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To understand POWDER, you should first understand roguelikes. "Roguelike" is a term applied to a wide variety of games which share a common inspiration from the game Rogue. A non-exhaustive list of such games would be: ADOM, Nethack, Crawl, Diablo (I & II), Moria, and Angband. My apologies to the many excellent roguelikes I didn't list. What characterizes these games? The exact specifications are a matter of debate - indeed, I may receive hate mail for including Diablo - but I shall try to write a few:
Tactical play. The unit of action is based on the individual adventurer. The game is not twitch oriented (like Quake, rewarding reflexes & well trained actions) nor is it strategy oriented (like Civilizations or Warcraft, requiring working on the large picture)
Based in Hack and Slash. A roguelike isn't primarily about plot development or telling a story. It is about killing things and acquiring treasure.
Random games. A roguelike is a dungeon crawler where no two games are the same. The maps are different, the items are different, there are no guaranteed win paths.
Permadeath. You die, that is it. No restoring a savegame. Good roguelikes delete your save game after loading them. This is compensated by the replayability of the game.
Complex interactions of properties. While the commands for a roguelike are simple, the potential interactions are not. My favourite example is equipping a silver ring as a weapon in order to damage a creature vulnerable to silver, but not one's other weapons. [Editor: This matches the Hack branch of the roguelike tree, not the Angband branch]
Steam rolling monsters. If a critter is in your way, and weak, you shouldn't even notice it is there.
For more information about roguelikes there is the Rogue Basin, a Wiki documenting this genre, and the Temple of the Roguelike, a newsite tracking developments in the field.

Having defined Roguelike, POWDER is easy to describe: A Roguelike designed for the Gameboy Advance and Nintendo DS and Now Apple Iphone

Just in time for the new, high res, iPhones, POWDER's tiles have caught up to the previous, low res, iPhones. The 12x12 Akoi Meexx tiles have been hand smoothed for a better landscape experience.

My old file server died. Fortunately, I was already in the process of migrating to a new one, so it really couldn't have been better timing. Unfortunately, my attempt to restart the PSP toolchain failed. I'll have to give this another try later, but this release is way too delayed already.

Note the iPhone version, as usual, won't show up right away. First, because even with immediate submission there is a delay for approval. Second, because one reason this release kept being delayed was a real frustrating bug where the keyboard wasn't showing up half the time. I think I fixed it, hence this release, but I want to do some more testing on my commute.

When the iPhone version does hit the light of day, I hope players on that platform will appreciate that you can now email your character dumps. This provides a way to get a record of your win without resorting to pen and pencil.


The delete key should work on Macs. (Konstantin Stupnik)
Typos in the animate forest description fixed. (Paul Nguyen, Kender)
You can no longer petrify or stone to flesh quest items. (Lorenzo Batallones)
Items that fall in a hole will not be revealed up on the next level's map. (Kender)
Zapping a wand of invisibility at yourself when you are already invisible from a permament source no longer reports "You are invisible." (Kender)
No longer falsely get system shock if a creature you possessed, but released when it was polymorphed, is finally slain. (Mental Mouse)
The Regenerate spell now works for creatures with No Regeneration, as was intended. (Mental Mouse)
Flesh golems can once more regenerate. (They lost this in the no-regen sweep) (Mental Mouse)
Giant Spiders have defences better fitting their explevel. (Mental Mouse)
The earth hammer is now made from stone as you'd expect. (Kender)
The spell Summon Daemon now spells Daemon like the rest of POWDER. (Mental Mouse)
Typo fixed in Golden Tridude description. (Mental Mouse)
Clarify cave troll description. (Metnal Mouse)
s/byte/sting/ for scorpion description. (Mental Mouse)
Clarify butcher skill description. (Mental Mouse)
Water elementals no longer leave corpse.
Eaten intrinsicly poisonous corpses now has a significantly shorter timeout. (Kender)
Attacks which deal multiple types of damage in the same hit will have damage reduction applied to each of the types, rather than only to the first type. (Mental Mouse)
Vampire bats will no longer chase players which they aren't interested in. (Kender)
Option to email character dumps on the iPhone to get them out of the black box.
Searching due to intrinsics will put Searching on the status line, and multiple manual searches will report Seached x10.
Improved the Akoi Meexx 12x12 tiles, for less ugly pixels when in landscape mode on the iPhone. ...