Very impressive entry! Played through for a while until finally getting smoked by a skeleton when I was rushing through stone harvesting at night. Whoops.
Love that this works great on mobile... definitely makes it easy to pull up and give it a run, much like the addictive 2048. Some day I'mma have to hear from these super geniuses how to get past 400 points. 😅
This is a very clever little game that I highly recommend folks check out. It will be a regular on my phone given it works great on mobile, and the concept is simple but challenging enough to keep me coming back for more.
Eventually I'd love to hear from these folks scoring thousands of points ... I haven't yet managed to break 400! I feel like I make one wrong move and everything cascades from there ... wondering if there's a trick to picking the right seed or else prioritizing different types of completion that I'm missing. 🧐
Haha, I enjoy the chaos of this one. It's got a bit of an Osmos x Binding of Isaac vibe to it. Probably better suited to touch input vs. mouse, as trying to drag out from your character to set a direction makes it hard to really finesse your movement. With touch, could see this just using a touch + drag mechanic vs. touch _on_ the bullet to set your heading. In any case, congrats on the submission!
Nice start to what could certainly be fleshed out with additional enemy types, monster features, and inventory management. In lieu of an actual inventory, I quickly learned to use the floor itself as my inventory, saving potions for when I was no longer certain to beat an enemy and retreating as necessary. (Or, in some cases, deferring to take a potion, expecting the level up healing to fix me up in time. : )
I think there's a small visual bug on the final boss, as his health bar didn't decrement as he took damage. However, I figured that may have been done on purpose to obscure his strength.
In any case, he was no match for my fierce fighter. 💪🏼💪🏼
Nice entry! I missed the 2022 competition, just jammed 2024, and this was shared to the Discord channel. Once I got the hang of the drone, it was fairly easy ... still got in a pickle using it to block off a doorway while then exploring other areas, but blocking off a guard is a nice way to let the alert cooldown. I wasn't quite sure my coins were having any effect, but the smoke bomb was very handy!
Could definitely see myself spinning this up again for another run. (My final score was 4, though, after accounting for my turns and alerts ... should be able to get much higher knowing the scoring algorithm now. ;)
Great start here! I've thought about tile laying in the past, particularly with some dominoes based games I've developed, but the UX is hard to get right. Moving and laying tiles felt great here - very fun to build the world you'd explore in real-time, and satisfying when you could make a nice big ol' dungeon to explore.
I did notice some highly frequent random encounters as described by another commenter, but it wasn't exactly game breaking - seemed random, just high frequency at times. I never found a way to access the scroll, but it was nice to build worlds with easy access to multiple fire spells and bombs. A quick rebuild after collecting items would let you stock up.
Ultimately, would be great to see the world be more inhabited and combat more strategic vs. "bump and pray." I could definitely see myself coming back to a fully fleshed game based on this!
Ahh, never mind! I realized that the "grass" side of the dungeon can be placed adjacent to other grass on a subsequent run. I've definitely struggled to complete larger dungeons, but it's also not a bad idea early on to create small ones where you take minimal damage in order to build up a supply of potions.
Oooh, love the idea! Quick question - is there a way to discard my current tile and redraw in the event I get an unplaceable tile? Or do I just need to start the run over? (I got a dungeon edge before I got a dungeon entrance, which prevented me from moving forward.)
Thanks for the game! Plays like a nicely polished puzzle game, given the nature of rune collection and pairing to cast particular spells. Once I read the comment below about flying, I finally had a solution to deal with the randomness of the blob's movement algorithm. Specifically, I could never seem to coax them around corners or into a line of sight to hit them with a directional spell, so I'd just fly on top of them until they stood still and roast 'em.
I found the directional nature of fireball and lightning to be challenging in general. Trying to line them up often resulted in me taking damage. I dove as far as depth 9 I believe and will definitely try again - I lost it this round on landing in the serprent's range of attack a couple of times on accident. (Them being able to fly was a nice surprise, though!) Might be nice to see the max level reached on the homescreen for the different game modes, fwiw, since you warp back to the start immediately upon death.
Overall, impressive work - especially for vanilla JS! Since I see you're making post-jam updates, two quality of life features that might help:
An indicator of enemy attack range, so it's clearer when you're gonna get attacked by a monster. There may be instances where taking damage from a winged serpent is the right choice; would prefer it to be intentional.
Having spells use consistent numbers (i.e., 1 is always magic missile, 2 is always fireball, etc.). I cast the wrong spell at least once and took damage as a result.
For what it's worth, took me a couple plays to realize the reason I couldn't cast certain spells was that I didn't have the right combination of runes in my inventory. I don't think this game merits a full tutorial, but you might consider a splash screen or overlay at the beginning that points to the various areas of interest, e.g.,
[Arrow pointing to inventory.] "Runes you collect by moving or waiting will cycle through your inventory here."
[Arrow pointing to grayed out spell slots.] "Activate spells by pressing their number when you have the right combination of runes in your inventory."
[Arrow pointing to the combination legend.] "Track the rune combinations required for different spells here."
[Arrow pointing to the collection legend.] "Track the runes collected based on different movements here."
(I don't think you need such a key or this text particularly, but that about sums up what you need to know!)
This game definitely captured my imagination, couldn’t help but keep playing until I won. I agree re: the late game - you’re basically looking for a good run where you can stockpile enough teleports and invisibility potions to sprint to the finish line from the 60s on. I don’t mind that denouement, but absent a “high score” to reach for, it may as well trigger victory once you have enough to make it. 😄
That said, you do need to play your skill tree well and still get lucky early on to make that happen. I liked the variety of the trees and the humor in some of the naming. Even now that I’ve beaten it, I still find myself returning to see if I can clear out via more trees.
Highly recommended! Looking forward to playing more after a round of balancing / bug fixing. (Couldn’t stay away even in the turkey blind this morning … plays passably well on mobile Safari. 😅)
Alrighty, landed my first victory! Definitely going to go for completion as the warrior and wizard. This felt incredibly tight overall, a fun concept executed very well within the 7 day time limit. After a certain amount of leveling, you aren't really concerned by regular monsters, though the boss was hard enough. For future expansion, would love to see more dungeons and / or big bosses. 😄
Congratulations on a great entry! And that music... 🤌🏼
Oooh, this is very fun. Twin stick shooters are my favorite genre (Robotron 2084 being my favorite classic arcade cabinet), and this is scratching that itch. Item / ability activation is always going to be hard on a keyboard vs. a gamepad, but I think I've got the hang of it and will give it a few more runs before rating. Really enjoying it, especially with the great soundtrack / effects and the interesting combos of monsters - always sucks to get caught in a crossfire. ^_^
Think I'm gonna call this my "game of the jam." I've spent more time playing it and chatting about it than any other entry. It stands on its own as a solid traditional roguelike, though the persistent nature of the dungeon means your individual experience won't vary until the current seed is completed. The cooperative nature of the game, then, lends itself toward messaging other players, chatting strategies, etc. to eke out the W.
That said, even as a traditional roguelike, I'm seeing things here I haven't seen elsewhere. For example, I appreciate the "grate" as a dungeon decoration mechanism and the impact it has on interactions with certain monsters, potions, weapons, etc. Since it stays so close to the genre, you don't have to spend a lot of time getting your bearings / figuring out the rules, but you can still be surprised by discovering new things. ("Oh, my sabre lets me lunge!")
The game feels fairly well balanced, even if certain monsters are OP and essentially run stoppers until you or other players leave enough notes to avoid them. (Cough, flaming orb, cough.) Looking forward to seeing how this one grows over time!
Very nice entry! The gameplay resembles other "action" RLs we've seen, both from Slashie and other developers, with a couple nice features specific to the inspiration: animated multi-tile attacks and special weapon throwing. It blends a persistent overworld with both persistent and randomly generated locales (and ambushes), with victory accomplished through a multi-step quest (that could eventually expand to incorporate more of the OG game).
In its competition state, the game was easy enough to learn if not very challenging, though it was likely unwinnable due to final boss power. However, follow-up releases have tightened things up, and I look forward to seeing more. 😊
One fairly unique thing about this entry vs. others I've tested is its use of music, sound effects, and splash screens to contribute to the mood of the game. Very nicely done!
Thanks for checking it out! Will be sure to keep experimenting / expanding this and will follow your dev - gif on your feed looks great. Gonna go kick some more baddies in your jam entry now. : D
Thanks for checking this out! This will require either a Playdate you can sideload the .pdx to or a Playdate account you can access the Pulp editor with to upload the .json. (These are the same game, I just didn't realize the .json had to be added separately to support Pulp import, hence the timestamp difference.)
I started Friday afternoon and finished Sunday just before midnight my time. Learning to adapt to the constraints of Pulp in real time while still creating a challenging, engaging experience was a lot of fun for me. The game is playable and beatable (find the scepter on the 10th level), with 20 random screens you'll warp between so each run is unique. I wish I had time to add additional monster and weapon types, but alas ... start late, cut fast. Will get a post-jam debrief up on the blog for other folks interested in Pulp scripting.
Had to work around some interesting Pulp constraints for this entry just to get it done, as I didn't start until Friday afternoon. For example, it's really hard (or impossible?) to have variable numbers of sprites moving around while preserving the background tiles. I ultimately decided to only let items and sprites appear and move on white backgrounds so I could always assume that they'd swap with white when they move or get collected.
(Interestingly, this doesn't seem to work all the time ... portals and scepters occasionally place over walls, and I didn't have time to track it down. Additionally, I never implemented avoiding placing portals and scepters on the player itself, because determining if two points overlap is cumbersome with nested if statements. I could fake it for monsters by starting the player on a non-white tile in many of the levels.)
For this one, too, I thought about messing with menus to support more item types (e.g., magic potions). I figured I could open it with B and make "rest" a basic action, but I didn't have time for any of that.
Next steps will be to flesh out the monster types and add another weapon or two... I want bats that move twice randomly instead of once and bows to shoot them at a distance, ghosts that spawn around graves in a level, etc. Need to add more sound effects and potentially music, too, perhaps to signal when the portal has appeared and the danger is increasing due to portal demons.
I also think I could've done myself a big favor by faking function calling ... creating a single "place_tile" function and setting the tile to be placed to a variable before calling the placement function. Instead, I ended up with a lot of last minute copy/pasta that probably led to some of the occasional bugs I mentioned above.
All in all, I love working within the constraints of a platform like Pulp. Looking forward to refactoring this post-jam and carrying it forward!
No sweat! I'm really mystified, as I usually know how to get around the security feature. In this case, I just get a Finder modal dialog that says, "The application 'The SignalMac' can't be opened." with no recourse, incl. in the security settings. Bizarre.
fwiw, this is a last generation Intel processor, not an M1/M2 chip. Perhaps some odd compatibility thing?
Fun little platformer! Playing on the Steam Deck ... I find wall jumping a tad complicated, but using the D-Pad is a bit easier than the joystick. Great work!
New versions are getting better and better. I love finding random houses with notes in them, new seeds, etc. Found an island off in the ocean somewhere that was just one island with a batch of new seeds to discover. Very fun. : )
On Mac OS, download the .zip file, double click it to uncompress it, then run it from the Terminal. To do so, you'll need to change into the directory (e.g. if it's in your Downloads directory, type `cd ~/Downloads/zrl_0.8` (without the quotes)) and then use `java -jar zrl.jar` to execute the .jar file. Good luck!
Excellent little concept and incredible execution for a 7DRL! The first time I changed into a pile of corn I cackled with glee. Will play until I win. : D
