itch.io

Unfortunately a lot of polish and teaching got left by the wayside, got sick towards the end of the jam so didn't end up having as much time as I thought I would.
The stagecraft abilities mostly manipulate the RNG of the combat

• Aim for the Shield makes the target always hit your shields.
• Dull strikes makes the target always hit for their minimum damage.
• Get Hit makes the target always get hit for max damage, with no shield protection.

The other two have a bit weirder effects.

• Stand by makes the target not do anything.
• Friendly Fire makes the target hit an ally instead of you, if there is a valid target when they go to strike. Also works for abilities, and ally targeting buffs will target the player instead.

All these effects can be toggled on or off on any target at any time.

Really cool use of the Tetris mechanics. Definitely quite a different approach from standard tetris, and I think I managed to bait myself into some really frustrating situations by trying to play it too much like tetris.
The aesthetics and mood of the whole thing are also really nice, music fits perfectly, and the sound effects add some great juice.

neat little puzzle game, the mechanics line up nicely to create some interesting challenges.

Fair point, the love file is now directly downloadable :)

Wow, I can't believe I left out the pickup control from the help menu all this time.

1) Press G.

2) Press S to start socketing, press the number that lines up with the bone in your bag, then if its a bone that can fit in multiple spaces, any other than the ribs, press the number that corresponds to that space (it shows up in the chat log).

3) When you press a button to start an attack, the next movement key you press will select the direction of that attack. All starting attacks are one tile range.

It's incredible looking back at this and seeing how terrible at user interface design I used to be.

He he hee

I tried to stay away from too many visual indicators, wanted the game to be mostly about listening. I think there's a longer pause between letters, but yeah it probably should have been more clear.

Sometimes when you click outside the window you lose the ability to type. Restarting the game will fix it.

Sorry about the locked resolution! Usually I'll do something to try and support smaller screens, but time was a little tight this time around. Watch out for a post jam version though, definitely top of my list for improvement.
Glad to hear you enjoyed the writing, to be honest I'd be writing these little descriptions regardless of whether anyone was reading them or not, but it's good to hear that some people are :)
A bit more instruction in the early game is another feature that's high in my priorities for if I come back to this one.
Try not to dwell too much on success and failure in these things, at the end of the day it's all about what you can get out of it. At this point 7DRL has become for me like a spiritual test of endurance, a week in the year where I grind myself to the bone to create something, just to see if I still can. It's also pretty fun.

Yeah it can be a bit tough, there isn't a huge amount of randomness though, the denizens on each floor pretty much stay the same each time, so once you've figured out a strat that works it should get quite a bit easier. Glad to hear you enjoyed it.

Currently it's flavoured that the player dying is a part of the orb activating, but I can see how an escape could be interesting.

Ahh yeah, that would be cool.
I think it'd kind of go against the tension curve a little bit, getting to the middle is the high point of the danger in the level, so getting out again could feel a little bit like an anti climax, but maybe if there was some interesting stuff going on with more spawns coming from outside or something it'd work.

It's definitely a viable strategy, curious how you managed to get past some of the later enemies though.
I don't remember ever putting in a method for the player to escape, perhaps you mistook flying off into space as an escape route?

Finally, someone beating the game via the intended route

It's not in the plan at the moment, sorry.
It'd be a fair bit of work to get it working well on mobile, but if there's enough support for it we might consider it.

Sorry about the crashes, there's some issues from the world size that make it unstable sometimes.
Glad you enjoyed it though, and congratulations on making it all the way through such difficulties.

Hey, that sucks about that error, but thanks for reporting it!

And... fixing it yourself.

Huh.

Well I'll definitely upload a version later implementing your fix today, it's a refreshing change to have someone find the problem themselves and tell me what it is in the bug report.

If you're using mac or linux, you'll need to download Love to run it. Making a true mac build requires having a mac, which I unfortunately do not have access to.

Hope that helps!

hehehe

Thanks! Pretty much all the movement is handled with the base unity physics, to get it to feel as good as it did we pretty much only had to make one change.

The torque that the player body exerts when they rotate is modified by the distance of the furthest body part from the center, so your furthest out piece will always move at the same speed, no matter how far out or close it is to you.

Glad you liked the depth. There were a couple ideas that we didn't get time to implement as well, it's definitely a gameplay loop with a lot of potential.

Thanks!

Getting Over It was definitely an inspiration, glad you found the comparison.

Well there definitely are bonuses to using Unity. Glad you had fun!

Glad you liked it. The musical instrument aspect was quite a late addition, but definitely glad we decided to go with it.

Thanks! There were unfortunately some bugs that we didn't get time to look at, and the failing to connect randomly is one of them that we were aware of. It'll be first on the list of fixes if we come back to it after the jam.

Yeah we probably should have put that earlier, changes to be made if we release a future version. We did have some pretty frustrating encounters with the Unity physics engine, and that problem you're seeing is one of the issues we didn't manage to get around fixing. Hopefully it's uncommon enough to not impact gameplay too much.

Thanks again!

Thanks! We tried to concentrate on polish this time around, so it's good to hear that that came through :)

Ah right, yeah I guess it's already implied by that isn't it.

I was hoping the number of objects on each card would help with that, but I guess not.

Glad you enjoyed it!

Numbers looping seems to be how a lot of people are interpreting it, so I might just change it to that.

How it currently works is, if there are no possible cards that can be played (for instance if you have to play one above 10), then you can play any card.

10 being both 10 and 0 though is definitely more intuitive, so in hindsight I probably should have just implemented it as looping.

mmm that'd do it.

I'm not that surprised that it might lag after a while.
How far in are you experiencing this?

Yeah you got it. Glad to know it's clear what's going on just from the screenshots :)

chill

Thanks!

You'll be glad to know that I'm actually working on expanding this one right now, and am expecting to release a more fleshed out version within a couple months. I'm keeping the smaller arena fights setup, but with a bunch chained together instead of just one really long one. I'm also introducing a kind of "passive traits" mechanic to add some more diversity to the run throughs.

Would love to hear your thoughts on it once it's released :)

Thanks for the kind words.

I appreciate the concerns about the ideas not getting passed on, but I'm still making stuff, and it seems like quite a few people have checked it out, so I wouldn't worry about it too much.

Glad to hear you enjoyed it :)

Your suggestions are intriguing, but I'm not so much a fan of the simulationist style of roguelike. I prefer briefer and more concise design,  and I feel like we managed to strike just the right balance of simplicity and depth with WHOF. Percentage chances and unpredictability were not really what we were going for, and are quite outside our vision of the game.

That said, it's definitely possible that they could work, so I've uploaded the source code of the game if you'd like to tinker with it. I will warn you that it's jam code, and might be quite hard to decipher.

mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm capitalism indeed

At the end of the game you fight death, but he has a randomized set of moves each time. To give you some ability to prepare for that fight though, the exact moves death has are revealed to you if you can find the hints.
You don't actually know those attacks, they're for death.