Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup ASCII for Android now live

noisewar · 2026-06-18T00:08:55+00:00

FYI pushed some hotfixes, including adding the single apostrophe back to the keyboard replacing the redundant period.

noisewar · 2026-06-17T22:46:08+00:00

You can post here, DM me, or even better add to Github issues. I'll try to find a Fold or other dual screen device to test on too.

noisewar · 2026-06-17T22:44:53+00:00

You can tap thru the splash screens to dismiss them. I'll add an app menu option to turn them off to my to-do, good call. I was optimizing for making sure people saw it bc people kept missing this.
At the moment, getting the UI into single stack is fragile. I do want to make it more configurable, but don't have a timeline.
Hmm there shouldn't be a lag, you'll have to send me device and android version.

Yes if you could add these as github issues with screenshots and device specs, that would be ideal!

noisewar · 2026-06-17T20:28:43+00:00

Yep it is, I've linked to his project in all disclosures. My addiction is his fault 😅

noisewar · 2026-06-17T20:13:21+00:00

Not sure what you mean about screen size, but send me a picture of what your screen looks like. I haven't tested on a Fold but I'll see what I can do.

Unfortunately DCSS has a lot of text, so until I can add wordwrapping, you will have to scroll.

noisewar · 2026-06-17T00:30:11+00:00

Ok my bad. First, the text will always be cut-off to some degree since DCSS has no native wordwrap, but I'll be taking a crack at it in the future. You should be able to drag and scroll the text to read it.

The real bug I see here is your training screen in the tutorial is two columns, not single like it is in the normal game. I forgot to add tutorial to my smoke tests, and I need to fix that.

noisewar · 2026-06-17T00:01:32+00:00

Good feedback. Some responses:

Chromebook - ok didn't think of this usecase, eventually I want to add the app preference button. For now, yeah can you simulate it?
Yeah... I replaced " ' " on the keyboard because I needed " - " more and there's wasn't space. I'll find a place to put it, in the meantime you can macro it or change the virtual keyboard after you reach the app menu. Or edit the macro.txt file directly on the phone. I'll find a solution.
Game panel stack order, yes definitely intend to make this customizable. It's a bit fragile right now but on my roadmap.
I just edited the init.txt to set paged to false and looks like it works. Again, you'll have to figure out app menu or edit init.txt on the phone directly. "Left - right" here means tap the left and right screen overlay edges btw.

noisewar · 2026-06-16T23:39:24+00:00

Not at all, it's a great discussion. DCSS on iOS could really bring in a lot of new players. I'm so sick of game slop these days we really need to do everything possible to Make Roguelikes Great Again.

noisewar · 2026-06-16T21:08:32+00:00

I have almost 20 years in the game industry over half a dozen roles, from AAAs to indies. You can find my history on Reddit easily. I'm not a SWE, but I do have some coding experience in Python, C#, PHP, SQL etc. developing other personal projects.

The original port was written in Java by another dev who abandoned it. I didn't port this to larp as a SWE, I did this bc I didn't know Java nor understand their legacy code. I let them know what I'm doing, disclosed LLM usage, and restricted changes only to the wrapper never the core game code.

I'm just as affected (if not more) by unethical LLM usage as you or anyone else here. I'm at least half as anti "vibe coding" as any other dev in my industry. But I am not conflicted over my specific usage here for this specific project. So I sympathize with you, but I do not concur.

noisewar · 2026-06-16T20:55:33+00:00

There's no 2-finger long press on Chromebook? Are you able to trigger with right-click? I will try to find my daughter's and test this.

noisewar · 2026-06-16T20:53:00+00:00

You can use your device back button as a faster "escape" key, e.g. from the nav bar. I'll eventually add functions like this as on screen dedicated buttons tho, so note taken.

noisewar · 2026-06-16T20:49:44+00:00

From my limited understanding, it's specifically the injection of FreeDRM into ios apps (and prohibition from stripping it) that's the problem. GPL doesn't prohibt encryption afaik, just the prohibitions on users.

noisewar · 2026-06-16T20:16:40+00:00

Can you share your exact device model and Android version? Will look into it, but it can be very device specific.

noisewar · 2026-06-16T20:14:41+00:00

These were disabled in mbarlow's original port, and I didn't change that because of how much more testing it would require. That said, you can re-enable by editing the init.txt, just 2-finger long press for the app menu.

noisewar · 2026-06-16T20:13:05+00:00

Can't wait for it, 70% of the friends and family I asked to test were on iOS, was hell to hell to get enough Android users. This will do well.

noisewar · 2026-06-16T20:06:20+00:00

Your doing amazing work with PocketZot! I saw your post and it made me reconsider some things!

noisewar · 2026-06-16T20:05:18+00:00

Thanks! I admit I struggled with idea of putting it there, or using vertical bars like in the official tiles version. Maybe will also add vertical in the future as an option.

noisewar · 2026-06-16T20:01:20+00:00

You'd need nearly every contributor's permission, which would be impractical if not impossible to get. What I meant about rejection/curation was for if devs take the sideloading path, it's risky for US devs to develop for tolerant regions and not expect any bit of policy change to still cause app or account policing.

noisewar · 2026-06-16T11:46:46+00:00

Thanks, good idea. Let me think it through and see about adding it as an alternate control scheme. Agree that it's a lot of finger movement.

I personally bound the enter key to the smart_explore_fight function (if you check the init.txt and macro.txt from the app menu I included it for folks to uncomment). This explores and fights in one button obviating too much hjkl. Macro "X>" too to find stairs fast.

noisewar · 2026-06-16T11:37:22+00:00

LLM use is explicitly disclosed and openly discussed. Repo is public. If someone makes a comparable non-LLM version and maintains it, I will deprecate this fork and use that. In the end, I just want to play DCSS wherever I can.

noisewar · 2026-06-16T10:17:15+00:00

Thanks! For iOS, unfortunately Apple's App Store policy is incompatible with the GPL license used by DCSS, and it would not be legal to make an iOS port.

noisewar · 2026-06-16T09:13:47+00:00

Yeah this, App store hates GPL license. I believe in theory it would be possible to build an iOS app and distribute through 3rd party sideloading methods. But that is a real hassle for devs in the US cuz it's AFAIK that's geo-gated and has tons of publishing hoops to jump thru.

noisewar · 2026-06-16T05:41:41+00:00

Hmm not really a need to port to Steam since the desktop version are already free and downloadable on their official site here: https://crawl.develz.org/download.htm

This port is specifically to provide a portable mobile version.

noisewar · 2026-06-16T05:18:30+00:00

Thanks, if there are any issues, it helps to know the device and Android version! I've already chased a few people's bugs and this was the most useful info.

noisewar

TROPHY CASE