You Only Live Once

You Only Live Once is a Seven Day Roguelike written by Jeff Lait.

You can get the most recent version here.

This provides a windows and linux executable versions along with the source for those brave enough to try and build it from scratch. It also provides a linux curses and windows curses version for those allergic to graphics. It also provides a mac source version so those running OSX can compile it.

The features of You Only Live Once are:

Extremely tactical combat. There is no randomness in combat. You always hit and always do full damage. This means that careful placement is the difference between success and failure.
Heavy on plot and characterization. A story is told. It is not just kill things for no reason. (If you want to just kill things for no reason, POWDER is recommended)
Quick to complete. You can likely fully explore and enjoy the game in an hour or two. You are then free to get on with your life.

Have fun!

Version History

A 7DRL is supposed to be completely done at the end of the seven days. However, this should not mean one does not make small fixes.

005: Various Fixes, Windows Curses
October 24th, 2006

Version 005 sees the mac-curses build not be distributed. Instead, you'll have to content yourself by compiling it by hand out of the macport directory.

The good news is that there is now a windows curses build.

You can get 005 here.

Note: I have no idea why there is no 004.

003: Mac Curses Release
April 6th, 2005

Version 003 adds a mac-curses build. You should be able to run this in your console on a OSX mac. Since I built this over an ssh connection, it was black and white. I don't know if you'll get colour.

You can get 003 here.

002: Bugfix Release
April 5th, 2005

Version 002 fixes all known bugs. It also adds support for curses output. This allows one to play the game over a text only terminal. I have hopes it also makes it easy to port to the Mac, but I have not yet got a Mac to try it on. If you port it to OSX, I would be grateful if you could send me the binary so I can release it to others.

You can get 002 here.

7DRL release
March 11th, 2005

The original 7DRL version can be got here.

It seems I can't even code for 7 days without writing at least one bug! Here are the known bugs in You Only Live Once 7DRL release.

Number pad doesn't actually work. Seems SDL doesn't give numeric unicode for pressing these, with or without numlock. Apologies for the misleading documentation. Note arrow keys should work, however, so you could always just restrict yourself to orthogonal movement as a challenge game :> The number pad does work if numlock is set on Linux and Windows 98. It may be just Windows XP where it doesn't work.
If you are playing as Kor Smith, do not escape the dungeon! Doing so will make the game unplayable and you will have to delete the valley.sav file before playing again.
The '5' and '.' key presses will cause you to wait in place. The bug is that they are not documented.
The '>' and '<' key presses will cause you to descend/climb staircases. The bug is that they are not documented.
After restoring a saved game, the up stair cases will connect to new dungeons rather than where they previously connected. This makes it impossible to escape the dungeon after a save/restore.
The bitmap loading code doesn't address endianness issues so doesn't work on Macs.

SDL Conformance Notice

The 002 and later versions include the SDL .dll. You may replace this .dll with the latest version. The official license is:

Licensing the Simple DirectMedia Layer library

The Simple DirectMedia Layer library is currently available under the
GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) version 2 or newer. This
license allows you to link with the library in such a way that users
can modify the library and have your application use the new version. 

The GNU LGPL license can be found online at:
http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/lgpl.html 

To comply with this license, you must give prominent notice that you
use the Simple DirectMedia Layer library, and that it is included
under the terms of the LGPL license. You must include a copy of the
LGPL license. You must also do one of the following: 

1. Include the source code for the version of SDL that you link with,
as well as the full source or object code to your application so that
the user can relink your application, or 

2. Include a written offer, valid for at least three years, to provide
the materials listed in option 1, charging no more than the cost of
providing this distribution, or 

3. Make the materials listed in option 1 available from the same place
that your application is available. 

The most common way to comply with the license is to dynamically link
with SDL, and then include the SDL source code and appropriate notices
with your application. 

Embedded Use: Personally, I don't have a problem with anybody
statically linking SDL for use with embedded environments that don't
already have an open development environment. (i.e. the users can't
relink programs anyway) However, this does technically violate the
LGPL, so be cautioned.

I have made available a tarball of the SDL code here. It is recommended you get the most recent version from http://www.libsdl.org, however.