Angband

User Summary

Angband is a roguelike game. It was first intended as a UMoria 5.2.1 variant with more Tolkien Tolkien-inspired content. Angband has seen a lot of changes by a lot of different developers and has been ported to a lot of different platforms. The open nature of the codebase (first under a free for non-commercial purposes license, now under the GNU GPL) has lead to the development of dozens of variants. Angband is still in development and is considered one of the foundations of the roguelike genre.

Angband is a dungeon crawling game. The goal is to travel down to the 100th level and kill Morgoth the Valar (the major villain in Tolkien's "The Silmarillion"). The player chooses between 11 races and 6 classes to create a character, buys equipment from the shops on the surface, and sets off to explore the dungeon, kill monsters and gather loot and experience. Angband features non-permanent levels (if the player leaves level 11 and come back to it later, a new one is generated), randomized objects (a pink potion could be a Potion of Healing in one game and a Potion of Confusion in the next), hundreds of different monsters and powerful Unique creatures and artifacts from Tolkien mythology (Sauron, Saruman, Grishnakh the Orc, Elendil...).

Angband has several display modes (ASCII text or graphical tiles), as well as a sound engine in recent releases.

Angband can be freely downloaded at the Angband homepage: http://rephial.org/.

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Angband is a dungeon-crawling roguelike computer game derived from Umoria. It is based on the writings of J. R. R. Tolkien, in which Angband is the fortress of Morgoth. The current version of Angband is available for all major operating systems, including Unix, Windows, Mac OS X, and Android.

Gameplay
The goal of Angband is to survive 100 floor levels of the fortress Angband in order to defeat Morgoth. The game is reputed to be extremely difficult.

The player begins in a town where he can buy equipment before beginning the descent. Once in the maze-like fortress, the player encounters traps, monsters, equipment, and hidden doors.[4] With the help of found objects and enchantments, the player's attack and defence power increases, and can even neutralise specific attacks. The player also meets characters and finds artifacts from Tolkien's legendarium.

Angband gameplay emphasises combat and careful resource management. The player has finite health points, and death is final. Although Angband records the player's progress to a save file, it does not allow one to resume a saved game in which the player character has already died. If the player overcomes Morgoth on the 100th floor, the game continues, and the player may continue descending to further floors. The levels are procedurally generated, allowing for a unique game in every play.

History
The first version of Angband was created by Alex Cutler and Andy Astrand at the University of Warwick in 1990. They wanted to expand the game Umoria by adding items, monsters, and features. After Cutler and Astrand, the source code was maintained at the University of Warwick by Geoff Hill and Sean Marsh. They released "2.4.frog_knows", which was enhanced by others and widely ported to non-Unix platforms.

Following their departure, the later principals of Angband have included Charles Swiger, Ben Harrison, and Robert Rühlmann. Harrison was the maintainer responsible for the "Great Code Cleanup", modularizing, extending, and greatly improving the readability of the Angband source code. This in turn led to the large number of variants currently available, as well as the rather large number of ports. Like other maintainers, he eventually moved on to other interests, passing the title to Robert Rühlmann in 2000.

Rühlmann's contributions included releasing version 3.0, which included many monster and object changes contributed by Jonathan Ellis. He also introduced Lua, a lightweight scripting language, with the intention of simplifying development of both the main game and its variants. The Angband community, however, did not generally embrace the addition of scripting, with many expressing confusion over its usage, and it was therefore later removed.

The original Moria/Angband software license allowed distribution of the game, but only does so if "not for profit", which precludes packaging with many Linux distributions or inclusion within a magazine cover disc. The license also does not explicitly allow code modification, something which is in practice ignored by the Angband community. In light of these perceived issues, an initiative to re-license Angband was therefore started by maintainer Rühlmann in 2000. This "Angband Open Source Initiative" was designed to make Angband proper Open source under the GPL license. The process was completed on 9 January 2009.

Source: Wikipedia, "Angband (video game)", available under the CC-BY-SA License.