Welcome to Shuruppak

Shuruppak is a game of adventure, exploration and survival, set in the ancient world of the Mesopotamian city states. Because the game world is randomly created each time you start a new game, each game is a new challenge. You will have to start exploring each time again, treasures will be hidden in different places, and enemies may always surprise you. This may, of course, mean that it will take a long time until you've had enough of Shuruppak...

Unlike many other contemporary games, Shuruppak does not feature colourful, detailed graphical art, but uses text characters as symbols for world features, creatures and treasures. This places it in the tradition of games like Nethack, ADOM, Crawl, Angband and, of course, Rogue, after which the whole genre of roguelike games was named.

I've received an e-mail today that inquired if I'm still developing Shuruppak. My answer is: in theory, yes. In practice, other things (like my PhD) take up so much time at the moment that any roguelike activity from me is completely suspended. I really hope that this will change in a future not too far, but only time can tell... Thanks, nonetheless, for the continued interest you take in Shuruppak!

Gosh, how I hated the way the game handled the different properties for items and creatures! The code was designed to make separate body parts possible, and while it worked, it was so clumsy and slow that I really had to rewrite the whole section. Introducing the new system was a rather severe change to the whole game, and I hope that I havn't done too many mistakes.

Due to a new job, I couldn't spend much time on Shuruppak lately, so the game hasn't seen any progress for a while. Yesterday I've added some improvements to rather badly coded parts of the game that should increase the speed considerably. It seems quite likely that Shuruppak will see more of my attention in the nearer future.

Some more additions to the website. The start page is slightly more interesting now, and the Player's Manual has some content for the first time. And I even made some additions to the game itself.

Instead of working on the game itself, I'm restructuring some parts of the website. PHP makes managing so many parts of the site so much easier!

A change log section has been added to the website to keep track of the development. Note that the version these changes apply to hasn't been released yet, making this somewhat pointless. But anyway, there it is...

Today I uploaded version 0.5.0 of Shuruppak, both as a source and a Windows binary package.

I intended to publish Shuruppak under the GNU General Public Licence, but as of today, I've changed that to a revised BSD Licence. As there hasn't been any public release yet, this decision is admittedly somewhat academic.

Still you may wonder why I did this change. Well, first of all, I can't say that I really understand all implications of the GNU licence; I'm not a lawyer. I want a licence that ensures that I receive proper attribution for my work, yet allow others work with the program code. Plus, the licence should contain a disclaimer adequate for a little game such as this. And finally, even though I regard myself as a supporter of the Open Source movement, I sometimes have the feeling that the Free Software Foundation and the GNU Project assume a position much stricter than I can agree with. This may be ignorance on my part, but for me, the primary point of Open Source software is not politics.

Some updates to the website (inclusion of licence, download pages show most recent versions automatically)