variety of outdoor, building, and underground locations.
- You can play both in hex and orthogonal mode.
- An original spell system, where you can build complicated spells using simpler spells as components.
- Also original skill/experience and fighting systems.
- Many hopefully interesting magical gadgets that can be found.
- A variety of creatures and items to find: about 150 types of items, 150 species of monsters and plants, 150 materials (including potions), 150 types of magical runes, 80 skills and spells; some of them are parametrized. These include both the standard high fantasy stuff and more original ideas.
- Graphics that are supposed to not only have the advantages of a graphical display (better aesthetics, accessibility for new players), but also the roguelikes' classical ASCII display (clarity, allowing one to use imagination, simplicity of creation of new monsters and items). An ASCII mode is also provided for SSH access, and other hardcore ASCII fans.
- Most of the game written in a special scripting language called VaporGS, allowing developers to create new modules, which can be simply placed in an appropriate game to modify the game somehow; these can range from minor additions (and you should be able to easily use several such additions at one time, if there are no obvious conflicts); they can be also provided as either open source (for educational purposes), or as closed source (if you want to have hidden secrets)
- The language is based on a extension of the Object Oriented paradigm, where objects can modify other objects by providing additional methods to them (like a ring of flying providing a flying ability to the wearer, but this paradigm has been applied in many various ways)
Screenshots
Note: most screenshots are outdated. (smaller screen size on older screenshots is due to being taken on a laptop, the lack of borders was also a result of the smaller screen size)
Sand dunes on a beach (0.50) |
Elven town (0.50) |
Forest (0.50) |
Formican hill (0.52) |
Melissa hive (0.50) |
Ratlords live there (0.50) |
On a mountain ridge (0.50) |
Village (0.50) |
user interface (new in 0.54) |
History and Future
The project was started somewhere about 1999. Originally it was supposed to be a team project, to create a roguelike game better than all the ones known at the times (like Angband and its variants), but the rest of the team has quickly lost most of the interest. But I continued working by myself.From the beginning, the game was meant to be scriptable; it should be possible to create variants by modifying the data files... even better, not modifying the files, but by adding changes as new files, which would integrate with the default base (unlike the situation with Angband, where the variant developers have created many modifications, but it would be hard to choose which one of them you wanted to use, or to combine ideas from different variants, you had to play a specific variant). It should be possible to create new enchantments, which modify items' properties in as arbitrary as possible, a bit like in a trading card game, where card designers can write anything on a card, meaning that the short basic rules of the game can be changed in thousands of possible ways. The script language was designed to allow to easily do such things; soon, I started to use the script language to express almost everything, which shifted the focus, from a scriptable game written in C++, to a game written in a script language, together with a relatively simple and generic C++ engine/interpreter. The extendible paradigm, first aimed at creating magical enchantments, proved to be an interesting paradigm for programming many different things.
Some other things also have evolved. I wanted to have many fantasy races, each living in its unique kind of a settlement. But making the necessary social interactions would be just too much work. I have decided to make the game about a cataclysm which turns a peaceful society into a bunch of aggressive zombies (fog was chosen because it gives a natural explanation why the field of vision is limited; a large field of vision would be not reasonable to work with). Simple ideas about the structure of the world (the stairs should not be magical portals which connect two otherwise unconnected planes—they should connect places which are one above another, and you should be able to create more connections by digging additional holes; and if you climb stairs, monsters on the previous level should not become dormant, but they should try to follow you by the stairs) have ultimately evolved into a world where you can use the 3D nature for tactical purposes in many ways. Originally planned as an ASCII game, but I have learned using SDL on the way, and have decided to create a graphical version too. I was quite happy with the result, so the ASCII version is supplied for the hardcore ASCII fans only. I like ASCII for its simplicity allowing the players to use their imagination, and its ability to show the information much more clearly than in most of these realistic graphical games; the graphics of VOI have been designed not to be realistic, but to allow clear presentation and using imagination, just like the ASCII; and some features are easier to present with graphics than with ASCII.
There were times when development was more active, and times where it was stopped: sometimes there was almost no progress for a year, followed by lots of work done in a single month. The project was a secret one (except to friends with whom I have started development), but in the meantime, I also got involved in the roguelike community, discussing on some fora, and eventually releasing some other tools and games. In 2010, there was an event called ARRP, aimed at releasing new roguelikes instead of keeping them secret for years. My development speed was quite slow by then, but I have noticed that the game is roughly complete, only the ending is missing, and playtesting and bugfixing is required. Getting input from the Internet would hopefully help the project. I had no time to do the remaining work before ARRP, but in 2011, I had more time, so I have decided to finish, using ARRP 2011 (September 18) as a deadline.
With such a motivation, the development was quite quick, and I have managed to do the things that are most important to make the game playable before the intended deadline. Thus, we have a release!
The current release probably has lots of bugs, is unbalanced, and it does not contain the very end of the game (a bit like ADOM without the part after you collect all the orbs, or like Dungeon Crawl without the Realm of Zot). But it should be good enough to be enjoyed by players. I'll see what happens, and decide what to do next. Maybe let more people to work on it (but I would not believe in the motivation of such extra people), maybe start some crowdfunding project to convince me that developing games is worth the time. Please contact me if you have any thoughts about that :)
Updates about Vapors of Insanity are published on my blog. You can discuss it at the RogueTemple forums thread, or by e-mailing me (zeno@attnam.com).
If you want to speed up the development of VoI, please consider making a donation.
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