Quest for the Unicorn
| Quest for the Unicorn | |
|---|---|
| Stable game | |
| Developer | Mike Riley |
| Theme | Fantasy |
| Influences | Rogue |
| Released | 1990 (1.0) |
| Updated | 2009 (5.0) |
| Licensing | Originally shareware, now freeware |
| P. Language | Turbo Pascal,c |
| Platforms | DOS,Linux |
| Interface | Graphic tileset, 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. This version had been ported to c and therefore much easier to work with than prior versions.
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.