Hyacinth
(cribbed from my blog post about Hyacinth)
Hyacinth is an in-your-browser, old-school styled rogue-like. More-or-less. It has a much less punishing interface, and has some severe balancing issues. True to its roots, it's also still in development and somewhat unfinished. HOWEVER. In the spirit of "actually doing things" I decided to get it to a playable state rather than forever tweak twiddly bits that I'd like to add.
Play Hyacinth Online
(hosted by North Knight Software Inc.)
The game arose out of a need for me to learn Flex, in the summer of 2008. It did that job and then lay dormant when things got busy, and I kept wishing I had the time to get back to it. A few months ago I finally got back to it, worked on it for a bit, and got busy again. In the last couple days I cleared up the worst outstanding bugs and now I am releasing it. Along the way, I got help, inspiration, and direction from my incalculably valuable colleagues, Gavin and Jesse, and far more playtesting than I could have hoped for from my lovely girlfriend tulokyn.
I'd greatly appreciate it if you could all give it a try. Just in case you miss all of the signs, "H" brings up help. Hopefully you'll figure things out from there.
And for those of you who usually shy away from rogue-likes because you happen to use a notebook with no keypad: we thought of you. You can use a 9-key "keypad" consisting of QWE, ASD, and ZXC. (The middle key, of course, is rest.) This, of course, throws a wrench in that experienced rogue-likers should take note of: drop is R, not D.
The Future
Every now and then I want to get back into working on Hyacinth. I have lots of ideas left that I'd like to implement, not to mention fairly routine rogue-like features (such as ranged combat and magic spells) that I wanted but cut for this release to keep it simple. For the moment though, it's pretty firmly in hiatus. Given time and/or encouragement, though, I will probably pick it up again in the future.
The Name
The name "Hyacinth" doesn't have any deep meaning in particular. I simply have a tendency to start out using flower or animal names for projects so that I don't get hung up on trying to find the "perfect" name to the exclusion of actually working on it.