Delve

About the game

Delve is a room-to-room action roguelike. You start at a small camp, walk into the crypt and fight through a chain of rooms seen from an isometric angle. Every room is generated from the seed of the run, with pits, obstacles, traps, breakable crates and explosive barrels. The exit doors show what lies behind them, a fight, a rest or a treasure, so every choice is a small bet.

When a fight ends you pick one of three boons, and they stack: thirteen of them in a run. Fall, and the gold you collected buys permanent upgrades at the shrine in the camp, then the descent starts again. There are four areas of ten depths each, the Dungeon, the Sunken Sewers, the Crystal Caverns and the Molten Depths, each closed by a boss, and after the fourth the order starts over, harder.

You get a sword, a dash that makes you untouchable for a moment, thrown daggers and a blast that charges as you land hits. Auto-aim helps when no direction is held, and there is a left-handed layout that moves everything to the face buttons.

Playing it here

This is a homebrew game made for the Nintendo DS: a new game by an independent developer, not a commercial release. It runs here in the DeSmuME emulator and needs no Nintendo BIOS or firmware. Both screens appear on the page, one above the other (side by side in a wide window). The bottom one is the touch screen: click it with the mouse or tap it with a finger, which is how the menus work.

Click Play, touch the bottom screen to begin and pick a save slot. The game keeps its three slots on an SD card, which the emulator simulates, and your browser stores what the game writes there, so the progress is still there next time. F2 saves the emulator state at any moment and F4 loads it. A gamepad works too.

Controls

On a phone or tablet the DS buttons appear on screen, under the two screens (or on the sides, with the device lying down), and the bottom screen works as the touch screen.

Tips

Dash through danger. You cannot be hit in the middle of a dash, so use it to cross projectiles and to get out of a corner.

Read the doors. The reward on a door tells you what is behind it. A rest door is worth taking when your hearts are low, a treasure when you are strong.

Visit the shrine. Even a short, bad run leaves gold, and the permanent upgrades are what make the second and third runs go further.

Credits and licence

Delve was made by Michal Pandyra, who wrote the code with the help of Claude (Anthropic), as he says in the credits. The pixel art is by Shade (Puny Characters, Puny Dungeon, Puny World and Miniworld Sprites, CC0) and the font by devurandom (CC0). The music is by Kosmo The Cat (CC0) and by Beyond, Drozerix and JAM (public domain). The game is under the MIT licence and uses the BlocksDS libraries; the licence texts and the source are linked from this page.