itch.io

Oh jeez. Thanks for playing! Sorry for the lack of polish-- If I'm being honest this is definitely my worst 7DRL (that you can still play). This was my first time using the web platform for a 7DRL, and I was sort of learning as I went along. So there's a lot of bugs, a lot of content got cut at the last second to make the deadline, and as you noted, I didn't do a great job of giving clear instructions. Plus, I'm not convinced the game is fun even if I were to fix all of the problems and add more content.

I've thought about coming back and redoing this, or at least trying to fix up more of the bugs and add some clearer instructions, but it seems like such an underwhelming game to me at the core that I've always felt the effort to polish it up would have been wasted. (I'm currently working on finishing up a pretty huge rewrite/remake/expansion of my 2020 7DRL, which was better received and has a lot more inherent fun in it even though the balance on the 7DRL version is not great.) But now I'm a little embarassed that you suffered through this, so perhaps when I'm done with TCOS I'll finally make "Duck Tape Hero: Remallard" so I don't have to feel bad whenever I get a hit on my analytics for someone playing this game.

Love this game. I did find what seems like a bug-- I sailed my ship into an inland sea (of shallow water), landed a boarding party to grab some treasure, and then found that I could not re-board my ship. I was forced to just wander the island until something came along and killed my crew so that the game ended.

That said, this game is amazing and really nails the "pirate searching for lost treasure" feel. Kudos.

FYI, when I try to run this right now, your API server is returning a 502 error for monsters/api/dungeon/? and the game just hangs at a black screen.

Feature suggestion: detect a bad or non-responding server and provide a friendly error message.

Usually when you encounter flooding you can just hold your breath and try and make it through. Make sure you close any hatches nearby so that the water doesn't fill up whole sections and make your life even worse. If the flooding is so bad that you can't make it through, you might want to use an Engineer party member (which can be yourself) to get in there and patch up whatever leak is letting water in.

Really enjoyable and atmospheric game. I really like the "stuck inside on a rainy day, let's play games" narrative, and I kind of want the "house" part of the game to feel a little more alive, with its own meta-narrative somehow in between failed attempts at beating the inner-roguelike. Or maybe the inner game is periodically interrupted outright because you need to go change out the laundry or something, I dunno. It's a great concept though, and I love it.

Probably could use some type of in-game version of the key reference-- I didn't get too far in on my first playthrough because I skimmed over the directions and clicked into the game without memorizing everything, assuming there would be signposts/references in the game somehow if I forgot something. And I managed to figure out all the keys by trial and error except for how to fire my gun-- spacebar never entered my mind as a possibility. So that first playthrough ended up being a melee-only challenge run. Went a lot smoother after I read the instructions. >_> <_<

I'm a bit stuck on this, but really enjoying it so far. I'm not sure the stats and climate simulation/etc are really pulling their weight in a rogue-y sense, without more significant or active threats to your health to drive interaction; it's too hard to get stuck in a place where you can't just walk someplace safe to rest. It also feels a bit grindy backtracking repeatedly to collect that last bit of info because you keep rolling badly on whatever check is being performed for the meditation.

All that said, the highly abstract presentation makes for a weirdly compelling little procgen puzzle game, regardless-- I spent about two or three hours just trying to decipher glyphs and puzzle it out, and it's still open in another tab. I'll be coming back later to puzzle some more. And if you do carry this forward to a full game, I'd quite like to see the results.

This game is extremely fun and adorable. I love it.

Slight bug report: I backed into the doorway on level 3 and found myself in level 4 unable to move at all. I think it retained my reverse momentum and my only movement options would have been in the wall.

Hi,

Thanks for playing <3

You're definitely not the only person to experience slowness. I took a bunch of inefficient shortcuts later in the 7DRL and didn't think too much about them because I was testing and debugging in Chrome on a pretty beefy PC with plenty of RAM and CPU to burn. I didn't even really notice the slowdown issues until people complained about them after release and I tried it on another computer.

You'll be pleased to hear that I will soon be publishingjust published a version where I optimized a good bit of that slowdown away (and I fixed the firefox bug you mentioned too), so you may be able to play comfortably now-- please feel free to give it another try when you have a chance. And if it's still really bad, let me know so I can continue tinkering with it.

As for the rest of it, I'm waiting to actually add anything functional to the game until after the 7DRL judging is over. But I'm already working on that post-judging update-- "look" was a wishlist luxury-feature that I never got to, so I definitely will be adding it, no question. I also like your idea of modifier keys to make the arrows become diagonals, so I may steal that idea as well and add it as a movement option. STAY TUNED or don't. (Do.)

Thanks! I'm glad you liked it. I definitely plan on building it out a lot more. There's a lot of stuff that didn't make it into the 7DRL that I still want to get in there.

The only other stuff I've put out there for public consumption is other 7DRLs. All of them need to be updated at least as badly as Precious Metal does, though, and my 7drl from last year here on itch turned out pretty jank, I don't know that I can really recommend it. You can try out Cambium though, which is a bit finicky about running but quite playable and a fun little game if you can get it running on your system.

I'm definitely still plugging away at the game, since it turned out unexpectedly fun and I feel like it still has a lot of potential as a game with just a little more stuff added. I was thinking you'd search the alien computers for references to other places to raid, but I also kind of like your fuel idea-- I already kind of have fuel represented in the game, since you may have noticed that your debt jumps up a couple hundred bucks every time you fly to a new location, so it wouldn't be out of the way to add an explicit fuel collection minigame.

I'll probably release updates separately from this version, though-- I prefer to keep the 7DRL version as-is, aside from fixes for actual game-breaking bugs that crop up (like the crash bug I fixed already, or the one that made it impossible to win because I flipped a greater-than sign). As for the updated version, I'll probably want to publish it through my own site, anyway, for functionality's sake-- the current version attempts to post your scores to my scoreboard server, for example, but running within itch.io's ssl page means that the browser sees the submission as an XSS attack and prohibits it. (There went an hour or two of the jam spent writing the scoreboard server, too.) When I do release a version with new content and balance fixes and the like, I'll make sure to put a link to it on the main game page.

I'm glad you like it! I pretty much agree with all your criticisms, but on balance I am pretty happy with how it turned out.

My original plan for the game involved lots more work on map generation, I've got several different planned map types in my notes. And I wanted the discovery of new areas to work something like what you describe, hunting for clues that would point you towards the next level(s). But I spent so much time ironing bugs out of the sprawling map system and ship movement code that I just didn't have the time to implement any additional kinds of area or even flesh out that basic "space station" type any further with details like furniture and so on.

The same time sink meant that a lot of the numerical balance of the game never got done, so you're right that it can be pretty swingy based on what ship you get and whether your lockers randomly have good stuff in them. I tried to mitigate that a little bit by having the different ships guarantee certain items and randomize others, so there's some consistency in the initial loadout but you might get lucky and get a cool thing.

Since the high score system isn't working from within itch.io, hey post your high scores here

mine is $393,341.

Precious Metal

Inspired by a throwaway line in one of my favorite sci-fi books. I was going to go with a wholly different game plan, but then I reread that book, read a neat line commenting on an alien species that doesn't consider gold a valuable substance at all, and thought "That would be a cool roguelike to make someday. Steal gold from an alien species who think it's nothing special and have massive stockpiles of it. Hey, actually it's like one week before the 7DRL..."

I wanted to do a more "classic-rogue" style game this time around, i.e. one where score was a focus, rather than achieving objectives. So the premise of the game is that you're trying to pay off your debts by earning (or rather, "earning") space-buxx, and that gives me a nice simple score mechanism to work with-- your score is just how much cash value of stuff you've collected, and just collecting the items isn't good enough, you have to stow them in the cargo hold for maximum value. It's a little too easy to "win" at this point, and needs some numerical tweaking that I didn't really have time for because I was fixing bugs right down to the wire.

The intention was always that you could keep playing after "winning" the game, in order to amass more and more cash, and strive for the high score. To that purpose, I implemented a little microservice for recording high scores, and was planning to put together a webpage to display the high scores. But I discovered that for technical reasons around publishing on itch.io, the version running on itch.io can't send your scores to my service (your browser forbids it for security reasons). So instead, to make sure I have something playable and winnable for the 7DRL, I currently have the game end in "victory" when you have enough money to pay off your debts and have escaped to the safety of deep space. If I can figure out in the near future how to get the score submission working from inside itch.io, I'll be sneaking that in as an update.

There are a few oddities in the map system I can't quite track down yet, but aside from that I'm pretty happy with the result. There's definitely some enhancements I want to make to the game going forward (more level generator types, number balancing, more ships for you to play with, &c), but I'll be leaving the 7drl version as-is aside from bug fixes-- and I'll probably run the updated versions off my own website instead of here on itch.io, anyway, so that they can talk to the highscore service.

Hello! My 7DRL is Duck Tape Hero, a game in which you are a heroic duck who uses a roll of duct tape to solve all its problems.

https://seregsarn.itch.io/duck-tape-hero

I bit off a bit more than I could chew this year, but by aggressively cutting content I managed to get to a thing that is playable and beatable. In fact, I put way too many healing items in, so it feels super easy to me.