itch.io

Neat! I like the concept of an unkillable (I think) enemy tracking the player. It felt kind of hopeless the first few times I played. Though some items definitely helped later, it seemed that no matter how I managed scent I would just stumble on the Fiend regardless. I would jump down a canvas and sometimes see them immediately there. It was unclear if I could lose them and how easy that is. I would like it a little more if the game focused exclusively on scent and the Fiend was blind, so I could use tactics that clearly threw the Fiend off my trail.

Also, may I suggest QWEASDZXC keys next time?

Would like to see: https://jere.itch.io/die-die

Grats on the job!

Really appreciate the detailed comment.

I'm slightly against trying to display more info because of potential clutter, but you're onto something. One way to solve this would be an undo system so you can just try out moves and see if they work.

I would still need a way to let you see the value of different pips (they're all super powerful but I understand the hesitation to try out something you're unsure on). Maybe some sandbox levels before the game.

It intentionally lags yea, but I just updated it to be faster. 

Thanks for the comment! I feel the same struggle predicting movement sometimes, but also that seems like part of the challenge and I worry that taking it away might trivialize too much of the tactics. Torn on that.

I think I'm OK if the player has to figure out how to best use an upgrade, but I definitely don't want its function unclear.

Could you tell me which ones are confusing (either in function or strategy)? Here are the other pips if it helps?

• Heal - Heals 1 HP when attacking.
• Sleep - Puts a full HP monster to sleep for 1 turn per SLEEP pip.
• Poison - Applies 1 poison per POISON pip when attacking (ticks after monsters act).
• Shield - Adds 1 shield when attacking. Decays when moving.
• Blink - Teleports after attacking or being attacked (up to 1 tile away per BLINK pip).
• Speed - Moving (but not attacking) is free.

thanks! I hope to.

The datum is for score only.

This game was made for the 2018 Seven Day Roguelike Challenge. It was made in JavaScript.

This tutorial I made gives some insight into some of the basic techniques: https://nluqo.github.io/broughlike-tutorial/index.html

This was interesting. For my taste, it's a bit too slow paced (leaning in the direction of a tactics game) compared to a trad RL where you can complete a turn in 0.1s. I think you pointed it out elsewhere but maybe doing things like making weapon swapping easier would make this faster paced. I would appreciate a blend of RL controls like... bump to attack if I'm adjacent.

But still an interesting system with FP. It's a bit confusing at first, but I got the idea. I often didn't feel like I had many options per turn though, mainly just trying to move away from monsters when first encountering them to burn their FP. But then when we start fighting, often not sure what else to do. Trying to move after accumulating any FP is ROUGH. Swapping to a bow sounds nice, but the damage is super low, making that part even more tedious. What I see as the potential here is learning how to work around each monster in a puzzle like fashion (e.g. if you can get them to move just far enough to not be able to attack, say). That seemed difficult to learn because IIUC the same monster sprite/color could have random abilities.

I assume running and swapping out to bow works but never quite got that rolling. Another thing that bugs me is that it appears the safest thing to do is grind the easy floors safely for very little cash. Something that roguelikes prevent with hunger clocks and whatnot.

Anyway, don't want to sound too down on it! It was a nice experience and fun. I love the title screen and set up. The concept has a lot of potential.

• I like the aesthetic a lot.
• The sounds are a bit goofy but in a charming way.
• Great title and death screens.
• The starting area is cool.
• There's a bug with descriptions getting cut off for example Green Tonic.
• Enemies seemed to get stuck around room entrances.
  
• It seemed like ranged attacks had no ammo and were very safe. Combined with them requiring several keypresses each and the above, this part was a little tedious.

Awesome job with your first game dev entry! I got to level 7.

Thanks!! You can tie in retreat/wait as trigger verbs which is nice because they are some of the only fully controllable triggers. In the future I also hope to have monsters that are dangerous enough that you would want to avoid their attacks. It's probably too easy now. 😋

I suppose it depends on what you want out of it. To create a complete experience (the main goal of 7drl I think)? To conduct an experiment? To build a platform to build on?

If it's the first one, undershooting and polishing instead seems correct.

You seem to have avoided it this year though!

Just FYI I updated it (partially based on feedback like this) to force unlocks at a set schedule so there's no way to miss it.

Thanks for the feedback! You're right that the skill tree branching feels a bit unnecessary. My idea was that you might look at all options to see what keywords you could gain, but that's too tedious. In v1.1 you at least only see the next available options.

I think I'm going to change it to a model where each skill can only be changed by 1 or 2 words (maybe more deeper in the tree) to make it feel a bit more constrained/puzzly. With this approach your tree options will be way more meaningful.

What a perfect name. Did you get it working on an oscilloscope?  Would love to see a video. I actually like the sound as a sort of score. The vibe is amazing and the wiggle does have that horror vibe. Gives me some ideas. :D
I liked the hearts but didn't like how it felt impossible to escape monsters sometimes. Possibly it's because of the controls. I kept getting stuck left or right and couldn't turn around. Maybe keyboard would work better or maybe it's just a bug?

Cool idea! It's nice to see another Godot entry.  Here's some feedback:

• The art is cool. Nice cel-shaded style.
  
• I like the idea of reaching a far away destination (I made a wilderness survival 7DRL in 2013 with a similar concept)
• I didn't think the controls worked at first, but I believe it's just that vi keys are super confusing for someone not used to them. Displaying a picture of a keyboard instead of key mappings is pretty odd.
• I would strongly suggest either tank controls (only need left/right for turning and up to move) or like QWEASDZXC instead. The nice thing about the latter is adjacent directions you can move in are actually adjacent on the keyboard. Figuring out that N and L are "adjacent" is pretty tough.
• I would suggest making pickups automatically picked up.
• For me (on a macbook), the font sizes are super small and the map seems to be about half the size of the game. If I go full screen I can see much further. I think this is a bug. Here's some screenshots:
  • https://i.imgur.com/YBjlh6g.png 
  • https://i.imgur.com/FnaJwH5.png 

• There's a few typos on both the itch page and "You can any" and "read your destination"
• The animation delay (near subs I guess) is super long and makes it feel like lag. I would not block the player if they want to skip ahead but either shortcut or speed up the animation.
• I tried and tried but could not manage to hit things with my torpedo. Nor could I escape monsters. I might be missing something there.
• I tried several times but never found the destination nor had any idea where to look (in the 7DRL I mentioned earlier it tells you that all you need to do is go in a certain direction for example)

Glad to see  something besides a dungeon crawler. :)

Thanks! Didn't follow any tutorials. Been trying to switch to Godot for a while and this is my second 7drl using it so it's starting to feel a lot more intuitive.

Ah I see. Apologies but the game is currently a little unclear here but that the main thing to do is unlock skills on the skill tree. You can do this immediately.

So you didn't interact with the core of the game (a clarity problem I think, which I'm definitely going to patch) and of course it's impossible without doing that. Would love to see you try it again with this knowledge. The part about exploration is definitely true. That's part of Path of Achra, which I'm trying to emulate here.

Thanks for playing. Just to clarify, is there a certain part of the decision space which is lacking: which skills to unlock, how to edit them (I think there's thousands of different skills you can write though arguably many are similar), when to retreat/wait/continue, or what upgrades to buy? Or you mean all of that together was too small of a decision space?

FWIW this game is incredibly undertuned right now and super easy to beat, so I wonder if you engaged with the skills?

It's not open source per se, but you can view the unobfuscated javascript code directly in the browser on itch. 

oh yea somehow missed this post. But indeed I think you're one of the only people to catch this. It's supposed to be a magic hex number like deadbeef or cafebabe. Seemed fitting for the hacking mini game and theme 

well thank you! Definitely the goal to create Hollywood hacking similar to Uplink.

Oh that's news to me about the tutorial. Like, it should stay on screen as long as you are adjacent to a table. Are you still next to a table and it's disappearing?

Thanks for the kind words! Seeing what I can do to improve clarity.

Ok thanks! I'm thinking maybe I should just your list of heroes before you start and let you rearrange them and see what they do. Very helpful.

Thanks! This is good feedback and I'd like to ask: did you try the tutorial? Obviously I want to do what I can to make it understandable.

Had the same issue both before and after getting an item.

Thanks for the report!

There's a free move mode too!

Hey trufata!

Listened to some of your stuff on soundcloud and you've got some really cool stuff. We're hoping to round out our entry with more tracks.

I think your synth based style would be a great fit if you find the requirements interesting. Our deadline is the end of Friday.

Let me know if interested. I added you on discord.

You can do that, but be mindful of the actual requirements (and the timing, which is a bit confusing to some): https://itch.io/jam/7drl-challenge-2023

In the past, some people that did this kind of thing did so in bad faith and the games were not related at all.

I added you on discord if you're still interested.

For 7DRL, it's best to do everything during the challenge.  You can always use previously made assets if declared, but it goes against the spirit if you do that specifically for the game. I'll ping you on Discord.

Hey Bruno! NoahJezyk already volunteered earlier to do music, but we could use someone to do just the SFX if you're interested?

Thanks, Noah!

What do you think about the requirements I posted? Do they seem achievable?

Also wondering would it be weird to try to work with multiple composers (reducing the load on each) so like a track per composer might be cool. Any feelings on that? I see you posted in a lot of jam threads recently and not sure how much bandwidth you have?

This year I have an idea for a rhythm based roguelike a la Crypt of the Necrodancer.  Working title is CONGA DUNGEON.

The idea is to have a line of heroes that move similarly to the classic game Snake with somewhat automated attacks but forcing you to move quickly on the beat. Think of a cross between Snake (or SNKRX) and Necrodancer. The theme will probably be very lively and on the lighter side. I want the game to have the energy of pinball.

This will be my 10th time participating in 7DRL. My last 4 entries are on itch.

Here's what I'm hoping to find.:

• Familiarity with or at least interest in Necrodancer and its music
• 2-4 newly made tracks, about 2+ minutes long. Not much need to have them loop.
• Songs have to have very clear beats.
• A range of BPM from ~110-160 , which will determine difficulty. I'm actually not 100% certain on this part because this game might play a bit faster than Necrodancer or not? I don't know how easy it is to change this on the fly, but some flexibility here would be amazing.
• Something lively! Something that sounds like it could be dance music.

The early tracks in Necrodancer are perfect examples really. I don't need music exactly like this, but with some of the same energy and functionality would be great:

• Disco descent
• Crypteque
• Mausoleum Mash

Also, I just have to point out Courtesyby Chipzel. One of my favorite video game tracks.

Anyway, sorry to sound so picky but this particular idea has some functional requirements.

I've found a composer for music, though we're open to working working with someone to do SFX (I'm also fairly comfortable with that part too, either way)?

It's a web only game for now. We'll offer some downloads at some point in the future.

Game state is updated in sync with the animations. And currently yes it's blocking player action but that's not really inherent to this approach. In either case you can queue player inputs and speed up animations as the player plays faster. No need to block. That's probably what we'll do eventually... It's less of a priority because there's no need to play super fast in Leyliner.

Great question! Exactly right, this is my first time really trying this technique out. 

What we're doing is keeping an event queue (basically just an array with FIFO order... with some exceptions). The main driver behind this was the Chain Lightning spell, since we wanted to animate each chain separately (seen in the above gif). Some other examples of things we want delayed are player/ally/monster movement; it's nice to distinguish those in order

The one tricky part so far is that it turns out it's not simply enough to always put things on the end of the queue to be popped off the start. There may already be future events on the queue when we do the Chain Lightning for instance and we want all those parts of the spell to come before anything else. So we added a priority to events as well. I'm sure some other method would work equally well, like nested events or something like that.

It certainly seems easier than doing all game logic immediately and then trying to animate to pretend like the logic happened sequentially. So far I'm really happy with this direction. Hope that helps.

Did you link a screenshot? I don't see it.

I think I get the idea though and think it's somewhat intended. We don't want monsters on mana and obviously not on walls, so this can happen. I suppose it could also just block it.... probably the way we will go in the future.

I would like to develop it further one day. One problem is I'm not sure the mech part of the game was very accessible (to a roguelike audience and even less so to anyone else). It was confusing and I have a few ideas along how to develop it but I don't know if it's really salvageable and I don't want to tread ground that's already been covered by something like Cogmind.

Sometimes I think I should scrap that and fully develop the hacking portion, but I would need several other hacking minigames....

Really appreciate the feedback!

Not really. It was made for 7DRL where you're supposed to make a complete (if small) game and stop.

I have thought many times about pursuing this is a future stand alone project. I think it has a lot of potential. But I'm busy with other things at the moment.

Curious how much you enjoyed the hacking vs dodging vs mech riding...?