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Intermission: Challenges, Medals, and Badges

Some roguelikes have at least some concept of conducts or optional achievements. Nethack, for example, keeps track of things like whether you've ever used a Wish or a Genocide, or ever polymorphed, or even whether you've ever killed a creature or read something, and reports these at the end of the game. Yes, winning is impressive on its own, but have you tried winning as an illiterate pacifistic atheist?

DoomRL takes things a bit further.



Selecting "Show Player" from the main menu takes you to this screen. It tracks all of your stats, and assigns you two ranks based on completed conducts (the "Skill Rank") and kills (the "Experience Rank"). Left and right will take you to pages showing more detailed stats, like per-enemy kills by weapon, or per-difficulty-level victories by game mode.



Keep going and you reach the Medals screen. The first page of them are viewable at any time; scroll down and you find the secret badges, which tend to be associated with specific bosses or secret levels, and are displayed only after you've earned them. They include not only things like "complete level ____", but also "complete the game in 25 minutes realtime" or "defeat boss ____ without taking damage".

I got a bunch of these in the game I just finished, so let's break them down:

pre:
Medal of Prejudice      - for a 100% kill rate
UAC Star (gold cluster) - for 100 consecutive kills without taking damage
Aurora Medallion        - for finding more than 3 Uniques in one game
Conqueror Badge         - for completing all generated levels, including optional ones
Grim Reaper's Badge     - for completing Limbo
Hell Armorer Badge      - for completing Hell's Armoury
Hell Champion Medal     - for completing Hell's Arena




The game also keeps track of which assemblies you've made (and how many times) -- you can actually access that screen in game with A if you need a refresher on assembly recipes -- and which exotic and unique items you've found. Flip past those and you get to Badges.

I'm honestly not sure what differentiates these from Medals except that they have explicit difficulty levels. There's generally one for each challenge mode (which I will get to shortly), plus some for general game progression and some for optional conducts like the Strongman badge. They range in difficulty from Bronze, which anyone should be able to get on HNTR with a bit of practice...



...to Diamond, which require world-class skill, persistence, and a solid amount of luck, too.

A lot of the badge descriptions use abbreviations like AoB, AoMr, and suchlike. What are these? The challenge modes.



These are accessible via "Challenge Game" at the main menu. They start locked, but unlock based on your Skill Rank and it doesn't take much to unlock them all.

Unlike conducts/badges, challenges are enforced. At any time you can decide you don't really want that Strongman badge and pick up a gun, but if you play Angel of Berserk you are incapable of firing a gun.

There are fewer of these than there are badges, so I'll quickly cover them. (If you want all the gory details, check out the wiki.)

pre:
Berserk        - Melee weapons only. Large health globes act as berserk packs.
Marksmanship   - Pistols only.
Shotgunnery    - Shotguns only.
Light Travel   - 5 inventory slots. Speed bonus.
Impatience     - Consumables are used immediately when picked up.
Confidence     - Skip episode 1.
Purity         - No powerups.
Red Alert      - Five minutes after you enter each level, it's nuked.
Darkness       - Vision range reduced. No map memory. Double XP gain.
Max Carnage    - Player and enemies always hit and always roll max damage.
Masochism      - No healing except a Supercharge on level up.
100            - 100 randomly generated levels.
Pacifism       - Cannot attack, but level up every 3 staircases.
Humanity       - Start with 10 rather than 50 HP.
Overconfidence - Skip episodes 1 and 2.


On top of these you have the Dual-Angel challenges, which let you combine two Angel challenges (but not any two -- there are some restrictions), and the Archangel challenges, which are much harder versions of some of the Angel challenges -- for example, Archangel of Humanity removes level-ups, too, and Archangel of 100 requires you to clear 666 levels instead of 100.

Over the next series of updates, I'll be showing off all the Angel and Archangel challenge modes -- albeit on HNTR, and some of them probably very briefly.