Post by Razuth in Author's notes comments

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I really enjoyed this one and I plan to dive into a few more runs later on (got the Ruby for 40 so far).

On the face of it, this looks and feels little a traditional dungeon crawler but then after figuring out what the game is asking of you it becomes more apparent that it is almost like a route planning simulator.

It's clever that the encounters are a different sort of peril from what the player would naturally be accustomed to. Fighting and defeating them is actually juxtaposed to what is beneficial to the player. It reminds me of another game called 'Hero Run'.

The game's premise and design means that the game offers far more gameplay in terms of it's replay value alone. It really hammers home how much can actually be achieved with very little.

sraëka lillian14 days ago

you're starting to notice my obsession with routing ^_^;; i'm glad you dug this one, i think the concept came through really well despite relying on the player to connect the dots themself, and it distills a lot what i think is interesting about rpg play into a digestible package. i encourage you to keep trying and see if you can get a perfect score

Razuth14 days ago

After being tortured for near three hours straight, mapping out optimized routes and listing all the treasure in a .txt file whilst praying for RNG favour I did manage to get the Comically Large Diamond Anniversary.

Took me around 20 runs. I had two optimized routes together in black and white after about the 6th run but it was just the roulette wheel favouring the house that was killing me off.

By the end of the first hour I knew no matter how I decided to tackle it exactly where I was and where the treasure was. There was no wastage in overstepping but I was despairing that it would be impossible since after getting the final treasure my agility and HP would be so low that it would be near impossible to run away from ANYTHING before it would kill me.

I started resorting to tricks like two tile stepping at the stairs of the first level to trigger an encounter to reset the count before descending.

I would even dash a few steps, open and close the menu multiple times in the hope that it would somehow not trigger an encounter on the next steps. I don't think this applies to RM2K games but I am sure it was a thing in old 8 and 16 bit JRPGS, though curiously it did seem to work on my victory run since I got to the first floor with 4HP and managed to get back to the stairs without an encounter.

By the end I was a quivering husk who could scarce string a brace of words together. Conceptually, this game is fantastic and the execution is nearly perfect. There are many things I did muse over in how to improve or expand on this but I think sometimes you do have to leave things as they are in their raw state and just appreciate what is actually there for all it's merits (and sometimes it's warts.)

Awesome job and I can't wait to study your next game!

sraëka lillian13 days ago

that's incredible, congrats on the perfect score. i'm glad that you ultimately found it rewarding despite the sizeable rng element lol. if i had more time to balance i'd probably look for a way to soften that a bit, ideally just having the right plan should give you a very high chance to succeed. but yeah part of the magic of games like this is that they comes with rough edges (lots of them sometimes) and that raw, organic texture is something i value a lot. thanks for sticking with it to the end, dude

btw activating a "transfer player" event resets the random encounter timer, so there isn't actually a benefit to getting into a fight before you go down the stairs. this does mean however that if you pass by an incidental stairway en route to your intended destination, you can step in and out to take the heat off. i don't remember if i do that in this game but i've definitely exploited it in some others

itch.io

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