HyperRogue 10.4 is now available freely!

Version 10.4b of the non-Euclidean roguelike HyperRogue is released freely!

The last free version of HyperRogue (10.0c) was released almost a year ago. What has been added in the meantime?


Every land in the main game introduces new mechanics, new thematic treasure, and a magical Orb power for you to use; many of these mechanics are unique -- not used in any other land, and in any other game. Most new versions add new lands, and this is true here too -- nine new lands have been added, and HyperRogue now has over 60 lands!

• Hunting Grounds is a new basic land which aims to show that the hyperbolic geometry not only gives HyperRogue a unique look, but it is also gives unique gameplay. This land helps you to learn the basic combat tactics in the hyperbolic plane... these tactics would not work in the Euclidean world!
• Blizzard is a land of mighty winds and intense coldness.
• Terracotta Army is a land filled with arrow traps and poweful warrior statues which wake up when you get too close.
• No place is safe from lava in the Volcanic Wasteland.
• In the Jelly Kingdom, monsters become walls and vice versa whenever you pick up a treasure.
• The Raiders from the Ruined City are all immune to your normal attack, but every type has a different weakness, which lets you escape in some way.

What about the remaining three lands? Well, the new version not only has more lands, but also lets you get more possibilities out of the existing lands by changing the grid. HyperRogue is normally played on the "hyperbolic soccerball" tiling of hexagons and heptagons, with 2 hexagons and 1 heptagon meeting in every vertex. As we already know from the older versions, using only hexagons gives us the standard Euclidean hex grid (which lets you see how most things which make HyperRogue unique do not work in Euclidean geometry), having only heptagons makes the hyperbolic effects stronger, and having pentagons instead of hexagons lets us explore the geometry of the spherical soccer ball. What are the new possibilities?

• What if we replace heptagons with octagons? Hyperbolic effects get stronger, and this geometry gives new possibilities which did not exist in the standard HyperRogue grid. The Docks, the Crystal World, and the Snake Nest are three new lands which explore these possibilities, and thus they do not appear in the standard game.
• What if we have much less heptagons? This one is interesting -- we get a game that is still hyperbolic, but in a weaker degree. Since the heptagons remain very important for the tactics, they now become precious and rare tactical resource.
• Can we have four pentagons in every vertex, or, say, one pentagon and two octagons? In hyperbolic geometry, we can, and HyperRogue now lets us play on such grids!
• Many Euclidean games use hex or square grid, but what about the grid of octagons and squares? On a Klein bottle? The "Experiment with Geometry" menu allows you to try all the above, and also many other geometries!

The new free version of HyperRogue also has quite a lot for people who are maybe not interested in playing games, but they simply want to do experiments with hyperbolic geometry, for educational/artistic purposes.

• You can view the world in many new models of hyperbolic geometry, both 2D and 3D. Kuen surface is known to have constant curvature, can we draw HyperRogue's tesselations on it? How would the hyperbolic analog of the two-point equidistant projection of the sphere look like? We know how to crochet small fragments of the hyperbolic plane in our Euclidean world, but could we make similar models of the Euclidean plane in S³?
• The new Texture Mode is a graphical editor which lets you to draw hyperbolic tesselations easily, which then interacts well with all the features of HyperRogue -- you can walk on your tesselations, render them in the Hypersian Rug mode or other available models, or even change their geometry (many tesselations can be adjusted to any three-colorable underlying map, for example). It is also possible to load existing tesselations (e.g. made by the famous artists such as M. C. Escher), and do this with them!
• RogueViz, the computation/visualization hyperbolic engine based on HyperRogue, has been extended with some new visualizations (non-Euclidean circular staircase, Banach-Tarski-like decomposition of the Euclidean plane). See also newconformist which is a separate program mapping the hyperbolic plane conformally to arbitrary shapes.

Okay, but what is missing in the free version? As usual, only paid versions have "social features" such as achievements and online leaderboards. There is one new feature exclusive to paid versions (in fact, exclusive to the Steam version) -- the Strange Challenge, which generates a new challenge every 77 hours by combining a random geometry, two random lands, and several random orbs, and lets you compare your progress with the other players (every player gets just one chance). Paid versions also get new content earlier -- and such new content is planned for 11.x! Most of the current lands introduce new mechanics, bit adding more complex lands which combine several of these mechanics at once definitely will not hurt, especially if these new land use new procedural generation algorithms. New modes, changing the gameplay in major ways, are planned. The future is exciting!


You can download the Windows, OSX, Android versions from the website, or download the source code (which compiles on Linux) from GitHub. If you want to see what the game is about quickly without downloading, you can also try the online version. Have fun!

HyperRogue 10.4

After an extremely long series of patch/preview versions (10.3a to 10.3v), it is time to release HyperRogue 10.4! While there are no new lands (they are planned for the next version), this release lets you get more out of the existing lands by changing the grid or presentation. There is also a new competitive mode focused on non-standard geometries!

Many games take place on the Euclidean hex grid; curvature in HyperRogue comes from replacing some of these hexes by other polygons. By replacing them with pentagons (or squares or triangles), we get spherical geometry -- a dodecahedron with 12 lpentagonal faces, or a "soccerball" with 12 pentagons and 20 hexagons. Similarly, we get hyperbolic geometry by replacing them with heptagons (or octagons etc.) -- HyperRogue normally uses the "hyperbolic soccerball" tesselation, with two hexagons and one heptagon meeting in each vertex; for a long time we also had a "heptagonal mode", where all faces are heptagonal, which makes the cells bigger and hyperbolic effects stronger (just like the faces of a dodecahedron are larger than the faces of a soccerball).


Can we go the other direction? If we do not mind losing a bit of regularity, we can! Goldberg polyhedra are obtained by adding more hexagonal faces to a dodecahedron, in a symmetric way described by two numbers -- e.g., soccerball corresponds to GP(1,1). We can do the same operation in the hyperbolic case, and now HyperRogue lets us play in the resulting worlds!


While in the standard HyperRogue grid heptagons are still ubiquitous, they become a precious strategical resource in these new worlds -- they are even more important strategically than in the standard HyperRogue grid. For example, in the standard Land of Eternal Motion, with two Running Dogs next to you, you can (usually) save yourself and leave them behind -- but this is only because there will be heptagons in your path! In GP(2,0) heptagonal (shown above) you may be doomed, though -- the Running Dogs will force you to go a path without any heptagons. Similarly, three monsters "on one side" can be usually survived in the standard HyperRogue map, but you may be doomed in GP(2,0). Thus, this subtle change lets you appreciate the effects of hyperbolic geometry on the gameplay in HyperRogue.


This construction is available in the "experiments with geometry" in special gameplay modes menu. Choose to play the "Crossroads IV" in order to play something similar to the full game -- not all lands though, as the Great Walls are not implemented, and patterns are only approximated. Additionally, the floor pattern code in HyperRogue has been rewritten, making floors look much better not only in GP grids, but in all non-standard geometries available in HyperRogue! The handling of alternate geometry variants of various lands has been improved too, with more efficient menus and improved generation rules in various combinations.


New geometries come with one serious problem, though: there are 15 geometries, most of them in the bitruncated and non-bitruncated variants, some in their Goldberg-Coxeter variants, and more than 50 lands... this makes thousands of combinations. Which one to play? This problem is solved in the new Strange Challenge, which is a combination of Orb Strategy, Pure Tactics, and geometry experiments, inspired by daily/weekly challenges found in other roguelikes and roguelites. Every 77 hours, a new challenge is randomly generated, by choosing a random geometry, and creating a combination of two lands in this geometry; you also get random magical Orbs to be used when you get into a tight spot. This is named "strange challenge" because, well, some of the resulting games are somewhat strange (and also because it lets us adjust the rotation nicely -- daily rotation would be too fast, and weekly rotation would be too slow). Compete with your friends and the best HyperRogue players for top scores in these challenges! (Note: this feature is intended to be available only on Steam.)


The full changelog is here; the most significant other changes include more representations of hyperbolic geometry (both 2D and 3D), attack animations, memory saving for low memory devices (preventing crashes on iOS and Android), relaxed rules of Dragon dismounting, rebalanced Terracotta Army and Snake Nest, and fixed Blizzard graphics in Windows OS. HyperRogue version 10.4 can be played on Steam and itch.io. Mobile versions will be updated later. Have fun!

HyperRogue 10.3: more lands, more geometry!

HyperRogue version 10.3 is released on Steam and itch.io! This big update continues the geometry experiment theme of HyperRogue 10.2, and also includes four new lands (two of which are included in the main game and two of which are for special geometries only).

Some of the Slime Beasts have decided to revolt against the color rules in the Alchemist Lab. They have changed their shape and consistency, declared independence, and established their own Jelly Kingdom. This land is based on simple, but unique mechanics -- Jellies switch between being a wall and being a monster after every treasure you pick.

Once a beautiful city... but now overrun by the mighty Raiders of unknown origin.

Raiders (and Skeletons, who also dwell in the Ruined City) cannot be harmed with mundane weapons, but each of the five colors has its own movement restrictions. Choose a path that gives you an advantage to run away from them! (Hyperbolic geometry will help, of course!)

The Docks have no new mechanics, but they feature an interesting tree-like structure that works in the octagonal geometry, but has no natural counterpart in other geometries. For this reason it does not appear in a standard game of HyperRogue. The picture should explain everything :)

The Snake Nest is another land not in the standard game. It is a version of Red Rock Valley, but where every cell is colored in one of the three colors. The snakes also come in three types -- each of which is restricted to two colors. It is exclusive to geometries where cells can be nicely colored this way. (Visit the Red Rock Valley in the current session, or obtain a highscore of 25+ Red Gems, to unlock this in the land list for the Octagons geometry.)

HyperRogue did not previously include the most common and boring tiling in games -- the square grid. The square grid is included now, and it comes in some more interesting variations, too! After bitruncating, we get a tiling made of octagons and squares, which is definitely less standard: from a large cell in the picture you can move to eight adjacent cells, while you can move only to four adjacent cells from a small cell. You can also play on a Klein bottle now -- that's why you see a mirror image of yourself on the left!

More of artistic than of "gaming" nature, the new texture mode lets you easily draw nice tesselations of the hyperbolic plane (or any other geometry supported by HyperRogue), in a way similar to Paint-like programs. Draw some lines, and it often ends up looking great! This is much easier to use, and in some ways more powerful, than the old vector graphics editor. The screenshot above shows drawing directly on the Hypersian Rug. The obtained picture can then be explored, played on, or saved.

After drawing a tesselation, it is also possible to convert it to another geometry. For example, the picture above is the spherical version of the tesselation from the last picture. Thus, it is possible, for example, to load Circle Limit IV by M. C. Escher, change its base tiling to another hyperbolic tiling, and walk on it, or view the result in the Hypersian Rug mode. This is inspired by the hyperbolic versions of M. C. Escher's tesselations created by Jos Leys.

Speaking of the Hypersian Rug -- this mode has also been extended. Previously, you could view a fragment of a hyperbolic plane embedded into the Euclidean space; now, it works with any geometry on both sides. You can now also explore the model in first person perspective. The animated picture above shows an Euclidean square embedded into a 3-sphere -- although the square is actually flat, it appears to be curved negatively, because the space itself is curved positively! Flying inside a 3-sphere is an interesting experience, as things close to the antipodal point, or things just behind you, will appear as if they were very close to you. See this video for more details.

Thanks to Fulgur14, Patashu, tehora, and tricosahedron for their ideas for new lands, themes, and features. Android and iOS versions should be updated soon. This version also includes many minor bugfixes and interface improvements; the full changelog is on Steam forums or the website.

Follow the newly created HyperRogue page on Facebook and @ZenoRogue on Twitter. Get HyperRogue 10.3 on Steam and itch.io, and have fun!