Frozen Depths

Frozen Depths
Stable game
Developer	Glowie
Theme	Fantasy, Ice & Coldness
Influences	ADOM, Nethack
Released	May 21, 2006 (0.99)
Updated	Aug 30, 2010 (1.04)
Licensing	Closed Source, Freeware
P. Language	C++
Platforms	Windows, Linux, Macintosh
Interface	ASCII, Keyboard
Game Length	Medium
Official site of Frozen Depths

Description

Frozen Depths is a traditional, combat-oriented roguelike game that takes place in a cold fantasy world.

From the official website:

The land of Glacia has started to freeze all over. The surface people will perish, should the temperature drop much lower. The high council has selected you to go to the Frozen Depths of Glacia, find out the source of coldness and get rid of it. If you return to the surface, you'll be executed as a coward, if you die on the way, another poor one will be sent down through another entrance to the complex, but if you succeed in your quest, you'll become a hero. Many have failed and many will fail... Now you're all alone in the Frozen Depths, will you make it?

Features

• A strong theme of coldness
• Four different dungeon generators and three different level themes: normal, snowy and icy.
• Flexible character development.
• No spell system, instead the fighters and archers can learn special skills.
• The shop system is a bit different compared to the other roguelikes.
• A freezing system instead of the traditional food system. The coldness increases steadily as you travel deeper.
• Clothes are an important part of your equipment. They increase your natural cold resistance.
• No elemental resistances, instead your gear has to be up to date if you want to survive.
• Visible durability. All equippable items can break, excluding rings, amulets and throwing weapons.
• Easy for new roguelikers to jump in with an easy beginning, small number of keys to remember and straightforward gameplay
• 50 floors of persistent 80x25 tile dungeon, which includes a lot of ice, randomness, five cunning bosses and a steadily increasing difficulty level. No town level.
• A pool of 50 handcrafted floors, 5 of these are picked for every game for you to explore.
• The game is combat-oriented, which means there are no puzzles. There's only one thing you can't handle with a sword: the temperature.

History

The development of Frozen Depths started in August 2004. The first and only rewrite happened after four months of slow coding. The programming was very slow for three months, and after that practically paused thanks to the MMORPG World of Warcraft. It took almost a year before the pace speeded up. Finally in June, 2006, the game was released. The game grew quickly in the Summer 2006. The development pace became much slower in mid-August and then school began eating the developer's free time. The development was very slow or non-existent between August 2006 and Summer 2007, but after the developer's Summer holidays began, the development pace speeded up again. The version 1.02 was released after about a month of hard work in mid-July 2007. After a short pause in development in late 2007, the developer went into a coding spree and almost finished the next version in early 2008, but injured his wrist, which prolonged the release to summer. The last changes and fixes were made in June and the version 1.03 was finally released in late June of 2008. 1.04 was released first as a 3-week beta and then as the final product in August 2010 after a summer of development, plus some smaller programming from last year.

Screenshot

The colors of this Windows XP console have been modified to look cooler.