Meritous Recharged is a fork of Meritous. If you already know Meritous, you can go right to the project homepage and read the changelog.
The current version is “officially” 1.3-dev. “-dev” is there because there is no binary package yet. Don’t worry, I consider this version functionally complete. As soon as there are proper packages with binaries, I will remove the “-dev”.
Project “homepage”
(contains more screenshots and source code archives. Oh, and Git.)
Gameplay
You play as Merit, a psi user, who got himself into the Orcus Dome. The Orcus Dome is a large system of 3000 interconnected rooms. The room system is randomly created each time the game is started. Strange shadowly creatures crawl around the Dome and threaten Merit. Merit can use his psi powers to release a powerful discharge which, when strong and close enough, destroys or hurts the shadow creatures. Merit’s psi power can also be used for a reflector shield which reflects incoming enemy bullets. Destroyed enemies drop psi crystals which can be used to upgrade the psi powers. As you progress in the game, all monsters will become more difficult to defeat and more aggressive.
Some of the rooms contain ancient psi artifacts which grant Merit special powers.
Ultimately, Merit has to find the ancient psi seal to return it to the center of the dome. But the psi seal only becomes visible after Merit collected three psi keys and returned them their correct locations.
Gameplay footage: I am too lazy and/or stupid to record a video. But since Meritous Recharged is still the same in gameplay as Meritous, you may want to search YouTube for “Meritous” (some spoilers).
Project goals and project “history”
Meritous Recharged is a fork of Meritous, which can be found on <http://asceai.net/meritous>. The current main goal of Meritous Recharged are better usability, a friendlier help system and overall technical improvements. I currently do not aim for much changes in the gameplay. Meritous Recharged is finished and a fully playable game.
The main motivation of this project was because I discovered some annoying bugs in Meritous but the original creator did not respond to an e-mail. So I decided to do the work by myselves. Said bugs are fixed now.
I rather would have kept the original name “Meritous” but it seems there are already some small forks around, so I better play it safe and choose a new name to avoid confusion.
Dependencies: SDL 1.2, SDL_mixer, SDL_image and zlib.
License
Everything is under GNU GPLv3+ (sorry, I was forced to …), except for the music (I think?), where the license status is confusing to me. Apparently most of the music is taken from The Mod Archive, and at most time the license is an obscure license called “Mod Archive Distribution license”, which is anything but clear. Someone in the past made some other research about this: <http://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/pkg-games/meritous.git/tree/dat/m/README-music.txt>. I don’t trust the claim about “cannot be legally distributed” for now.
Here’s one song used in the game: http://modarchive.org/index.php?request ... uery=44366
I have no idea wheather the music is compatible to GPLv3. I am not a lawyer, but I have asked The Mod Archive’s forums. Let’s see what happens.
Contributions
As I said, the game is finished. But I am just a bit clueless about how to package this. So currently, you have to compile this by yourselves, sorry.
But luckily, this just breaks down to typing “make” under GNU/Linux. Any help about properly packaging this game or pointers to useful informational resources is appreciated.
