After almost 10 years, the rat skull will finally return in Shattered Pixel Dungeon v2.4.0 as one of the game’s new trinkets! It was formerly a quest item that I removed way back in v0.2.1. Now the skull will passively boost the chance for you to encounter rare exotic enemies like albino rats or crystal mimics. This means a bit more challenge, but also more rare loot!
Was the original PD open source and now people are riffing on it? I never played the original - what is the difference between them?
Watabou still makes a lot of procgen stuff https://watabou.itch.io/
Yes, it’s open source and there are a couple of forks, but also forks of ShPD etc.
ShPD is nearly ten years old, so quite a few things changed over time. Boss fights are different, alchemy got extended a lot and other things changed, extended or added. After ShPD was forked, the original Pixel Dungeon introduced a duration system where upgraded weapons and armor degrade and become +0 again at some point if not repaired.
A speedrun of the original: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Brvx6sTkFcs
Edit:
That’s really cool. I can’t believe it’s been around so long and I’m just finding it.
Wicked stuff all around
I mostly know ShPD because it is/was the only PD fork on F-Droid. Originially I played PD a few times, but I had a hard time, and then tried ShPD, where it was easier for me to progress … I still died quickly, but it was fun.
Yep! There’s shattered pixel dungeon, regular pixel dungeon, etc. I seem to recall something like “sprouted” pixel dungeon? I can’t remember, this is all years and years ago. I’m very surprised to see this community on Lemmy! I’ve been playing these games for nearly a decade (particularly shattered pixel dungeon), and it’s really cool to see a community still going strong.