This game is incredibly hard! I nearly always died on the second monster I encountered. In cases I managed to pick up a health potion I died on the third fight.
I like the automatic item replacement. Having no inventory juggling makes the game smoother to play.
I am not familiar with the RPG-Maker. How can it be combined with rot.js?
I think I may have gone overboard with adjusting the monster stats. :( During most of the development it was WAY too easy and I wanted to make it more of a challenge...of course this decision happened at the last possible moment before publishing.
RPG Maker MV switched to JavaScript for it's logic engine which makes it possible to bring in additional libraries... Rot.js being what I pulled in to assist with some of the low-level roguelike mechanics. Typical RPG Maker games have a real-time map screen with all battles taking place on a separate turn-based side-view battle screen. I eliminated that and modified the map screen to be turn-based so everything happens on the same screen. A lot of work this 7 days was getting it to work like a traditional roguelike with pretty much the last day and a half spent on items and monster definitions.
That's a really good question... I'm still using RPG Maker to define the weapon and monster stats via it's database and also visually creating some events that I'm using as "prefabs" that can then be dynamically cloned to populate the levels. It allows me to create a static level that I can populate and test out the interactions before turning on the procedural generation. Also, even though the built-in battle system is not being used, that logic is still all present and the damage routines can be called individually which is what I'm using to resolve combat and potion effects. I think if I continue down this path, I'll mainly be using RPG Maker more and more as just a library of routines instead of how it's normally used.
Also, even though RPG Maker has it's own built-in level designer, I've switched over to using TileD for designing levels in some of my other experiments since it has more versatility. In fact, the procedural generation in this roguelike are actually populating TileD level maps that are being rendered with the RPG Maker engine via a third party plugin.
Regardless, I think RPG Maker provides a real nice jumping off point to get something going quickly, but it also exposes all of the code so you are able to really customize it way beyond how it was originally intended to be used. Also, with this last version (MV), it's finally cross platform and web-enabled. It was pretty much a non-starter for me before that point.
