Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• Nothing too out of the ordinary here, but everything is done nicely. The game looks very pretty, the UI is presented nicely, and it plays well & without bugs. I enjoy the map generation, the layouts work well for the gameplay and are varied without much dead space. Occasionally it's hard to find the stairs because of LoS blockers, but otherwise it flows well. Monster AI is the real draw here, and each enemy does behave unique in a way that builds into a nice set of challenges. Loot is nice, but barebones; you see the same items quite a lot, and it's pretty quick to find the best drops available (seemingly). The game plays like a stealth game, there's very few combat encounters you can take Even with defensive gear most enemies can deal 1/3rd of your HP or more. But it is fun to work your way around enemies and keep doing. Dwarves and Wraths are the standouts here, their mechanics are the most troublesome to keep moving and force fights. I probably killed more wraths than any other enemy. Vampires/Goblins fill the basic case while Ogres are pretty rare and skippable. Warlocks are neat, but their movement makes them generally not worth fighting. Mimics are a doozy, I think they're one mechanic that works the least. Their huge stats effectively mean once Mimics start showing up it isn't worth looting any items. It doesn't help that the item pool seems exhausted by that point so there's little value in most new items anyways. To make matters worse they make the game *easier* because they reduce the density of threatening monsters like dwarves, vampires, and wraths. Other than that mechanically maybe this leans a bit too much into stealth. There's very little reason to ever fight a monster and most of them you can skip around without any serious trouble. If expanded, I think you either would need to rebalance combat to be more worthwhile, or you would want to lean into stealth/evasion and design around that. Otherwise it's a fun and well polished roguelike. It all works, and it's great discovering the new enemies. It just needs more gameplay and direction to really make it click into something worth mastering.
• Completeness 3 I didn't run into any bugs, and overall the game was very stable. It did feel like there were a few features missing though, an ending being the biggest of them. Aesthetics 3 The visual style was succinct and effective, there were few times when I mistook two different enemies for each other, or didn't understand what I was getting attacked by. Some of the glyph choices were a little questionable though, for instance purple for the potions was really hard to see against the background. Also, the tiles in general were really small, it would have been nice to be able to resize the window to make them larger. Fun 3 The enemies were particularly interesting to fight, as each one had its own unique behaviour and abilities. The AI was also quite interesting, as it would try and get into a position where it could get the first hit on you, and it required some planning to get around that little bit of cleverness. The stats system was a little broken, as defence was clearly the most powerful stat by a landslide, but that didn't have too much of a negative effect on the experience. Innovative 3 As mentioned above, the enemy AI was very cool. Other than that though, mostly standard roguelike mechanics. Scope 3 While there isn't a huge amount of content here, the fact that it was made from scratch in C++ is enough to warrant the score. Roguelike 4 This is most definitely a roguelike.
• TinyRL is a turn based traditional roguelike and the first attempt by the author at writing a roguelike ever. The fact that they were able to complete a functional game within a week given this is a feat worth being proud of. The game uses the traditional ascii interface, but was written in SDL so a "double sized" version was available and greatly appreciated by this reviewer. With larger letters and a faint by noticeable color scheme the action was always clear. TinyRL follows the Rogue mold closely, with weapons, shields and health potions being the items and bump combat. One small addition is the grass terrain type and the possibility to lose enemies with it. The game has no fixed end state that I could find, having a high score system with gold and kills being combined. Though every year as the community continues to explore new themes, mashups, and ideas, there is something to be said for revisiting the past classics to recapture some of their magic. I was able to use this game as an example of what a "original" roguelike looked and player like to my children during testing. Well done!