itch.io

Nice, glad to hear you enjoyed the first edition and are looking forward to the second edition.

To answer your questions:

Is the 2nd edition a completely analog game (without digital tools like 1e)?

Yes, 2e is completely analog, although nothing's stopping you from using the digital tools from 1e.  The missions from the 1e tools are balanced for just you and not you-with-companions, though, so I'd recommend upgrading the monsters you encounter one tier, as discussed in the 2e rules, if you decide to go that route.  I have not playtested this way of playing 2e, so YMMV. If you try it, I'd be interested in hearing how it goes.

Will the 1e online tool be available in the future or will it be phased out (or how about a downloadable version)?

I have no plans to phase out or remove the 1e tool, although it might get moved off of the front page of the web site to a sub-page now that there's a new edition and the site will have to support both editions.  My intention is to leave support up for 1e players rather than trying to force them over to 2e by withholding support for 1e. If someone prefers 1e to 2e, I'm happy to have them still play it.

I'm not ruling out a 2e online tool, but one of the design goals was to get rid of the dependency on the online tool, since I heard from a lot of people that they'd prefer analog options.  Obviously there's already a codebase I could draw upon to create a 2e online tool, so it's not too unrealistic a possibility, but right now, my focus is on developing a second realm for 2e.

I think you'll find that the 2e presentation of the dungeons will be fairly comparable to the 1e experience, just with "read paragraph #N" instead of "click this button" to get to the descriptive and mechanical elements.  And if you're using a device to read the realm's PDF, it will still be a digital companion for delivering the dungeon content, just with a different mechanism for calling up the game elements.

Either way, hope you enjoy your time with 2e!

Okay, I've uploaded a version of the game that fixes these issues. Thanks again for letting me know!

Ah thanks for taking the time to let me know. I’ll try to get an update out fixing these issues today.

Hope you’re enjoying the game!

I would love to share some!  I'm hoping to get some made for both this game and Sleuths, maybe over the holidays.

In the mean time, the videos on the first edition are still fairly applicable. The big change from what you see in the first edition game video  is that the new version removes the reliance on the web app to generate the missions; most of the underlying mechanics remain fairly similar, but the interaction with the dungeon environment has changed significantly as a result (for the better, in my opinion).

The video about assembling the papercraft is still entirely applicable with no changes.

I'm loving this advent deck you made, Shenbot! Super charming.

Nice!  Seems to be working now.

Sure!  See attached. 

Interesting idea for a puzzle game.  Unfortunately the text gets cut off for me down at the bottom.  Is there a way to scroll the text or make it smaller so it fits in that box?

Weird - I haven’t changed it in a long time and I know people successfully printed from that link. I’ll look into it - thanks for the heads up.

Well, I had several reasons:

•  Someone just stumbling onto the game on the Lulu store and buying it wouldn’t have (easy) access to the companion files like the downloadable character sheets and the other adventures. So I’d have to set up a way for them to get those files but in a way that doesn’t just make them freely available to people who haven’t bought the game at all.

• This way I can set the Lulu price at cost. If I made it so you could buy just the book I would have to raise the price of the physical book if I wanted to make a profit. But then that punishes people who want both because then I would be “double dipping” on them, which feels kinda smarmy. This way I make my profit on the digital version and people who want the physical version can get it at cost.

• As I release updates, people who buy the game on itch get those updates. AFAIK I don’t have an easy route for that for people who buy the print version. I’d have to set up some other avenue for them to receive that information. It’s cleaner this way.

So that was my thinking. It’s easier and simpler to manage and ensures (-ish) that people don’t get left without the support avenues for the game.

But if you really only want the physical book and not the companion PDF’s and updates, just reach out to me on Mastodon (@lonespelunker@mastodon.social) and I can send you  the link.

Well, the other way you can finish a hole is using the “putt” that allows you to just move one square without rolling. In that case the bonus is for not using that to end the hole (which can be tough).

Love it.  As usual, tight, easy mechanics with fun presentation.

Some questions:

• If you move through the hole's square but still have movement left to do, do you sink the ball, or do you have to continue with the remaining movement?  The chip-in bonus seems to suggest you don't have to land it perfect to sink it (since you get a bonus if you get it perfectly – unless the intent is to get the bonus by rolling and not getting the bonus by "putting" with the single orthographic move).
• Similarly, do you pick up gems as you pass through them, or only if you land on them?
• Perfect shots can "travel through walls", but you can never end movement in a wall. What happens if a perfect shot movement would end on a wall?

You should have received two versions of the various pages as PDF's.  One of them is a series of pages that are "right side up", intended to be used in a digital reader.  This one isn't used to create the one-page foldable "zines".

You should also have received a version that has the eight-up layout with some "right side up" and some "upside down".   This is the one to print to make the "zines".

Picked up the full game on Steam thanks to the strength of this demo. Great work!

Ah, glad it helped.  Thanks for playing, even though it's not written in your first language. Hope it's accessible enough to still be fun!

Well, like any other challenge roll in the game, you imagine what your character is doing to handle the situation or how they are responding to it, and then you pick your traits that apply to roll.

Remember that if you don't have two, you can always imagine d4 traits on the fly.  So, if you are grappling with "Ale is consumed. Much ale." and you have literally nothing in your pre-selected traits to roll that applies, you can always imagine, say, "d4 Staggering through the headache" and "d4 Hair of the dog that bit ya" and roll those to see what comes out on top.

Have fun with it! If your character's traits just simply don't apply to the situation, that's not great for your die rolling, sure, but it's a fun creative opportunity. That's a situation where your character is really out of their element, so you can come up with weird responses, lucky coincidences, miraculous providence, sudden appearances of old friends or rivals, or obscure backstory to flesh out your character a bit. (And maybe that die will even come out on top!)

Also remember you're always responding to two challenge dice, so if you can't think of much that fits "Ale is consumed. Much ale.", you can simply lean into whatever the other challenge die is and respond to that, and if "Ale..." comes out on top, well, whatever you were trying to do was derailed because of your hangover. You didn't try to respond to it, nor did you have anything particularly able to counter it...and it got ya!

Bottom line: Just pick dice that will make for interesting story, whether they're dice your character already has or d4's to fill out what doesn't apply.

Awesome, thanks for taking the time to say so.  Hope you have a lot of fun with it!

Glad you like the game.  I think you're gonna enjoy the second edition! Make sure you follow me because I'll announce it here when it's ready!

Delightful. Solved the mystery, but some bad rolls (I believe?) made me miss the clue in the flower shop, so I ended up with 90/100.  Got the mystery correct on the first guess, though!

One thing I was impressed with: I am neither a theater nor a music person, personally, but the writing was accessible enough that it felt like my character was knowledgeable enough about high society theater and music to investigate the mystery even if I wasn't. There were a few terms, like the instrument names, that I ended up having to go back and remind myself which was which, but otherwise, I was able to follow along with those elements and their ramifications in the mystery despite not having the background. Well done on that.

The mystery itself felt like a good difficulty. It wasn't obvious, and the player has to pay attention to what the characters say, but the structure of how you made options for following up on specific items from interviews help the player to sift the wheat from the chaff in a way that makes it likely they will figure it out without the solution being handed to them. And the hypothesis system worked quite well as a way to establish a theory before making an accusation. Really nice mystery-solving design with some clever affordances to help the player succeed while still feeling like they're the ones solving the mystery.

I didn't read the game notes before playing, so I was a little surprised by the dating sim segment at the end. Once I realized what was going on, it was of course fine, but in the moment, it seemed odd because I expected the game to end when the mystery was solved and the perpetrators were brought to justice. In retrospect, it seems a lot more obvious that was what it was building up to, so this is probably more about my unfamiliarity with the conventions of dating sim games than any problem with the game itself. For example, I took the adjustments to the relationships as "willingness to divulge information relevant to the investigation or to step in if things go south with the villains", rather than "how into you they are". I now realize that was leading up to the dating portion, but when I was first playing the game, I thought those were investigation progress measures, not romantic measures. (A quick paragraph about what those bonuses mean might help orient people like me unfamiliar with dating sims, but honestly it's fine as is.)

Anyway, a solid offering. Engaging writing, a fun mystery, interesting characters, quick to play, easy to navigate, and no major frustrations. Great work.

It should work fine, but the UI isn't particularly scaled for it, so you may have to pinch-zoom-scroll to move around while using it on a phone.

Glad you enjoy it!

What a charming, enjoyable little game. Very well done. Love the 60-second little quests you have to go on, and that they aren't punishingly difficult. Enough of a challenge to be fun, but not so tough that they block progress. Nice presentation and controls, too. Great game jam work!

So glad you liked it! I hope your readers enjoy it as much as you did.

Ah, I see.  Well, I do have a simple RPG system that I've released under Creative Commons which you could use if you're okay with using CC licensed stuff. You can check it out here: https://lonespelunker.itch.io/fafo 

It's about pushing your luck and trying to avoid suffering the consequences of doing so, so maybe it would work for a kind of narrative-driven PC RPG. Be sure to take a look at the sample adventures, because those would probably be a good guideline for how a FAFO-based PC RPG would be organized narratively.

If you end up using it in a game, be sure to drop me a line and I'll send out a message to my followers about it.

Good luck with your project!

Sorry, but no.  A publisher bought the rights to the game, so I'm not at liberty to let people use the game in that fashion.

Why, what were you looking to do with it?  Maybe I can help you with something similar.

Glad you got it sorted, because as I was reading that I wasn't sure how I'd be able to respond to that.  :)

Well, I'd recommend trying not to just ignore that the old die doesn't fit; ideally, you'd imagine a way to bring it into relevance, because it's the combination of the randomized elements that give your Dungeon Hero stories their depth and replayability.

But if you're drawing a blank for a particular pairing, it's perfectly fine to just imagine the newer die as "doubly relevant" in that situation; there's no problem doing that if you want to keep the tempo up and it's taking too much time to think up something interesting.

Below are some strategies for finding a way to make those pesky dice relevant. Hopefully, some of these will help spark ideas as to how you can solve this problem when you encounter it.

Let's imagine you generate two trait dice while trying to sneak into an old, run-down castle.  The older die is d8 Shadowy gatehouse and the newer die is d10 Climbing the stairs of the castle. These two dice describe two geographically distinct traits, so it makes sense that you might want to tweak the meaning or have a hard time connecting them because how can the adventurer be in both places at once?

In this situation, you could:

• Tweak the old environment trait to extend it to the current situation.  Here, you are just adding to or expanding the original trait to give it more "reach".  "As I was leaving, a gatehouse guard came back from patrol, found his fallen comrades, and is now following behind me and waiting for a time to strike. I notice him following me as I'm climbing the stairs of the castle."
• Interpret the situation as the transition between those two traits.  Maybe neither trait is what's affecting the adventurer right now, and it's the liminal space between them that the adventurer finds challenging.  "I need to make my way from the gatehouse to the castle entrance, but it means crossing the courtyard without being seen..."
  
• Imagine a "twist" that happened back in the context of the first die that is only now coming to light. "It was then that I realized my wineskin had been slashed open, and everywhere I'd walked had been trailing a dribble of bright red wine. And here I was, walking right up the main staircase of the castle..."
• Imagine a lingering effect of the last situation that you rolled.  Say the last situation you rolled was a fight with two guards. You might imagine a lingering effect of the fight like so: "The fight in the gatehouse had winded me. I climb the stairs, trying to keep my breath silent as I labor to ascend them."
• Shift to a nearby trait descriptor. If the first die doesn't make sense any more, you can always replace it with a descriptor you skipped over but didn't use. Try grabbing the descriptor of an unused trait immediately before or after the original die (or before or after the new die). For example, if the environment trait after d8 Shadowy gatehouse is d10 Alert guards on patrol, you could switch to that die's descriptor.  This will keep the meaning of the dice in the same general context of the story without you having to invent anything. I'd recommend keeping the die size of your original die, however.
  
• Invent something totally new to replace a die, as long as it's interesting and relevant to the situation. "Just as I was about to ascend the stairs, a cluster of giggling handmaidens came bustling down the corridor, forcing me to duck into the shadows under the stairs to avoid them seeing me."

Hope this helps!

Well, the intent was that "resolve" wouldn't just mean "hit points".  It means "ability to continue on continuing on," of which things like injury would be a part, but I was intending it to be more of a measure of how close you are to failure at your quest so that it could explicitly be used for non-combat situations or scenarios. That way, you can imagine the story consequences of a failed roll to be whatever makes sense for your character, the test, and the story.

For example, suppose your rogue is trying to sneak into a tyrant's palace and you fail a check from d8 Armed sentries.  What does the resolve loss represent? You might imagine having had to take a few sentries down in a quick fight, and getting injured in the process. But you might instead imagine that you lost precious time because you had to stay hidden in the shadows until they passed. You might imagine them having seen you trying to sneak in and raising the alarm. You might imagine the sentries guarding the easy path and having to find another way in. Any of these would be a valid interpretation for resolve loss, and only one of them represents injuries.

In the case you mentioned, failing to persuade an NPC to give you passage on a ship would certainly seem like a valid setback in the scenario's goals, so it seems in line with how I envisioned resolve to work.

But if you're looking to introduce a test that doesn't run the risk of a resolve setback, say for story purposes, the mechanics of the game as written can handle that – simply ask the player in a lock paragaph to make a check and instead of losing resolve on failure, they just get a different  story consequence.

For example:

🔒 The dowager duchess angrily demands an explanation for why you have magically appeared in her chambers carrying a chicken. Make a check against d8 Suspicious circumstances and d8 Better explain yourself quick!  If you succeed, she laughs at your predicament and allows you to leave peacefully; skip ahead to the next lock paragraph. If you fail, do not lose any resolve, but she shouts, "Guards!" and you have to leap out the window to escape; advance 1.

Tried this little game today.  Fun!  The stories it made were nonsensical, but that was kind of the fun of it.

Nice, glad you're enjoying it.  It was a game jam game, so it's a little limited, and there are definitely some things I'd change if I were making it a "real" game.  But it was fun to experiment with making a game that would be screen reader capable.

Wow these games are really cool. Fun game ideas.

I particularly like the creative ones – HRS, Shoot the Stickmen, One of a Kind, and Autobard – but that's just my own preferences for play styles. They all sound pretty fun honestly.

Well done to all participants!

Glad you like the game!

If you look in the comments for Volume Two of this game I talked a bit with a user named Verdant Green about this topic. It includes both design information and the specific requirements from my publisher for sharing fan-made content for the game.

Came back and replayed this today, and, well, it's just a solid, fun, engrossing little game. I love it. This is one of my favorite PICO-8 games.

You can use any small items you have lying around, but what I use are those little 8-12mm cubes and discs that come in some board games like Lords of Waterdeep or King of Tokyo. I'll put links to places you can buy them below.

Nowadays, I use a disc to represent the ship and different colored acrylic cubes to represent the crew, the longboats, and camp.  You will also need a token to note the time of day on the tracker, which can be larger, like a penny.  See the first photo on the product page to get a feel of the size; that photo shows wooden cubes, but the metal or acrylic ones are about the same size.

I've also seen people make little cardboard tokens, just by gluing paper to cardboard, writing what it represents, and cutting it out. This is cheap and easy, and is especially nice if you have some artistic flair and can draw a little evocative image on the token.

You can also play entirely by using a pencil and an eraser on the map, without any tokens at all, just annotating on the map with a symbol where everything is. This is good if you want your game to be portable and quick to set up and put away, but the map can get a little busy if you have a lot of notes, too.  (In that case, I'd recommend keeping a separate log for notes of what's in each hex, like cave passages to adjacent mountain areas.)

Happy expeditions!

Metal cubes at BGG

Translucent acrylic cubes at BGG

Plastic discs at BGG

Assorted colors acrylic cubes on Amazon

Awesome, glad to hear you're enjoying it.

I love seeing people kitbashing their own stuff into this system. It's gratifying and exciting to see it, because it's confirmation that I had some success on some of the design goals of the game – simplicity, flexibility, approachability, etc. Thanks for taking the time to mention that – it made my day!

And the double-sided adventure pages is a great idea! Two booklets in one, even more portable than before.

Good luck with your Wolverine playthrough!

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!