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!
