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A jam submission

Key CaveView game page

A roguelike where you use the whole keyboard
Submitted by Scott Ethington (@sprucefruit) — 20 hours, 9 minutes before the deadline
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Key Cave's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Innovation#303.0003.000
Completeness#543.0003.000
Aesthetics#643.0003.000
Fun#802.5002.500
Overall#1092.6672.667
Roguelikeness#1132.5002.500
Scope#1402.0002.000

Ranked from 2 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

  • KeyCave is nice example of the game that relies on simple yet innovative mechanics. Important part is that mechanics is intuitive to use. Game is simple, finished, bug-free and rules are trivial to understand. Graphics is quite plain but cute. Fun... That's the hard part. Fun comes from innovative mechanics. From the novelty itself. Playing through 10 levels was nice experience, but I don't think I'll ever come back to this game. ...and I think that's quite OK for the game jam entry. The problem is lack of variation. There are only two types of enemies. By de design, "level" is always the same. It starts to be boring quite fast - the only difference between floors is initial actors placement..
  • The game is confusing in the first moments, as we don't have a clear notion of what to do, so I just proceeded to kill all enemies. Then a key dropped and a door opened, so the mechanics got clear. From then on it was a breeze, the game became very easy to play. Too easy, and too monotone. I died on the 46th level only because I had spawned in a way that made me surrounded by three enemies at once. If it wasn't that, I would just continue on without dying... forever? It doesn't look like there is an end to this game, there is not a win state, but the game is too tedious to play for more than 5 levels. There is no change in content, no sense of progression, no difficulty curve, nothing, only the same keyboard layout with the same enemies over and over again. Also, using the entire keyboard for controls is quite clumsy as we need to keep attention to which key we were on and which key to go, and that would change every turn. That quickly became very distressful. At least the layout and aesthetics are clean and vivid.

Successful or Incomplete?

Success

Did development of the game take place during the 7DRL Challenge week. (If not, please don't submit your game)
Yes

Is your game a roguelike or a roguelite? (If not, please don't submit your game)
Yes

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