Quest for the Unicorn
| Quest for the Unicorn | |
|---|---|
| Stable game | |
| Developer | Mike Riley |
| Theme | Fantasy |
| Influences | Rogue |
| Released | 1990 (1.0) |
| Updated | 2011 (5.3HC) |
| Licensing | Originally shareware, now freeware |
| P. Language | Turbo Pascal,c |
| Platforms | DOS,Linux,Windows/Cygwin |
| Interface | Graphic tileset, ASCII, Keyboard |
| Game Length | |
| Official site of Quest for the Unicorn | |
Quest for the Unicorn was my second foray into rogue-like games. I began writing the original version in the late 80s and released version 1.0 around 1990.
Quest for the Unicorn was based upon the engine that I had written for The Land. I had updated the engine to support a more expansive world than what the original engine could support. The engine for The Land also had a lot of hard coded values in it which I had moved off to the data files for Quest for the Unicorn, making the engine more generic in case I were to ever use it again for another game of this type.
Features
Unicorn's expanded engine now supported a world of 400x300 tiles divided into 12 districts of 100x100 tiles each.
More than 60 dungeons were added to the world for exploration, however only about 5 are actually needed to finish the main story line, all the rest contain powerful artifacts that could help the player.
Like its predecessor The Land, Unicorn provides an automapper in the lower right corner as well as a message log containing any messages given by NPCs or found in scrolls.
History
Much of the history of this game has been lost to the ages. This game was not nearly as popular as The Land, even tho it was a much more expanded game. Originally this game was written using Turbo Pascal.
Version 1.0 was initially released around 1990 for DOS. Like The Land it was originally distributed on BBS systems.
Version 2.1.2 was the last version released for DOS sometime in the mid 90s and was released on one of my websites.
Version 5.0 is still under active maintenance but now exists for Linux/Unix systems only (Cygwin on Windows also works). This version had been ported to c and therefore much easier to work with than prior versions.
Version 5.2(HC) - Released September 28, 2010
- Interface was replaced with a pure ascii interface
- Permadeath has been implemented
Version 5.3(HC) - Released on April 28, 2011
- Rarity change to allow for ultra rare items
- Sockets may now appear on rings, necklaces, weapons and armour Items can have up to 3 sockets
- Recipe book browser added to crafting screen
- No more random treasure, all treasure now comes from mob drops
- Addition of items with enchantments, items can have up to 3 enchants
- Trophies have been added
- Many new crafted items have been added
- Added Hall of Legends and Hall of Remembrance score tables
- It is now possible to find items with enchants on them
- Identify now shows the identified item in the message area
- Added some statistics tracking
- Added magical resistance attribute to mitigate some magical damage
- Added ability for monster levels to be increased
- Added seasonal items and trophies
Version 5.4(HC) - Released on May 11, 2011
- Players now have some basic items from the start
- Players now start with no gold
- Health items can now never give more than max hp
- Some restructuring of the source was done to remove most of the remaining hard coded data. This was done to facilitate the use of the underlying engine with other games, mainly I intend to rework the dataset from "The Land" to be used with the Unicorn engine in order to revive "The Land" on a system that is easier to deal with.
Quest for the Unicorn HC
On September 28, 2010 the HC version of Unicorn was released. This version was created to appeal more to the hardcore rouge-like players, where even graphics are considered a no-no. The HC version of Unicorn replaces the standard graphics tileset with a pure ascii interface. This version also features permadeath.
All of the same features of the standard edition are also present in the HC version.