WazHack - a retelling of NetHack - beta 1 (first public release)

[Waz]

WazHack is my attempt to create a roguelike that is graphically
modern,
while keeping all the traditional goodness of NetHack and its
ancestors.

    http://wazhack.com

It uses a 3D web-plugin and incremental download, so it starts up very
quickly, but here is a screen shot anyway:

    http://wazhack.com/images/wh-screenshot-2.jpg

Probably the first thing you'll notice is that I have turned the world
sideways. If you think about it though, it's topologically quite
similar
to a traditional roguelike map, but it allows for better visibility
than
the "Falcon's Eye" or "Diablo" style. You'll also find Levitation and
Jumping are far more interesting!

WazHack is, of course, turn based and permadeath.

Don't worry, the Skull Tutor shuts up pretty quickly, he's just there
to get you going.

I hope NetHack players find it familiar - for now, I have deliberately
kept
to the traditional items, monsters, ... and consequences, of NetHack,
except
where I feel it forces spoilage or when it is just too unrealistic,
and I
hope you may even find some of my "fixes" appealing. For example:

 - You can feel the relative weights of objects

 - Creatures actually have different sizes (see: ogre)

 - You cannot die by eating too much food
    (you will probably still die though, choking is pretty bad)

 - Dogs can't climb ladders (or can they....)

Some changes are purely to make the game more fun or to suit the
radically
different visual style, for example:

 - Wand zapping and bouncing is way more fun with 360 degree freedom

 - Blindness is more 'poor vision' - the screen does not just go blank

 - Lamps and keys activate as needed, saving oil and sanity

 - Most anachronisms are gone, but there are new homages and
subtleties

You'll find plenty of things "missing". This is just the first
version. The
only one I'll explicitly mention is that sorry, for now, there is no
god.

You'll also find plenty of little additions. I'm not going to list
those at
all, and there are plenty more to come (I spend many, many hours a
week on
WazHack). With time, WazHack will continue to diverge from NetHack, as
it
should. But next to add is the Gnomish Mines, though you will hardly
recognize it if my plans play out.

There are bugs. Some are in the Unity3D engine I'm using (eg. resizing
the
display while in-game), others are all my fault. You can report bugs
directly
in the game (for now, it's just email).

This is not my first attempt to ruin NetHack. I'm also to blame for
the
"default tile set". I know many people prefer TTY graphics (though I
never
played with fancy *colored* characters before doing the tiled
version!).
This time however, I released myself from the challenge of building
upon
the NetHack source code - WazHack is a retelling, not a fork or a
variant.

For now, I can logistically only support it on Windows. However, it
should
work on MacOSX, and eventually on Google NaCl (so, Linux, for
example).

I'm announcing first to this group because I have always cared about
NetHack.
So please, play WazHack and tell me, from a NetHack player's
perspective,
have I done it honor or ill so far?

--
Waz (a.k.a. Warwick Allison)
http://wazhack.com