Hey look — this floor was generated procedurally!

As always, your games are extremely polished and impressively scoped for the length of the jam. There were a lot of items, stats, and enemies that felt pretty distinct (although some of the equipment bled together, especially at higher rarities where everything became a stat pile).

The seed mechanic was neat, and made you choose between keeping your letters around as equipment or using them as a word. The choice became a little tedious in the late game, since you could almost always spell a 10-15 letter word, but you had to puzzle over it with your fifty letters and use the drag-and-drop interface. It would have been nice if you could convert the chaff into wild cards or something else to clear up space and make use of large numbers of duplicate letters.

Like any good roguelike, there seemed to be certain lucky items that let you get a crazy lead early on. I got a broadsword — and upgraded it twice to Legendary — which turned my dual-wield pump-actions into an instant death button. There were other distinct and enticing strategies as well, like building for magic and movement speed.

The worst part about the entry is the endgame. Once you have all Mythic equipment, it slowly becomes more and more tedious as the enemy health scales and you stop getting stronger. By the end, both you and the enemies are very tanky, and it takes several seconds of continuous shooting to kill even the weakest enemies (and even with the broken broadsword build). I kept a scroll of teleportation in my inventory as a panic button and used it a few times if enemies trapped me against a corner or something. It might be an improvement if enemy damage scaled more and health scaled less, so that the gameplay never turns into a pillow fight.

(Side note, if your HP goes to zero while teleporting to spawn, the “Game Over” screen appears but you don’t die! My last couple floors I just played through the game over screen after having panic-used a teleport spell and put the game in a weird state.)

In terms of roguelike-ness, it’s obviously deviating from the “classic roguelike” formula by being real-time and not grid-based. However, you still keep the spirit with the items and interactions, high-res ASCII graphics, and little tropes like the ability to kill a shopkeeper and take their stuff.

Great work for one person and one week!