itch.io

Glad you enjoyed it.  As for being available as a download, I haven't packaged it up or anything, but if you own PICO-8 (and you should because it's great), you can download the cart from the Lexaloffle entry for the game (https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=48785) and use it that way offline.

Sounds good – you definitely have a solid foundation for a fleshed-out game with more features here. Hope to see you develop it more!

Very cool game. Played quite a bit and never got far – Argonauts and food are far too scarce compared to the prevalence and threat of the enemy creatures.

The "gifts" system is really cool, and satisfying to use when you can. The artemis bow, especially, is fun. I'd like to see even more emphasis on those because you don't really get to use them much, and they are definitely a high point of the game's flavor.

Attractive and clear. Loved the presentation.  

The ABXY keys being mapped to ZXAS was confusing – why not just call the ZXAS keys?

Inventory doesn't seem to be bugged any more, but now I can't seem to eat any food.  I can consume potions but not food items.

Also is there a way to interact with the townsfolk, the shop, etc.?

Pretty cool presentation, but I've played five times and I've been unable to get anywhere. First monster that doesn't move randomly kills me, and I've had seven components in my inventory and still can't make a weapon.  I've only made a weapon once – a dagger – and it did not seem to make any difference in my combat prowess.

(Weirdly, the end scene seems to say I'm fourth level?  Not sure how I got there!)

Is there a way to discover combinations of components that can make weapons and armor?

Anyway, this game feels pretty solid and well-presented.  I'd love to see it developed further, maybe with a less steep entrance curve, because the crafting and talisman stuff sounds like it would be fun to play with if I could ever reach it.

Solid little roguelike with some interesting elements. Charming art.

Great job.

I am also experiencing the inventory blackout.  Looking in the Javascript console it appears to be throwing this error:

TypeError: undefined is not an object (evaluating 'item.adjective')

Maybe you have some item that is supposed to have a .adjective property that isn't defined. This last time, it occurred when I picked up a thing that looked like a piece of meat on a bone.

Anyway, what I was already able to see is pretty nice and engaging.  The keyboard commands are a little awkward – would love to see moving left and right changing facing, and then just a single key for picking up, attacking, etc. as an alternative control mechanism. Graphic presentation is pretty charming.

Cool thanks

Ok! Looking forward to seeing everyone’s amazing creations!

In previous years, you could see entries off of the jam announcement page, but now I only see "Overview" and "Community".

Maybe it's because I wasn't able to participate this year and didn't join the jam, and you have to have joined the jam to see them?

I couldn't participate in making a roguelike this year, but I'd sure like to check out the ones others made!  Can the entries link be added to the overview page?  Or is there some other way to browse entries?

Hm. Sounds like it would get kinda inefficient to understand the current state of an element that's undergone a lot of changes, but I imagine that could be easily solved by caching the current state and only referring to the history when you really need to. 

I can definitely see its utility for making a time-travel roguelike like you're making, since it means you can unroll the activity back in time.  I had an idea for a heist-planning roguelike a while back that would let you "scrub" forward and backward in time to let you let one character do their thing, then go back and define what another character does simultaneously, but what I ran up against was how to handle things when those two characters would interact; it would "void" things after.  But if you just have a list of "things they're going to try to do" instead of trying to save the state at each time point, the characters could adjust, I think. This sort of idea would really assist with that!

Cool, looking forward to checking out your game.

Looking forward to checking out a Loren-Schmidt-visuals game!

Clicking the link takes me to a "can't find page" message, though.  Have you set the permissions on the project to be visible beyond yourself?

Heh.  The mid-7DRL slump!  I've hit that in just about every 7DRL I've participated in, where you initially start out making a lot of progress and then you realize you've painted yourself into a corner somewhere and have to step back and refactor a few things.  Luckily, you do usually make up the time, but it can be concerning for sure!

That action system you're talking about sounds interesting.  Is that based on something you read about somewhere, or is it something of your own design?

Awesome – really looking forward to seeing future versions.

Love it so far.  Super charming look to the entire presentation, and the skirmish elements are fun.

I especially like that you got in a boss enemy that's larger than the usual sprites – that's cool. Not a lot of games like this do that!

The underlying skirmish mechanics feel good and seem straightforward and clear. You do feel like you can make decisions about how to best take on the enemies. And having different characters with different capabilities is pretty nice, too. Overall, a great flavor and puzzle-ish space for the combats. Love it.

Selection of characters and their actions is a real pain point, though, especially once you get some summons on the board.

I'd recommend to switching away from the stepping through characters to just a spatial interface, so that you select your next character to act by using arrow keys to move a cursor to a character with a green dot by it (I'd also make the green dots more prominent to assist with this).

If that's not feasible for some reason, I'd change the order of the stepped-through characters to be top-to-bottom-left-to-right so that if you want to select, say, your wizard, you can zip through the characters until you get to them, because the order is more predictable. As it stands, it feels like the cursor is randomly popping all over the place, even though there is a set order.

After attacking, it would be handy to auto-select the next character which hasn't acted yet.

It's also kind of easy to accidentally trigger a spell when looking at your options. Would recommend always having X to act and Z to cancel. When you select a character, pop up an interface that lets you choose their action between their normal attack and their available spells, navigating them with arrow keys, confirming with X, and canceling with Z. That way, nothing commits until you X and you can always reliably back out of something with a Z.

Since you show the enemy's health at the bottom when an enemy is selected, you might consider also showing their attack value alongside it.

I hope the above doesn't come off as being too critical. I really think this game is pretty great already, and would love to see it develop further. You've done an excellent job on it – easily one of my favorite PICO-8 games I've seen, up there with PicoHaven and others. Well done!

I don't use MS Word so I can't really help, but if you've set up each "page" of the 'zine as a different page in Word, it is probably thinking that you want them printed as individual pages, and the page setup is just assuming it's very small pages, so that when you go to print on regular-sized paper, it just prints one per page.

You may need to "lay them out" onto a single page to get the effect you need.

What I did was use Apple's Pages to create a bunch of small one-zine-page-sized images, and then used a layout program to position and place them into a second document that has them printable.  I imagine many word processors are capable of placing "boxes" of text in a layout so you can edit them in place, but when the pages are not in a very usable order and some of them are rotated 180°, you might find it less painful to just make the images and lay them out when done.

Glad you enjoyed it!

Interesting! I’d love to hear how it goes.

Yeah, I found that. Just wasn't sure whether there was anything else; I expected an end game screen or something.  Anyway, great little game!  Well done.

Excellent game. Very engaging.

Is there an endgame I'm missing, or does it just end when you've upgraded all three parts of your suit all the way?

Great, thanks for your support.  I do have some new stuff in the works!

Glad you enjoy it!

The game was bought by Button Shy so I won’t be releasing new ones in this format. There will be some releases as “AdvanceQuest” that will be available for download later. If you follow me here I will post about them when they become available.

In the mean time there have been some fan-made adventures posted here to itch you can check out, and you might be interested in some of my other games which have some similarities to this game, like Welcome Aboard, Captain, which uses many of the same mechanics for an open-world Sci fi game, or Fable on your Table which is like Dungeon Hero as a tabletop miniatures dungeon crawler.

I used to play a lot of Dwarf Fortress on Mac, and I'm interested in revisiting it.  Are there any plans of releasing this for the Mac platform?

Okay, clearing the stones got me to 303!

Clear the stones, eh? Didn’t know you could do that - I thought they were just walls!

Nice, thanks for saying so.

How does it compute the final score?  I see people with scores of 303, but I cleared the entire board and only got to 288.

Yes, agreed.  I'd love to be able to have a key command to mark, either a modifier key to mark when clicked, or a keystroke that places a mark with the next click after typing it, or some other mechanism that doesn't rely on right click or a scroll wheel or anything like that.  Because right now, I have to play without marks because it's so likely that I'll mistakenly click the cell instead of mark the cell.  That, in turn, makes it really slow going because I keep having to recompute values.

In fact, it would be really nice to be able to play entirely with the keyboard, using the arrow keys to highlight tiles and key bindings to click or mark the tile currently highlighted.

Great game.

Suggestion: Also allow shift-clicking as well as right-clicking to mark tiles.  It's easy to accidentally click when trying to right-click on some trackpads or on one-button mice.  I've died several times when trying to mark, and being able to hold down a modifier key to safely mark a tile would have been really helpful.

Excellent game.  Took me a while to figure it out, but once you get it, it's pretty engrossing.  Well done.

The current version is only playable with the web app but I am almost done with a second edition of the game which does not require it.

Follow me to be notified when that version is released.

I've downloaded it.  I'll check it out

Yeah, as mentioned, supplies appeared to be limited and it's no longer available.  One of the adventures is still available on pnparcade, however: https://www.pnparcade.com/products/advancequest

Sure, send me a link. Would love to check it out.

Sorry, not currently.  That would be a lot of cards to print out – basically, more than two decks, and one of them is a non-standard size that AFAIK you can't get card sleeves for – so it didn't seem like a game people would want to print and build from scratch.  It was kinda designed to work with the GameCrafter's specific strengths.

It's an idea, though.  Follow me here on itch – if I decide to make a PNP-friendly version, I'll post about it here!

If you like Dungeon Hero, you might like Fable on your Table, which uses some similar 2x2 mechanics for a more miniatures skirmish vibe, also with dungeon crawling elements.

Welcome Aboard Captain uses the same 2x2 system for solo sci-fi roleplaying.  The pre-written adventures for that game are a lot like the pre-written adventures of Dungeon Hero, but are more linear and more complicated because you track a crew of multiple bridge officers and your ship.  You can try Charon Wormhole, the tutorial adventure, for free to get a feel for what the game is like.

There have also been a few people who have made some fan expansions for Dungeon Hero, which you can find by searching here on itch.

Not currently, no.  Sorry.

Thanks for your interest.

I am working on a second edition of Fable on your Table which is expanded with some tighter rules, more gameplay options, a magic system, and custom-crafted missions.  It's almost done and is currently in playtesting.  Be sure to follow me here on itch for news about when it's released!