Delve

An endless descent. A room-to-room action roguelike for the Nintendo DS.

Fight through isometric dungeon rooms, pick one of three boons after every fight, choose your next door by the reward it shows, and go as deep as you can. When you fall, the gold you found buys permanent upgrades at the camp, and the descent starts again.

Website: eightyfour.ca/delve · Download: Releases

The camp	The Dungeon	The Crystal Caverns	The Magma Lord

Features

• Endless, seeded rooms. Every room is generated from the run's seed: shapes with pits and chasms, obstacles, traps, breakable props and explosive barrels. Exit doors show what lies beyond them: a fight, a rest or treasure.
• Four areas and their bosses. The Dungeon, the Sunken Sewers, the Crystal Caverns and the Molten Depths, ten depths each and a boss at the end of each one. Then the order starts again, harder.
• A full kit. Sword, dash with invulnerability, thrown daggers, and a blast that charges as you land hits. Auto-aim helps when no direction is held.
• Boons and upgrades. Thirteen stacking boons per run, fifteen permanent upgrades bought at the camp's shrine, and waypoints that let later runs start in an area you have reached.
• The look of the DS. Low-poly 3D rooms with flat shading and dynamic light, SNES-style pixel-art sprites as billboards, parallax skies on the 2D layers, and two camera zoom levels.
• Built for the handheld. Three save slots, run history, first-time tips, a left-handed control layout, touch-screen menus, and closing the lid pauses the game.
• Secrets. There is more to the About screen than meets the eye.

Playing

You need a way to run homebrew: a DS flashcart, a DSi or 3DS with TWiLight Menu++, or an emulator such as melonDS.

1. Download delve-v<version>.nds from the releases.
2. Copy it to your SD card and start it from your loader.

Delve saves through DLDI, the standard homebrew storage interface. The ROM carries a blank DLDI stub, and nearly every loader patches its own driver in when it starts a game. If yours does not, build with make dldipatch (it patches in the R4 driver) or patch the ROM with your cart's driver.

Saves (delve-1.sav to delve-3.sav, one per slot) go next to the ROM when the loader says where it is, otherwise into /saves/, otherwise the card's root. Without a usable card the game still runs, without saving.

Delve has been tested in melonDS and on a Nintendo 3DS with TWiLight Menu++.

Controls

Action	Default	Left-handed
Move	D-pad	A B X Y
Sword	A	Left
Dash	B	Down
Dagger	Y	Right
Blast (when charged)	X	Up
Camera zoom	SELECT	SELECT
Pause	START (or close the lid)	START

Menus work with the D-pad and A/B, or by touch.

Building

Delve builds with BlocksDS and Nitro Engine, installed through Wonderful Toolchain (BlocksDS's setup guide covers the details):

# Wonderful Toolchain
curl -fsSLO https://wonderful.asie.pl/bootstrap/wf-bootstrap-x86_64.tar.gz
sudo mkdir -p /opt/wonderful && sudo chown -R "$USER" /opt/wonderful
tar -xzf wf-bootstrap-x86_64.tar.gz -C /opt/wonderful/
export PATH=/opt/wonderful/bin:$PATH
wf-pacman -Syu --noconfirm wf-tools

# BlocksDS and Nitro Engine
wf-config repo enable blocksds
wf-pacman -Syu --noconfirm
wf-pacman -S --noconfirm blocksds-toolchain blocksds-nitroengine
sudo ln -sfn /opt/wonderful/thirdparty/blocksds /opt/blocksds

The Makefile looks for BLOCKSDS=/opt/blocksds/core, BLOCKSDSEXT=/opt/blocksds/external and WONDERFUL_TOOLCHAIN=/opt/wonderful; set them in the environment if yours are elsewhere. Then:

Command	Builds
make	delve.nds, the everyday build
make debug	delve-debug.nds, with debug cheats and performance meters
make release	delve-v<version>.nds: runs the tests first, warnings are errors
make test	Runs the unit tests on your computer (only needs gcc)
make dldipatch	Patches the ROM with the R4 DLDI driver
make clean	Removes all build output

The version is kept in one place, the VERSION file.

Debug build. Hold L and press R to clear the room, hold R and press L to leave through a door, hold L and press X to fill the blast meter. A meter at the bottom of the top screen shows CPU time and polygon count per frame. Hold L + SELECT and press START to test the crash screen, which every build includes: it reports the CPU registers and the build's commit.

Assets. The art in gfx/ and the audio in audio/ are generated and committed, so building needs nothing more. To regenerate them from the originals in art/third_party/, run the scripts in tools/ with Python 3 (the art scripts need Pillow): import_art.py, make_art.py, import_music.py and make_audio.py.

Project layout

source/          the game (C11)
  states/        title, menus, the run, the summary, the Easter egg
tests/           unit tests for the platform-independent modules
gfx/, audio/     generated art and sound, converted at build time
art/third_party/ the original CC0 and public-domain art and music
tools/           the asset scripts

The gameplay modules (rooms, generation, combat, difficulty, saves) are plain C with no DS dependencies, so the tests run them on your computer. Rendering and input live in their own modules on top. Gameplay maths is fixed point, and every pool is static: nothing is allocated while the game runs.

Credits

Delve is by Michal Pandyra, with code written with the help of Claude (Anthropic).

• Art: Shade (Puny Characters, Puny Dungeon, Puny World, Miniworld Sprites; CC0) and devurandom (Victoria Bold font; CC0).
• Music: Kosmo The Cat (CC0), Beyond, Drozerix and JAM (public domain).
• Libraries: BlocksDS and libnds, Nitro Engine, Maxmod.
• Homage: a hidden tribute to Rogue (1980) by Michael Toy, Glenn Wichman and Ken Arnold.

CREDITS.md has the details and LICENSES.md every source and licence.

Licence

Delve's code, and the art and sound its own tools generate, are released under the MIT licence. The third-party art and music keep their own licences (CC0 or public domain), listed in LICENSES.md.