very rough build: https://rwhaling.itch.io/aeon-shifters

Building a fast-paced hack-and-slash roguelike with dynasty warriors/vampire survivors vibes.
Re-using a custom WebGL engine I built last year, with React for all the UI.  Learning React for the first time, which is a hoot, but hopefully this means I don't get bottlenecked on UI stuff and can just copypasta my way through simple stuff.

Using Loren Schmidt's lovely Phosphor sprite set: https://lorenschmidt.itch.io/phosphor

Making good progress so far!  Basic gameplay concepts (fortress, grunts, champions, 2 sides) are in place.  But it's not fun to play yet.

Next up - working on building a "special moves" system - acquiring and upgrading big, colorful AOE attacks to deal with the masses of enemies is the entire point, and I'm hoping that once that is up and running the game will start to feel "fun"

The basic gameplay flow is - there are 8 factions, arranged in a "tournament" layout, and each playthrough the order is randomized.  At the start of a level you choose one of two factions, which offer different kinds of moves/perks as rewards.  I'm thinking about a forgiving loss mechanic where you can go into a "repechage" bracket to acquire more perks at lower difficulty, before retrying the main progression.

The sprites are super inspiring, the 8 factions I have are:

• orcs
• undead
• sirens
• lizards
• wyrms
• drakes
• griffons
• slimes

Update!
Things are going well, new build up:
https://rwhaling.itch.io/aeon-shifters
The big breakthrough was integrating a JS animation library, GSAP, and figuring out how to use it to control parameters on some of my shaders - that turned into the foundation for colorful special move effects and I have found the fun inner loop of the game.  It definitely has turned out sillier, faster, and more arcade-y than I even expected, but I think it's also just more fun than any game I've made before, so I'll take it.  

I cut the list of factions down to 6 - sorry, wyrms and slimes, you are no longer in the running to becoming archons of the new aeon - but really liking how the ones I have turned out, especially the griffons, who are basically just angry geese.

Integrating music and polishing a bit more tomorrow but happy with how things have turned out so far.

Looking forward to checking out a Loren-Schmidt-visuals game!

Clicking the link takes me to a "can't find page" message, though.  Have you set the permissions on the project to be visible beyond yourself?

Thank you!  Just published it now.

Submitted! https://rwhaling.itch.io/aeon-shifters

I'm very happy with how the special moves, animation, and general React UI approach turned out - they all made it possible to implement a more ambitious design than I have in the past.  

I'm a little surprised that the game turned out real-time-ish instead of turn-based, but once I had the special moves running, it just felt "fun" and I wanted to double down on the arcade-y vibe.  Added some music from my last roguelike, Barrow 2, for vibes.

I had to cut a lot of things that I'd originally planned for - gold, perks, stat upgrades, etc. - and the game feels pretty bare-bones.  Most notably, the original plan had been for a randomly-generated map with fortresses, camps, castles, and something much closer to a true musou/dynasty warriors progression - but all of that got cut, so what we have now is a much simpler horde-combat tower-defense thing, but I'm still quite pleased with it.  

I might expand this into a turn-based game with actual maps and more of the cut features sometime, I feel like there is a lot of design space to explore here.