itch.io

Glad to hear it.  Just to keep your expectations in line, though, please remember that this was a game jam game, so the scope of it is pretty limited.  Thought I'd better point that out in case you want to adjust how much effort you want to put into getting it to run on Linux!

Wow, haven't seen any interest in this game for quite a while.

In order to produce a new build, I would have to re-familiarize myself with LÖVE again – I am completely out of that framework now, and haven't touched it in a while.  I'm working on two other game releases at the moment, but maybe I'll revisit Arkham After Midnight later – I did have more ideas for creating mysteries with it that I'd like to explore someday!

Well, I don't have a good way to make and maintain multiple page formats for these – sorry – but I find that it's usually necessary to do a little trimming of the booklet pages anyway to get nice consistent margins (depending on your printer settings and capabilities), so I don't think it would save you much effort in practical terms. Most people need to trim a little anyway; you'd just trim off slightly different sized bits.

I recommend printing it as large as possible on A4 and then simply trimming off the ends to create consistent margins. If I have my math right, you'll trim 6.25cm off of each end, leaving a center of 27.2 cm or so, if you can print the US Letter source at the full width of A4.

Many printers can't print the full width of the page even when what's being printed has margins already, though, so you may need to adjust these to match whatever capabilities your printer has.

(I think this is why a lot of the fine folks who show the game on YouTube seem to have inconsistent margins on their copies – their printer couldn't print to the full size of the page and they didn't trim, so when they folded the booklet, it has the booklet margins plus the printable margins on the "outer" edges. I have yet to come up with a good solution on how to deal with that, even in US letter sizes, unfortunately.)

Anyway, folding the pages along the centers of the between-page margins will help clarify the size of those outer margins before you trim, if it's helpful. As long as each "page" is pretty close to being the same size, with the content in the center of its rectangle, it should fold up fairly nicely. (There will always be a little shift because of paper thickness when folded.)

In any case, thanks for your interest in the game, and I hope you enjoy it on your holiday!

Awesome, I posted some comments on that page.  Overall, pretty snazzy!  I really enjoyed reading through it and will probably try it out at some point when I get some spare time.  I added some suggestions and observations – hope it doesn't come off as critical, because that's not my intent; you never really know how much people want to talk about other ideas and suggestions versus how they're pretty happy with what they've got already, so feel free to ignore any of the suggestions for changes.  Thanks for sharing it and making it. I hope people enjoy it!

Nice, looks fun.  Haven't attempted it yet, but it sounds like a fun system to tie some adventures together.

Here are some comments and suggestions, feel free to take 'em or leave 'em:

• In case people don't know what "FoyT" is, you can probably just say "Choose an ability. When it is the highest die in a challenge roll..." instead of explaining what a boon or bane is.  (There are a lot more people who have downloaded Dungeon Hero than have downloaded Fable on your Table, so it's quite likely people won't get that reference.)  I don't mind if you want to just describe a boon or bane effect without referencing FoyT.
• The magic ring's title is in italics when all the other magic items are underlined. Is that supposed to denote something special about the ring?  If so, I'm not sure it's communicated. (If it's just that it's supposed to be underlined instead, that's fine.)  I do like this magic item, giving an extra die to roll, which is fun, and it probably won't come into play most of the time until that one time when it saves your bacon from an otherwise bad roll. Very thematic.
• The Bard class mentions "wizard" traits, but I'm not seeing any "wizard" traits. I suspect you mean "mage" traits.  (Not sure why you'd ever buy just a mage or thief trait when the bard trait is available.)
• Not sure how Grit works.  Do you roll a d6 and increase both stamina and resolve by that much?  Or if you roll a five, say, you could increase max stamina 2 and max resolve 3 for a total of five?  Recommend maybe making that a d4+2 – it would be a bummer to save up 10 treasure only get get a +1 stamina boost.
• The modifications for elite encounters sound pretty cool.  I like that they would add little wrinkles to the combats as you go.  For second edition of Fable on your Table, I'm working on a similar system to buff monsters sometimes, so you're kinda reading my mind there, and it will dovetail pretty well with that new version.  Pretty cool.
• Indeed, in general, pretty impressed how evocative the mechanics tied to the magic items and descriptions are, like the seven leagues boots letting you hustle through dungeons faster, the spiked armor damaging your enemies as much as they damage you, etc. Again haven't play tested them to see how they play in practice, but the concepts are fun enough that they ought to be fun to try.
• Not sure what "can only be bought by choice" on the escape flute means.  I know you can roll random magic items – does it mean you cannot gain it by rolling it randomly as a treasure?  If so, I'd recommend wording like, "Cannot be found, only purchased in town" or something.
• The barbarian "Rage" ability says you can "reroll all your dice".  Do you mean all your dice as in all the dice in the current roll  including the threat dice, or "your" dice as in the character's dice only?  I suspect you mean the latter, but if so, 3 resolve feels pretty steep on top of the 10 gold cost.  You'd have to already be taking more than 3 damage for it to even possibly be worth it, and if you're at a disadvantage and still likely still lose the contest, you've basiacally just added +3 damage to yourself.  Suggest maybe instead always spending only one resolve, but it starts as letting you re-roll one die, then two dice, then three dice as you upgrade it.  (Haven't playtested it, of course, so maybe the suggested setup is better, don't know.)
• The Masterwork and Smite abilities, at least from my impression reading it, seem to be underpowered.  They'd be okay to find randomly if that were possible, but I don't think I'd ever pay ten treasure for an ability I can use at most four or five times, with all but the first one or two uses likely inferior to what you can muster yourself.   Might help to have it reset back to its max value when you go to town or something so it's not just a "dead end" purchase.  (If you want to model masterwork equipment like FoyT does, you can do something like give it a +1 value boon.)
• The text is pretty cramped and you seem to struggle to explain what you mean in places because of the space restrictions.  You got a lot of cool stuff onto one page, for sure, but it does feel a little tight. One way you could free up some space would be to spread this expansion over three little booklets instead of just one, kinda like how the Dungeon Hero volumes are three booklets each.  Have one booklet explain the system, and then have one booklet for magic items and character abilities, and one booklet for enemy and elite advancement tables. You could explain how these things work more easily and it would give players some more cool booklets for their collections. The enemy tables could be d12/d12/d12 instead of d6/d3/d6, you could add more abilities, have a tracking sheet for the new elements like dungeon levels and magic items, etc.  (Just a thought – it works the way it is now, and it's also cool that it's all in one booklet, too.)

Anyway, some fun ideas and nice work. When you're ready to let people try it out let me know and I'll post an update to my followers.  Thanks for sharing this with me, it's really cool!

Sure I'd love checking it out.

Further down this thread, you'll see the position Button Shy takes on creating fan expansions. Basically, it can't be for sale/profit, must include a note that it's compatible with Dungeon Hero / AdvanceQuest, and no potentially offensive material (racism, sexism, "adult" material, etc.).

Do I roll my two skill dice first and the two environment dice at the same time, look at the result and THEN decide whether I want to reroll one or more of the dice for stamina - or do I roll my dice first, THEN decide whether I want to reroll and when the result is clear, I roll the environment dice - and can then decide again whether I want to reroll any of them.

You roll ALL the dice at once.

After you see the results of all the dice, you then decide your re-rolls.

Can I re-roll environment dice at all - or can I only pay with stamina for my skill rolls?

You can re-roll any die in the exchange. It doesn't matter whether it was your dice or the dice of the environment.

Can I reroll a repeated die due to stamina use?

I think you are asking if you can continue to re-roll dice by spending more stamina.

If so, then yes, you can continue re-rolling dice if you keep spending more stamina.

Those are the rules as I intended them. However, if you enjoy playing with different rules, go ahead! You could decide that you can only re-roll dice from your hero and not the dice from the environment or that you can only perform one re-roll. That would make the game harder of course, but if that feels more natural to you, that's fine. You could balance the difficulty by giving yourself some extra stamina or resolve.

Anyway, thanks for playing "Dungeon Hero" and I'm glad to hear you enjoy it!

Wow that’s great! Glad you like the games and thanks for taking the time to say so!

Sorry, no.  Hadn't heard of that.

Fun little game. Enjoyed the upgrade system particularly – simple but engaging.

I'm not personally a fan of visual novels, but I do use some VN-style cutscenes in other genres of games. I found this introduction to be well-thought-out, with some solid advice on many topics of interest to both VN developers and other game devs who borrow VN style conventions like me.

So, good stuff here! And good on you for making a detailed, approachable resource for people looking to get into the field. Well done.

Was really enjoying the game after getting through several levels.

Ended up getting a game-stopping bug, though:

This happened right after I'd tried to use the ability that has block with a coffin-shaped image on it.  I believe the card had been upgraded.

I also saw some weird behavior in the pathfinding.  I think one of the monsters tried to path through an orb and kinda got stuck against it, unable to move.  The orb was next to a wall, and the monster was above the orb with the wall on the left.

Anyway, nice game. Fun retro aesthetic.

Great gameplay, great aesthetics, and you kill nazis. Trifecta.

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!