WebRaidMobile

Web Raid Mobile
Stable game
Developer	Karlheinz Agsteiner
Theme	None particularly
Influences	NetHack, WebRaid
Released	Nov 2, 2011 (version 0.2)
Updated	Nov 5, 2013 (version 3.2.2)
Licensing	Closed source, Shareware
P. Language	Java
Platforms	Android
Interface	Tiles
Game Length	1-30 minutes per game, months to achieve everything
[[1] Official site of Web Raid Mobile]

In Web Raid Mobile you wander through dungeons made up from tiled graphics, meet and fight fierce creatures, pick up great weapons, armor, mystic amulets, magic books, and collect precious treasures. Web Raid's focus is on strategy - you get a full overview of a whole dungeon level, insight into the power and character of each of the creatures, and you'll need that to survive. Web Raid's goal is to survive long enough to pick up stuff and return it from the dungeon, and to also survive to tell about the creatures you've slain.

The big difference to other roguelike games is that, behind the scenes, everything that you encounter in Web Raid Mobile corresponds to bits and pieces of web pages. Behind the scenes, creature, armor, weapons, amulets and treasures are derived from words - the longer and more complicated a word, the more spectacular the creature or item. Behind the scenes, all the dungeon levels are determined from the longest sentences of web pages; if a maze has a vertical wall with a hole near the top of the wall, then this hole is there because a letter at the beginning of the alphabet was next when building the maze. So actually you're wandering through web pages and hunt for the biggest and coolest words. The game just makes this look like dungeons and stuff in them. Each is mapped to a unique monster or item, waiting for you to be discovered.

Also, a few things are done very differently to most games, on purpose: For example, low-level magic is as strong as high-level magic, but less focused.

Features

• A huge number of monsters and items - if there's a word for it, and that word is on a web page, then Web Raid can turn it into a monster or item, and depending on the vowels and consonants of the word, the monster / item will be very different.
• Everything except names is derived from the vowels and consonants of words on web pages: all monsters, weapons, armor, magical amulets, and treasures, dungeons.
• Everything is influenced by the five elements of chinese astrology: for example, some armor protects more from fire, other from earth or metal (derived from vowels)
• Web Raid Mobile features 9 different monster classes (e.g. Warriors, Peacekeepers, Cowards, Wild Beasts), each of which has different plans on what to do in a dungeon. Each of the classes has a couple of parameters, so there might be agressive or peaceful Wild Beasts, Warriors wearing armor or not wearing armor and so on.
• Monsters can pick up weaponry and armor and use it.
• Weapons and armor have a weight and a skillfulness that influence how good they are (derived from consonants).
• 7 weapon kinds that you build skills in while playing. These skills make you more effective in battling with weapons of that kind.
• Amulets influence the weight of every monster (including you). Wear a powerful amulet to move much faster than the monsters.
• Dead monsters leave behind grease that reflects their elements. Combine several of them for perfectly balanced magic grease. Magic grease can temporarily make your weapon and armor much more powerful.
• Very rare mysterious items (1 of 1000 items) can cause one of eight powerful effects that bend the rules of the game's universe.
• Spell books an unleash dozens of spells of 4 different schools. Web Raids spells are unique in that the low-level ones are just as powerful as the high-level ones. Instead of power, you gain precision from high level spells (e.g. first you damage everything incl. you, later only others (items and monsters), later only monsters. The magic system - again - bases on the five elements. To cast a spell you need to fill the slots of the elements the book needs. You fill slots by throwing away stuff with fitting elements. When you cast a spell you fill up your magic capabilities which enables you to cast more powerful spells.
• Sophisticated "fond memories" system that shows you exactly what you've raided so far, and offers many different goals you may want to remember (like: kill everything in a whole dungeon)
• Global high score lists: allows you to see how you're doing compared to the others on the planet, with help of the social gaming platform "Swarm"
• over 40 achievements to unlock (also based on Swarm)
• Mazes and caves generated from the sentences in a page. Web Raid Mobile knows the following kinds of dungeon level: mazes, mines, nethack-like rooms+paths, houses, ruins.
• tiled view; supports gestures: tap to move into a direction, long-tap for info on a square, tap-and-scroll to scroll, double-tap to fast-move to a certain square, pinch-to-zoom.
• Full information available on anything in a level. Right from the scratch you can see everything in a dungeon level (and they can see you as well), and you can get all information on them to decide how dangerous / precious something is, e.g. if a monster will just hang around or come after you.
• Completely configurable game difficulty. By choosing your name you define your level and how strong the five elements are in you. Short name, tough game, long name, easy game.
• As everything is generated from web pages, difficulty is not balanced in any way. Other than "Web Raid", however, the whole dungeon is created from a single web page, and the easy stuff is placed on the top levels, and the deeper you get, the tougher the game is. The biggest beasts, the strongest stuff is on the lowest level(s). For more fun, some tough monsters or great weapons are placed higher up in the dungeon.
• RPG elements: you enter each dungeon naked and you are and stay at level 1. Armor, weaponry and magic amulets make the difference between fast death and success. However, during the game you build up your skills for weapons, and your magic power and resources.

Compared to Web Raid

As the successor of Web Raid, much is similar in Web Raid Mobile. Here's the major differences.

• Dungeons are more structured - easy levels on top, difficult levels on the bottom.
• A level may have more than one or two stairs down to different sections of the dungeon.
• Smaller levels, more variety in randomly generated levels.
• Monsters and you have a speed that depends on your weight. If you weigh a lot, you're slow.
• Amulets are no longer armor, but they reduce your weight and increase monster's weight based on its level, power and elements.
• Monsters behave differently - there are 9 classes now, each with individual goals to achieve in the game (killing you being often an important one).
• You can move diagonally.
• No fixed word list anymore; the game just takes whatever it gets, sometimes leading to nonsense words for monsters.
• Magic!

Changes since first release

• Pinch-to-zoom feature for zooming in and out
• Visual bugs when showing the first level fixed
• Statistics screen
• Centers on player when entering a level
• Improved monster intelligence for passive types of monsters (will not wait until you hit them)
• Correct location of saved dungeons
• Fixed a bug that would show icons only partially on top devices with a high pixel density.
• Great tablet support
• Skill system
• Magic
• UI redesign with better buttons
• Load/save of games
• More spells and achievements.

Free and pro version

Web Raid Mobile is available on Google Play.

There is a free version and a pro version. Other than in other games, the free version is not crippleware but the full game. However, new features enter the pro version first and are part of the free version only a month or two later.

Currently, the pro version features ranged weapons, while the free version doesn't. In the free version, bows are like treasures. You can collect them, take them home as fond memories, but you can't shoot them.

The pro version features 7 kinds of bows + the respective skill system, distinguishes between long-range bows and precision bows with a shorter range. Other than most games, it doesn't feature arrows as objects you can pick up as well. You have exactly three arrows, right from the beginning. You shoot them into monsters, they never get lost. If you kill a monster, you reclaim your arrows.

The pro version costs one Dollar/Euro.