History of HyperRogue
In March 2012, for the Seven Day Roguelike Challenge, I have made a new version. It still included only the ASCII graphics, but it had seven land types and magical orbs. To make it clear that the game was not written completely from scratch for this challenge (although probably the development probably took less than 7 days in total), but rather based on a partially working draft, this version is called HyperRogue II.
Later, I have decided to add vector graphics and other improvements -- this version was called HyperRogue III, to make it clear that it was no longer the 7DRL version. Since version 4.0 I have decided to drop the III suffix, it looks strange and not everyone has to know the history. :)
In January 2015, HyperRogue was accepted for sale on Steam. This was mostly luck: I have managed to put it on Steam Greenlight while Greenlight was still free, I would not pay the Greenlight fee to put it there otherwise. Initially, the Steam version simply allowed online leaderboards and achievements, and cost below $1. Anyway, this not only brought me some money for my work, but it also has created a great community, with many ideas. Due to this community, HyperRogue is roughly five times bigger now than before 2015, and I am much more proud of it -- with lands and quests based on hyperbolic features, such as horocycles, equidistants and periodic patterns, which could not work in Euclidean space, it is a really unique game now. While the very newest features are currently available only in the paid versions, this does not feel like abandoning the "completely free" virtues of the original HyperRogue -- the free version did grow a lot, and it will grow further, which would not be possible without Steam.
More details about the beginnings, and each particular land or feature, can be found in the series of posts on the HyperRogue blog. The detailed changelog can be found here. Have fun reading!
Special thanks
Special thanks to:- for making great music for HyperRogue:
Shawn Parrotte, Will Savino - for ideas for new lands (or at least some inspiration for them):
tricosahedron, Maciej Chojecki, Marek Čtrnáct, Piotr Migdał, tehora, wonderfullizardofoz, zelda0x181e, phenomist, Kojiguchi Kazuki, bluetailedgnat, jpystynen - for translating HyperRogue into other languages:
Marek Čtrnáct, zulmetefza & Seyacim, green orange - for being great players, and notifying us of some exploits:
Adam Borowski, tricosahedron, Vipul, jruderman - for bug reports and feature requests:
Andrew Farnsley, ortoslon, chrysn, Simon Clarkstone, Quentin Christensen, DarkShadowJ, Marek Čtrnáct, Piotr Migdał, tehora, jspoh, Vipul, archmageomega, snowyowl0, green orange, Maugli, wonderfullizardofoz, Sprite Guard, arythera, Maxmetpt, Sinquetica, Patashu, Tom Fryers, _monad, jruderman, DivisionByZero, baconcow, Alan, SurelyYouJest, hotdogPi, Christopher King, Evan Daniel, DivisionByZero, xXxWeedGokuxXx, jpystynen, bluetailedgnat, Kurt Patzelt, Jacob Kopczynski, rjdimo, and more - for recording their HyperRogue games:
ortoslon - the first version of HyperRogue
Sprite Guard - up-to-date recordings of the new versions of HyperRogue
Alan Malloy - a series of videos with many ideas for improvements - for creating the HyperRogue Discord server:
KittyTac - for helping to spread word about HyperRogue:
ortoslon, Darren Grey, Piotr Migdał, and snowyowl0 - for providing ports and packages:
Konstantin Stupnik (OSX), Wayne A Arthurton (OSX), mcobit (Pandora), chrysn and Damyan Ivanov (Debian) - for their contributions on GitHub:
Alexandre Moine, tehora, Dmitry Marakasov, Arthur O'Dwyer - for donations -- donations are always welcome!
tricosahedron, Michael Heerdegen, Kojiguchi Kazuki, SpriteGuard, Vipul, Roice Nelson, TravelDemon - everyone who voted for HyperRogue on Steam Greenlight -- HyperRogue is already on Steam!
- everyone who supported HyperRogue by buying T-shirts or other merchandise
- last but not least, everyone who played HyperRogue! :)
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