itch.io

I'm apparently missing a font, I see "27AB" in a box instead of an arrow on the levelup screen (playing on web).

I was having fun until I was ambushed by a party of 2 Big Greys who did 200+ AoE on my guys before I could possibly do anything, and that ended that :(

The music is a very nice fit.

Painting the map was really satisfying.

I've played through Dungeon Encounters, and am not really a fan of it, and this felt like it had some of the same problems - once I got 2 good melee weapons, I had almost no reason to do anything other than just choose melee attacks over and over again with all my characters, so the interesting choices disappeared as I grew.  I only made it to the 3rd or 4th floor before a crash killed me, but maybe it gets more interesting later.  That being said, the actual dungeon exploration and exploring the whole map seems to play so much better in a first person crawler perspective, so that part felt more engaging =).

The art was nice, and the environment had a really nice sense of style to it.  Good game!

Thanks for sharing the maps, that's cool!  I also quite liked the bookshelves and the padded cell that felt so much like home =)

That was fun!  The narrator was fantastic.  I laughed out loud at "It was quite obvious to everyone besides Jet".

At first, I thought the combat exclamation marks were nice for knowing where I've been - then noticed they came back when I healed, and that seemed fine, except, then it seemed they came back even when I hadn't used a healing station, which confused me, and then I went back to being lost.

The names of items were great, I'll not trade my soiled cardboard hat for anything!  I tried going for a dodge build instead of defense on a couple of my lives, but it didn't seem to work, I just got torn up :D.  I went back to just choosing increase to defense and it was good.  It seemed the green/red plus/minus on DPS didn't show right (often said it was a minus to DPS but actually was much higher than what I was wielding).

I liked the incremental game integration with ambient combat, felt rather fresh.  I really appreciated the auto-clicker.

Later half of the game didn't come as much of a surprise to me, but I loved the visuals, especially the environment.  Unfortunately I did not know these halls as well as some of my colleagues professed to, so I spent quite a while wandering about, but eventually found all 4 dragons, for the third time, and won.

Really enjoyed it, nice job!

Thanks for linking the palette, I was curious if it was a specific one.  I guess it was specific but very obscure =).  At times the game was awfully dark, was the 3D view/map additionally darkened beyond the palette colors?  Once I turned down my lights and closed my curtains I could play better :D.

I had to replay the first area as I was kicked off without getting any loot or killing any wolves the first time.  Second time I ensured the genocide of the wolves, as is expected of me.  I got some new armor, and my AC went up... and I wasn't completely sure if that was good or bad =) (pretty clear it was good, I just wasn't sure which way it was going to go...).

I couldn't figure out why Jora could hurt the fire serpents with her Hand Axe, but Hargir couldn't (didn't matter much, as blasting them with magic was more effective, just confused me), I think later I deduced they needed to be injured with magic first, but often the magic one-shotted them, so took me a while to get that.

At the end, there was a guy who offered a reward if I killed the trickster's brother, which I did, however I was immediately whisked away since I then had the 3 songs so didn't get to go back to him - was there something I missed there?  (Obviously not anything important to progress since that was the end of the game...)

Very solid game!  Felt nice to be whizing through menus with hotkeys - most of the time, except when I accidentally pressed E to turn but I was in a dialog and E selected something else :D.  Power growth felt nice, combats were hard, especially as you're figuring out what to do, which was nice.  I absolutely loved the visuals, really looked great!

Thanks for playing!  Glad to know you got stuck (did you try retrying the fight?  Maybe need to retry the dungeon and build the deck a bit differently?), as I was worried I balanced the game way too easy, so maybe it's about right :D.

Thanks, that's what I was going for.  Although, you're free to ask yourself "how much of this is actually in his mind?  is he actually murdering the crap out of his uncle's minions on his way in to visit him?"  My head-canon is that he's probably just playing card games with his uncle's staff and they're all playing along...  But, dragons, ya know? They don't think much of us mere mortals...

Yeah, if it's a well-optimized web build (my engine'll run on an Intel GPU of like 10 years ago just fine, I think :D), the main difference is just in the user experience (like being unable to catch the Escape key unless the user enters full-screen by pressing F11 themselves, not clicking on a button/etc).

Check is in the mail, send me the registered version, please!

I died in my very first fight, but I guess that was okay.  I enjoyed begging a bit to scrape up money for some starting gear.  Really enjoyed the writing, definitely was not too much.  "Fold the beast into your bag with a squelch" was one of the first lines I read and one of the best :D.   The ASCII art was gorgeous at times, and exploration snappy.  I had a little difficulty telling when there was a hallway to my sides (realized I had to look at just like 2 characters in the corner), some additional shading on the perpendicular wall or something would have maybe helped.

It bothers me that the dithered full block characters are different resolution than the other characters.  Related to that, causes a weird moiré pattern with the CRT shader on that I think would go away with a fixed-resolution font.  I just turned the CRT shader back off and didn't worry about it and it was fine though ^_^.

I liked figuring out a good equipment embuement for an area, the combinations there were interesting.  I thought there was going to be one more area so I was a little stingy on using my shards though.  Maybe the added perceived scarcity made it more interesting though.

I had a lot of trouble with the golem, it seemed he absorbed HP even with the right stuff equipped, I was attacking with my water weapon, wearing pure water armor, and he'd attack and it'd say "use water against fire to prevent regen" or something :(.  Eventually was able to kill him through the regen by stacking some DOT and hitting him over and over again though on my second try.  Now knowing that it was the final battle, it felt pretty fair though.

Audio was great too, obviously a favorite style of mine =).  Nice job to you and your team!

Thanks for playing and the feedback!  Yeah, I definitely tuned more on the easy side (which becomes the super-easy side if you get lucky and get a Daze card or two early), which usually seems right for a jam game, but maybe was a mistake this time (especially since I let you retry a floor if you die anyway).  I could probably just not drop the daze card until the final dungeon to keep the tension a bit higher for a quick fix =).

Thanks for playing and glad you liked it!  Sorry about the fire roundabout, its so easy to not see that hallway :(.  For the water area, there is one ranged guy behind a detail that looks like it should block ranged combat, and he's definitely a bit annoying (apparently in a significantly not-fun-way).  In the post-jam update I'll probably fix that.  Yeah, showing intents at a distance would make sense, I also wanted that but didn't get to it because I don't have any way of drawing text in 3D in my engine yet, and ran out of time before hacking something together for that :D.

Because I have you enter full-screen by pressing F11, Escape doesn't exit full-screen (and, instead, let's it do game actions like open/close menus/etc, as I find it super frustrating when I press Esc and the game just exits full-screen under normal gameplay...), so you need to press F11 again to exit full-screen.  That being said, I could probably throw a button on the title screen "exit full screen" (or just call it "exit") that drops out of fullscreen to prevent such confusion.  I've definitely done similar things and not realized I closed an entire browser window until much later when I'm like "why do I only have 2 of my normal 3 sets of tabs open somewhere..." ^_^.  Anyway, glad to know you forgot it was a web version by the time you were done playing ;).

I love the surface curvature.  For the raygun, I was confused as I couldn't tell if I have a maximum range, or if it's taking lots of hits to kill them.  My later conclusion was that it had a max range of around 4-5 tiles and it took 2 hits to kill them, and once I followed those rules it was a lot less frustrating =).  My only gripe was that it seemed I couldn't use the same save point twice, so when I reloaded, and then went exploring and found a bunch of upgrades, and then died to the boss, and came back, I was missing my upgrades, had to go find them again.  The music is lovely, really vibes with the game.  Had a lot of fun with this, the actiony real-time combat with very few HP worked really well.

  A deck building crawler, what a great idea! ;)

  This took quite a few runs before I beat it, but I had fun along the way.  My final run that beat it was to just buy poison the burning card and basically nothing else, and maximize campfire stops (and got lucky and got the "keep your mana" trinket).

  It feels like something is going wrong with the CRT filter with curvature on, it's causing bands of blurriness that I wouldn't expect, like maybe the CRT filter itself was outputting at 640x360, instead of taking a 640x360 input and outputting at full display resolution?  Fixing that and it might feel a lot more crisp with the curvature on.

  I had a little difficulty figuring out a bunch of mechanics - I got a perk that said "echo effects apply twice", which I assumed meant any card that said, like "Echo: +1 damage" would get +2 damage, but seemed, instead, to just give me 2 echo per card played, maybe?  At one point I lost track of my favorite card, I couldn't find it in my hand, in my draw pile, or in my discard pile.  The draw pile said it had 11 cards in it, but only 8 showed up when I clicked on it.  Eventually when it got down to 3 cards in the draw pile, it reshuffled, and then I drew my favorite card again, so it seemed it was in some limbo state.  Knowing the turn order of the enemies seemed very important, but wasn't communicated (and, I think, wasn't left-to-right as I initially assumed, but middle, then left, the right, but I'm still not quite sure...).  I had two cards that negated an attack, that used completely different terms - Tenacity and I forget the other - so I thought maybe they'd stack given the precise wording and different terms, but it seems they did not (to my character's demise ^_^).

  I love the animation when you approach a goblin and 2 more come in from the sides.  Graphics overall were pretty great, it all meshed together nicely.

  I liked finding secrets when I did - was there only one dungeon type that had the secret doors, or did I just not find them in the others?

Thanks for playing and the feedback!  Yeah, either Daze or Poison can get overpowered - both together are ridiculous.  But, I like to think that if the final boss gets a turn, you're not deck-building right :D.

For the fire area, the exit I think people are looking for is to the left right after you go through a door, and the very low contrast visual style I did for the fire area means you don't even notice the hallway there unless you're really looking for it, so you just don't look to the left to see it.  For a post-jam update, I've moved that particular one so it's visible when you enter the room on your way out (though the rest of the one-way doors are staying ^_^).

Glad you liked the visuals, it was fun trying something different!

Thanks for playing, and congrats on getting to the end!  I almost  regret all of the one-way doors in the Fire dungeons...  In hind-sight I should have had the character say something like "Hmm... there's only 5 rooms, but maybe I should draw a map..." :D

Yeah, defense cards were pretty under-powered (I bumped them in strength a couple times too!).  They're also situationally useful when a step or two away from an enemy and waiting for them to close, I think.  But in a melee, yeah, they're hard to justify using.   Ranged attacks having a penalty in melee's a good idea, also would have made having just high-damage ranged cards feel more balanced (and could then buff up the damage on those as they're then more situational...)

Oh, and the "cat with it's Picasso face" is a good example of what the algorithm does if I don't touch up the assets at all :,D.  I thought it was best to leave that one as-is.

Thanks for playing, and glad the yield mechanic clicked with you!  It was kind of a whim at first (the "cleaning the hero's mess" was our primary theme), but once I realized it'd be a bit of optional difficulty (that people like me really get tricked into trying to optimize), it seemed perfect for a jam game that I'd likely balance to be way on the easy side.

I'm glad you liked not having a map!  It was definitely a bit of a hard decision (especially because people often praise the minimap in feedback ^_^, though that always feels a bit unfair since that's mostly just part of the engine anyway), but led me to (hopefully) make smaller levels that don't need a map.  Except for the branching fire one which was a little intentional and it warms my heart to hear you had to make a little map =).

Nice to hear the art feedback.  The creatures were mostly sourced from 32x - 64x size pixel art, and often I had to reduce a lot of color detail to fit it into my chosen palette (and to make the Depixel algorithm work better, as it likes being able to detect connected components clearly).  The environment was all slightly edited versions of the, of course, 12x12, small-palette, textures, and scaled up quite a lot more.

Thanks for playing and recording a video!  I'll check the video later.  I definitely was on the fence with the one-way doors in the fire area, knowing they'd be a little frustrating, and intentionally not having a map due to encounters being (relatively) small... luckily should only take a moment to get back to the beginning though, and hopefully left you feeling a little lost...

Glad to know you enjoyed thinking about the cards!  That's definitely how I played too, although I laughed a bit when I had a friend play who very much analyzed everything and played perfectly, and then I had another friend play and she just played random cards and she got through the first floor in like a quarter of the time of the first friend, so it was definitely balanced perhaps too easy... but as long as they both had fun, I'm calling it a win =).  I'm looking forward to seeing which broken combo you settled on in your video =).

Totally agree with defense feeling useless against ranged enemies, not sure on a good fix there...

Those seem reasonable to me (though I've yet to add an inventory system to my engine ^_^).  They're the kinds of generic features you'd get for free if one was using RPGMaker, RPG in a Box, FRUA/BTCS or similar, so seem reasonable to have prepared (or re-use from another project during the jam).

That's brilliant, why doesn't every program have this feature?! :D

Actually, the reason why is probably because it's hard to actually find the newest video... it seems to be opening the newest video file from my shared Dropbox folders, but not from where I actually do my video recording and editing (which is usually on another drive or a network folder depending on the project).  If it could additionally search whatever folder the most recently loaded video was loaded from (which is probably always going to be my Banidcam / screen capture folder), or a `folders.txt` file I could edit with folder names to search, that'd be awesome =).

I tried putting a symlink from My Documents to the folder in question, but that didn't help either.

Feel free to take screenshots and use then in any way you see fit!  The generator itself uses licensed assets, some of which are not free, so can't be used in its entirety in another product, but if you're seriously interested in such a thing I could probably provide a code license and point to which 3rd party art assets also need licensing.

Just tried it now, it works wonderfully, thanks!  Chances are high the next snippet of dungeon crawler gameplay posted to Discord will have been trimmed with this program =)

I'm confused... does this run on Amiga? :D  Just kidding, this looks super useful (my hacky solution has been to use Handbrake and manually type in offsets in seconds after seeking around in VLC ^_^).  Any chance for a "portable" install that's just a .zip I can extract and run instead of having to give the installer administrator access?

Out of curiosity, did you get a Steam key, and did it still activate?

Really cool, and very varied results!  The wobbly guts on seed -1145899909 scared me for a moment =).

Nice entry!  The movement felt responsive and snappy, felt good moving around.  Avoiding the patrolling guys was some nice little gameplay variety, and finding secret rooms was fun (nice job telegraphing the first one).  I wish there was more content =).

I love the lava and fire, they look great!  Combat was pretty fluid and fun once I got the hang of it.  On two attempts I managed to kill 9 foes both times, despite feeling like I was playing much better the second time :).

Really love the look of this an the atmosphere, nice job, feels unlike any other entry =).  I found myself constantly low on inventory space so just ate any mushroom I found, which, perhaps, was good for the theming...  Unfortunately at some point I died and got stuck :(.  I might have to come back to this one and try to beat it without dying, I guess =).

Very fun!  The walking on walls worked surprisingly well, strafing up a wall just felt natural.  All of the mechanics seemed pretty easily discoverable pretty quickly, which was nice.  Sacrificing letters was fun, and then trying to figure out what the text says while remembering which letters I'd sacrificed was a feeling I don't think I've encountered in another game.  I ran into one bug where I made my final step to get to 0 HP onto a mushroom and it only gave me the letter value instead of the 120 from the mushroom :(.  That, and the getting stuck at the end ^_^.  Other than that, it was pretty smooth sailing.

What a very... ambitious... entry.  So many nice little parts coming together poorly and riddled with bugs, which is about what I'd expect from the experiment :).  High marks for the title and City of Phlegm, though!

I got a laugh after doing a few combats with 5-8 combatants to enter a combat with a Fire Dragon, and it was just him and one other, so I thought "ooh, boss fight!"... and then it died in a single attack.

I'm confused... I was walking down a hallway with a fireball coming at me, and I hit a spinner, and... it turned me towards safety?!  That was so surprising, coming from your team!

I had a lot of fun with this one.  Combat and trying to minimize incoming damage was pretty satisfying.  Dungeons were all interesting to explore.  I found one spot where I could fire an attack while my position was interpolating and hit someone down a diagonal to get some free hits in =).  I regret the first points I put into STR, I ended up with a AGL+BODY build and liked it.

The ending dialog seemed strange...  helped the fungal entity on every level, but when I chose "wake up?" it felt like a "bad end" without resolving anything.  Ah, reading the spoilers on the game page, maybe that was just missing content.  I'm content with my choices.

The visuals were great, really felt distinct and had a lot going on.

Really nice!  I had a lot of fun until I crashed within the amber vault, not sure if I was close to the end or not.  Really nice use of transparency in the forests to give a lot of depth with simple tiles.  I liked figuring out the enemy patterns.  And collecting mushrooms, of course.  Played very nice with controller too, I love that!

The Overworld is fun.  It crashed after fighting the tentacle guy at the beginning, had to start over (and then saved slightly more often, though luckily didn't run into a crash after that).  Not queuing movement is painful, very often I'd turn and try to move forward and turn again and it'd skip my move forward :(.  I couldn't enter the castle the first time I went there, second time I managed to get in only by clicking around, not sure what was up with that.  On later visits I got in by pressing Space.  Better too easy than too hard, but I felt a wee bit overpowered pretty quickly (never had to heal during the game).  It was fun getting a tentacle of my own, though!  Nice use of the assets, they worked well in RPG-in-a-box!

Thanks for playing and recording, I'll try to watch some of it =).  Dungeons are procedural (I took and existing generator and tweaked it only a little bit for this, adding the two mimics per level and marking some areas as "indoor" to get a different tileset), and pull from like 15 tileset flavors - since the assets were there, making a new wall/door/floor/secret/detail combo only took a few minutes each, so I couldn't stop, even though most players will only see a handful of them :D.

And, yeah, stacking lots of hats of one color later can definitely block most damage, though each floor has at least 2 colors of enemies so you'd have to keep swapping to really abuse it.  In the post-jam version coming soon I increased the "in combat" range that blocks inventory usage to the same as the range that triggers multiplayer syncing, so it makes it slightly harder to abuse (and, more importantly, you can't slow down other people if you decide to do so).

I really liked that the kobold bosses get the rooms with the windows.  It works great thematically and also helps me find them.  Which lets me more easily kill them without killing their minions, so maybe they're regretting being promoted to a "room with a view"...

I, uh, apparently escaped the Underworld 10 times.  The last 5 went by really quick as I stopped delving dungeons and just explored the overworld, found all the teleporters, but never found any way to get a title, I wonder what I missed there?  I found some jewelry that never seemed to do anything...

The gear was neat, especially at first, though once I had my build laid out, it got _really_ repetitive (just looking for the same named item with 1 more plus after each escape).  I only played the first class, one using the magic items probably would have gotten more interesting (maybe I'll go back and try that later...).  For a single playthrough in a jam, I think I would have preferred no classes and just 3 "special" slots (fit any of the 3 special colors) that let me change up my build a bit more as the game progressed.

The presentation was great, really felt nice and cohesive.  Overworld was fantastic.  Lots of nicely swapped tiles that gave them some extra charm.

You can download and play via the Itch.io app. (It is, however, and online-only game though, so that doesn't get you much)

I feel like I made a life-saving decision by picking up the heal spell before entering the dungeon :D.  Without that, would have been rough...  That was fun!  Auto-combat worked well, and upgrading my party was nice.  After 3-4 levels I also saw a victory-ish screen but could continue and ended up in a world with nothing, I'm assuming that's where the jam content ends.  I quite like the visuals, nice use of particles, lights, dripping water, all came together quite nicely.

Nice job making something!  Are the walls raycasted?  They have an interesting effect that's pretty cool.

Neat game!  The upgrade choices were interesting.  It was a little hard to tell if they were working (I had Staffs up to 5 damage, but I saw a `3` whenever I attacked with them, and my relics said 1 damage, but I also saw a 3 when attacking with them... I think?  It was hard to see because the numbers fly by so quickly though....).  Having S bound to flipping 180 degrees was deadly!  I kept pressing it whenever I wanted to take a step backwards and the enemy would get 2 free hits on me :(.  I think I died on the final level (was fighting the balrog-y guy).  It would have been nice to have a "wait 1 turn" button, I always seemed out of step from where I wanted to be relative to the enemies, but that made it challenging.