Pixel Dungeon Gameplay
Danny Hosford
Pixel Dungeon is a 2012 roguelike indie game created by Oleg Dolya. Through turn-based gameplay, the player must descend and battle through dungeon floors to obtain the Amulet of Yendor. Initially developed for Android, it expanded to iOS and PC platforms. Dolya stopped updating the game in 2015. Since it is open source, the game's small community have created mods and games based on Pixel Dungeon's code, the most notable of which is Shattered Pixel Dungeon. While it received little attention from game critics, the few who reviewed it found the gameplay addictive, striking a balance between approachability and roguelikes's defining difficulty.
Pixel Dungeon is a simple roguelike video game with pixel art graphics.[1][2] Players are tasked with obtaining the immortality-giving Amulet of Yendor by descending down the floors of a dangerous dungeon filled with monsters. Like other roguelikes, death is permanent and requires the player to start from the very beginning with a new game.[3]
Before every game, the player must choose a character class to play as: the melee Warrior; the wand-wielding Mage; the evasive Rogue; and the ranged, unlockable Huntress.[3] Gameplay is turn-based and tile-based. Every time the player character moves or uses an item counts as at least one turn; in-game time progresses and enemies move every turn.[1]
The player descends through maze-like floors such as sewers, abandoned prisons and buried Dwarven cities.[1] New floor layouts are procedurally generated every game.[3] There are 25 levels, with shops and a boss fight every five levels. NPCs can appear and give players quests in exchange for items.[1][4]
The player can attack enemies with an equipped melee weapon, or use wands/ranged weapons from their inventory. Armor can be equipped which provides absorption against melee attacks. Rings can be equipped which provide bonuses to the player. Equipment can be upgraded, which enhances their stats. Weapons and armor can also be enchanted, giving them an extra effect. It is important to note that a player must become familiar with a piece of equipment to know its upgrade level. Some pieces of equipment may even be cursed, making them harm the player instead of helping them. The player has a range of items at their disposal. The player can find and use potions and scrolls, but they start off unknown to the player. For example, a player may not know the effect of an "orange potion" until they identify it.
The player levels up by gaining experience points from killing enemies. This increases their max health and effectiveness in combat. Enemies often sometimes drop equipment or money. The money can be used in shops that are on the floor below every boss level. Another mechanic is hunger. The player must find and eat food, or they will starve and take damage every turn.
Pixel Dungeon was created by independent developer Oleg "Watabou" Dolya, who was inspired by another roguelike titled Brogue (2009).[1] By July 2014, it had over one million downloads on Google Play.[2] Dolya released the game for iOS in July 2015, but shortly after stopped working on the game, considering it complete.[1][5]
Pixel Dungeon was highly praised by players upon release. In a 4.5-star review, TouchArcade's Andrew Koziara thought that it struck a good balance between approachability and the unforgiving difficulty of roguelikes by streamlining their mechanics, but found that the purpose of many items remained unclear.[1] Koziara and John Walker of Rock Paper Shotgun enjoyed exploring the dungeon and learning the details over time.[1][4] The few critics who reviewed the game found it addictive despite the difficulty.[1][2][4][6] Android Central and GamesRadar+ included it on their list of the best Android games in 2022.[6][7]
Pixel Dungeon attracted a small community of fans who started a subreddit and Wikia for the game, which Koziara recommended for confused players.[1][2] In 2014, Dolya made Pixel Dungeon open-source. The community has since developed mods for Pixel Dungeon and their own games based on its code.[5]
Evan Debenham, a novice Canadian developer known as Shattered Pixel, started working on Shattered Pixel Dungeon shortly after Pixel Dungeon went open-source and he released it for Android. Debenham intended to work on balance out item benefits in Pixel Dungeon for several months, but it took seven years of continuous updates for Version 1.0 to come out in August 2021, coinciding with the iOS release. It is currently Debenham's primary project and main source of income.[5][8]
Other popular variants include Skillful Pixel Dungeon, Yet Another Pixel Dungeon, and Remixed Dungeon: Pixel Rogue. These games all have the same base mechanics,[14] something Bo Thompson tried to avoid when developing Pixel Odyssey.[3]
This is a list of potentially useful game mechanics of Yet Another Pixel Dungeon, which are either not very well known or are easily confused with what is happening in most other mods, that can be used to the player's advantage. Readers who are also interested in reading the tips that ConsideredHamster himself has included in YetAnotherPD can visit YetAnotherPD's relevant github page 1 (loading screens) and github page 2 (signposts).
Arrows, bullets and quarrels can be used as throwing weapons without a ranged weapon equipped, they just deal less damage. So you don't need for example a sling, when you have bullets and a piranha is waiting for you in a flooded room.
Bomb Bundles are extremely effective against all bosses and 4 of them can even take down a Yog's Fist (5 in Impossible difficulty). 75 items of gunpowder are needed to create 1 bomb, and 3 bombs to create 1 bomb bundle.
It is rather well known that bookshelves in YetAnotherPD are searchable and might drop scrolls or display game lore, their chance of them doing that is not so known though: it is a default 5% with +5% added per chapter, so the hero should have searching them in mind even more, as he/she progresses in the dungeon.
Most of what follows is described in the "Mechanics" section of YetAnotherPD, but here all the relevant info is put together. It is well known that in YetAnotherPD shields are used to block damage by getting the hero in Guard stance, and when their block is successful, enemies will be probably exposed (which guarantees the next hit), in which case a counter attack will be probably performed, that deals 50% more damage. It is less well known though that when the hero has nothing equipped in the second main slot or has an off-hand weapon equipped, their equipped weapon can be also used similarly to a shield, to get him/her in a guard stance. Shields are certainly better for this purpose, especially when upgraded, and unlike weapons they also increase the hero's armor class (the round shield by 10 points, the kite shield by 14, and the tower shield by 18, the last number being bigger than that of an unupgraded splint armor), but especially when your hero is wielding a heavy two-handed weapon, which by default isn't compatible with a shield, and/or just has no decent wand or all-purpose good throwing weapon in the inventory, it is better to leave the second main slot empty, to allow using the melee weapon also for blocking. Another difference between blocking with shields and with weapons is that the chance: a) for the hero to block with weapons depends on the damage roll of the enemy blow and the minimum damage of the hero's equipped melee weapon or the sum of minimum damages of the hero's equipped weapons (dual weilding), and b) for the hero to block with a shield depends on the damage roll of the enemy blow and the sum of minimal damage of the hero's equipped melee weapon and the armor class of the equipped shield. The formula that calculates this chance is:
The chance to counter attack with increased damage is basically equal to the hero's regular chance to hit the enemy when not exposed. In all the cases of heroes that use often either a shield or a weapon to block damage and land counter attacks, equipping and upgrading a ring of Awareness will be very helpful, as it increases bonus damage from counter attacks from +20% in level 0 up to +50% in level +3.
The chance of an item found in a regular dungeon room to be cursed increases with each chapter, but in the Sewers chapter no ring or wand will be found cursed (armors and weapons can be though). Skeletal remains that spawn wraiths don't necessarily contain a cursed item, unlike what is commonly happening in most mods. In YetAnotherPD no enemy drops gear, for it to have a chance to be cursed or not.
In the specific case of special rooms: a) items guarded by animated statues or dropped from disturbed tombstones are never cursed or in bad condition and they are also often upgraded, but b) items in piranha vaults and trapped vaults sometimes are cursed and in bad or horrible condition (still they are cursed less often than items found in the regular dungeon). In depths with two animated statues or with piranhas guarding an item, a potion of Invisibility always spawns, but not in Flooded or Overgrown depths with an animated statues and piranhas randomly positioned anywhere.
Unlike Original PD and most other mods YetAnotherPD is more realistic in that it does not take into account the pc/phone's clock time in order to change some features of the dungeon, as the dungeon is underground and no light would normally reach its depths. So the hero's vision and the spawning of enemies will never be affected by the external time of the day/night.
The player can enhance the hero's vision by using the Lantern item: it will insrease immensely the hero's range of vision and their ability to detect hidden doors or traps, but it will also negate any stealth he/she has and will make him/her very easily detectable by enemies.
There are two minor differences of the doors in YetAnotherPD in comparison to Original PD and most other mods: a) hiding behind a closed door does not guarantee that a surprise attack will succeed, it just makes it more probable, and b) throwing items at a closed door now opens it, but the item bounces back and does not remain on the doorway (throwing items at the tiles of secret doors now also reveals them).
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