''DRL'' (formerly ''DoomRL''), short for ''Doom, the Roguelike'', is a

roguelike Roguelike (or rogue-like) is a subgenre of role-playing computer games traditionally characterized by a dungeon crawl through procedurally generated levels, turn-based gameplay, grid-based movement, and permanent death of the player charac ...

video game Video games, also known as computer games, are electronic games that involves interaction with a user interface or input device such as a joystick, controller, keyboard, or motion sensing device to generate visual feedback. This fee ...

developed by ChaosForge based on the

first-person shooter First-person shooter (FPS) is a sub-genre of shooter video games centered on gun and other weapon-based combat in a first-person perspective, with the player experiencing the action through the eyes of the protagonist and controlling the p ...

s ''

Doom Doom is another name for damnation. Doom may also refer to: People * Doom (professional wrestling), the tag team of Ron Simmons and Butch Reed * Daniel Doom (born 1934), Belgian cyclist * Debbie Doom (born 1963), American softball pitcher * ...

'' and ''

Doom II ''Doom II'', also known as ''Doom II: Hell on Earth'', is a first-person shooter game by id Software. It was released for MS-DOS computers in 1994 and Macintosh computers in 1995. Unlike the original ''Doom'', which was initially only available ...

''. It has been in development since 2002, and was released for Microsoft Windows,

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, w ...

and OS X. Following a cease and desist notice from "Doom"

trademark A trademark (also written trade mark or trade-mark) is a type of intellectual property consisting of a recognizable sign, design, or expression that identifies products or services from a particular source and distinguishes them from othe ...

owner

ZeniMax Media ZeniMax Media Inc. is an American video game holding company based in Rockville, Maryland, and founded in 1999. The company owns publisher Bethesda Softworks with its development unit Bethesda Game Studios (developer of ''The Elder Scrolls,'' ...

, the game's name was changed to ''DRL'' in 2016.

Gameplay

''DRL'' is turn-based, offers a top-down interface formed entirely of

ASCII ASCII ( ), abbreviated from American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for electronic communication. ASCII codes represent text in computers, telecommunications equipment, and other devices. Because ...

characters, and features a character leveling system with traits. As it is based upon ''Doom'', the game is more fast-paced and combat-oriented than usual for a roguelike, and relies heavily on ranged rather than melee combat. A limited player inventory, non-stackable items, and other design choices contrast with the often extreme intricacy of games in its genre. As of version 0.9.9.6,

Derek Yu Derek Yu is an American independent video game designer, video game artist, and blogger.tileset A tile-based video game is a type of video or video game where the playing area consists of small square (or, much less often, rectangular, parallelogram, or hexagonal) graphic images referred to as ''tiles'' laid out in a grid. That the screen ...

is now the game's default, offering an alternative to the more traditional

rendering. ''DRL'' includes the entire ''Doom'' soundset and music library, with optional support for high-quality

MP3 MP3 (formally MPEG-1 Audio Layer III or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III) is a coding format for digital audio developed largely by the Fraunhofer Society in Germany, with support from other digital scientists in the United States and elsewhere. Origin ...

History

Development

The game was created by programmer Kornel Kisielewicz with

Free Pascal Free Pascal Compiler (FPC) is a compiler for the closely related programming-language dialects Pascal and Object Pascal. It is free software released under the GNU General Public License, witexception clausesthat allow static linking against its ...

, and uses art by

Derek Yu Derek Yu is an American independent video game designer, video game artist, and blogger.first-person shooter First-person shooter (FPS) is a sub-genre of shooter video games centered on gun and other weapon-based combat in a first-person perspective, with the player experiencing the action through the eyes of the protagonist and controlling the p ...

s ''

'' and ''

'' universe. Since approximately 2002 in-development with first

beta version A software release life cycle is the sum of the stages of development and maturity for a piece of computer software ranging from its initial development to its eventual release, and including updated versions of the released version to help impro ...

s, the latest stable release is from 2013.

Wordmark conflict

On December 2, 2016, Kisielewicz received a cease and desist notice from

, concerning the use of the wordmark "Doom" present on game's website and name, which ZeniMax trademarked worldwide. To exclude "Doom" from the game's name, the title was changed to simply ''DRL'' on December 7, 2016.

Open sourcing

In addition, the game was made open source by Kisielewicz on December 6, 2016. Kisielewicz had planned on releasing ''DoomRL'' as open-source prior to receiving the notice at the conclusion of an ongoing crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter for ''Jupiter Hell'', a sequel to ''DoomRL'' using the same assets, as a thank-you to his supporters. The notice only made him push up this change to an earlier date. The

source code In computing, source code, or simply code, is any collection of code, with or without comments, written using a human-readable programming language, usually as plain text. The source code of a program is specially designed to facilitate the w ...

was made available via

GitHub GitHub, Inc. () is an Internet hosting service for software development and version control using Git. It provides the distributed version control of Git plus access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, continu ...

under GPL 2.0 or later and the game's assets under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license. Kisielewicz anticipates that the open-source community will be able to provide support and improvements to enhance both ''DRL'' and ''Jupiter Hell''. For instance, a community

source port A source port is a software project based on the source code of a game engine that allows the game to be played on operating systems or computing platforms with which the game was not originally compatible. Description Source ports are often c ...

of DRL to the

OpenPandora The Pandora is an operating system, handheld game console and mobile personal computer originally released in 2010. It is designed to take advantage of existing free and open-source software and to be a target for homebrew development. It inclu ...

handheld A mobile device (or handheld computer) is a computer small enough to hold and operate in the hand. Mobile devices typically have a flat LCD or OLED screen, a touchscreen interface, and digital or physical buttons. They may also have a physical ...

resulted already three days later.

Reception

In 2014 ''DRL'' was described by PCGamer as "a brilliant mashup of two classics" and named among the "Ten top fan remade classics you can play for free right now".

References

External links

*
Official source code page
on

github.com GitHub, Inc. () is an Internet hosting service for software development and version control using Git. It provides the distributed version control of Git plus access control, bug tracking system, bug tracking, software feature requests, task man ...

{{Doom series Doom (franchise) Linux games Roguelike video games Windows games Open-source video games Free software programmed in Pascal Freeware games Fangames Creative Commons-licensed video games