Hello all,

I'm working on a new roguelike project called Merl. I'm a big fan of dungeon crawlers and RPGs in general and I'm very excited to be working on this project. It is still very early in development and a lot is still undefined, but clearly there will be dungeon crawling, and looting, and there will be 16bits!

You can already play a very early version of Merl in WebGL, Desktop, and Android formats:

https://pixeltrollgames.itch.io/merl

Merl is made using the FES Retro Game Framework:

https://pixeltrollgames.itch.io/fes

Monsters now drop any items that they're carrying upon death. Since crates are a type of monster they drop items too!

Currently they drop a crazy amount of items, as part of a loot & inventory test.

When dropping an item the surrounding 3x3 area is checked and the "most empty" tile is chosen. This helps to prevent too much item stacking. If there are too many items in the area they are stacked and upon stepping on a stack the player can pick which item from the stack to grab.

The inventory screen mostly works, it lets you organize items and drop them on the ground, can't equip anything yet though.

Recently I worked on inventory/equipment, you can now equip items. Still need to add special handling for 2H weapons. Equipping items also has no actual effect yet...

• Added minimap
• Added a simple healthbar
• Added outlines to characters and items to make them pop a little more, I found that previously they were blending with the background too much. I would really love some feedback on this change!

Some more updates recently,

• Redesigned the look of existing dungeon proc gen, new floors
• Added exterior forest map which kinda ties into the title screen! For fun I added clouds that fly by on this map
• Added cave map which at the moment is pretty similar in layout to forest map
• Added support for animated tilemap tiles, used right now to animate water and lava
• I consolidated all the existing UI into the side bar, so now the inventory and equipment is visible all the time. I initially resisted this idea but I think it is significantly better and more user friendly, at some cost of screen realestate
• You can now drink potions! The UI mechanism for this is currently experimental. When you pick up a potion from your inventory the character portrait changes expression and a little "DRINK" label bounces on top of the portrait, you drink the potion by dropping it on the portrait. Its a little gimmicky, but at the same time works very well on touch devices, which I'm always keeping in mind as I design the UI
• While messing around with procgen I added a Unity Editor extension that lets me dump maps in ascii form at various stages of their creation. This is purely for debugging purposes, but I thought it might be interesting to share. Unity lacks a good monospaced debug console, so I might develop this console further and add it to the FES offering in future releases