itch.io

future updates will add bosses, more heroes, more items, unlockables, etc. hopefully that's enough to make it fun

It's fun but the sound effects are absolutely awful, the sword in particular. Had to play muted.

excellent game; a unique idea and very fun

These are fantastic, I hope you make more NES packs 🙏

Was just thinking of this, for the same reason, dungeon design.  Would love to see it added as a feature.

had to give up at area 5, too frustrating, but it was fun until that point. disappointed I didn't get to see the end.

if native exporting to game engines is added I would like to see Godot as an option

Really neat tool. I could see myself using this for a jam game when I need levels quick and the deadline is approaching, it's an easy way to add in some variety and level decor without needing to put any significant thought or time into it.

For anything larger than a jam game I think I would wind up being restricted by the limit of 8 additional rulesets - is it a technical limitation for there only being 8? Or a design choice? Either way, for a larger level with more going on I would want more than just 8.

I also had some thoughts about the object tool. As it is, it's good for placing essential level components (player, goal, doors, at most a few enemies), but I can see it becoming overbearing if you want more than a dozen level objects. The property system is great and I think it would be very useful to have a "sprite" property to make visualizing objects in the level a bit easier. An option for a grid-style object selection would work well, especially if you could set a sprite property - you'd be able to find the object you're looking for a lot quicker than scrolling through a list.

Last thing I thought of is that it would be nice to load more than one tileset at a time. When I'm making a game I organize my tilesets by theme, and if I want to make a level that mashes up 2 separate themes I'd pull from 2 different tilesets. Having the option to only load a single tileset forces me to combine all my tilesets which would make organizing and editing them a bit of a pain.

It's possible that my ideas are pushing scope beyond what you had in mind but with some additions and improvements I think this would completely replace the older and less intuitive 2d mapping tools for a lot of people. The interface is clean, easy to navigate, and it took me a whole 5 minutes to figure out how all the ruleset and pattern stuff worked.

configurable controls will be in the next demo

for this demo you can rebind the sword to x if you open the inventory with escape and press z then x

I'm glad you enjoyed it, join the discord or follow my twitter if you want to see future updates on the game

install Direct X

GameMaker Studio 1.4

Thanks for the report, all softlocks have been fixed. Just uploaded the updated files.

I appreciate the extensive feedback. 

I wanted to have more enemies that didn't require crouching and a more engaging boss fight but I ran out of time, I assumed most people wouldn't make it to the boss anyway, not even I did during most of my playtests. I'm surprised and impressed you made it as far as you did. 

I'm working on a full game version of this with levels instead of enemy waves so I'll work on improving the controls and attacking. 

release when