We made some changes to item generation that should make this issue less common. I still sometimes see the generic result on "A Square's Flatland", but it doesn't happen as often anymore (and if it does happen, it usually only happens on level 1 of the dungeon). Monster generation seems fine, albeit not super creative. I think the model just has some trouble on this particular prompt for some reason :/
AnimatedRNG
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Fun game, and I really liked the art and music. They went well with the game. I looked over the github page and saw some of the features that you wanted to add. Here's a few other features that might also improve the experience.
- Some small animations. Doesn't need to be anything too dramatic, but an indicator that an attack happened would be nice. Or that you're being attacked. Otherwise everything feels kinda static.
- Some initial equipment might also be nice, just to reduce RNG. Or just spawn some random equipment around the player.
- I'm not totally sure how the armor calculation works, but in some cases it looks like certain armor is strictly better than other armor? In that case, should it just auto-equip? That seems like a nice default.
- As you said in the github README, it's very easy to wander into a high-level biome and instantly die in one hit. That's how most of my runs ended. As a game balance thing, I think it's okay to throw in some high-level monsters into a level, as long as there's a clear indicator that they're hard/impossible to beat, and you have some opportunity to run away from them. The enemy level indicator that's in the game helps a bit with the former, but yeah it would be nice if they didn't instantly kill the player.
Overall, great job! I especially appreciated the music and art :)
Very very cool. Kinda reminded me of the old flash game Motherlode, and had a similar gameplay loop (between having to come up to the surface to refuel, avoid taking damage from mining, a number of upgrades to each part of the miner, etc). Some small thoughts/tweaks that could further improve the game --
1) I think other commenters suggested implementing an elevator or something like that to the game. I think just reducing the fuel penalty for falling (or make it zero) and then an "auto-fall" feature might be nice.
2) Animations for bombs, rockets, etc. I think I saw some quick animations both, but would be nice to have a better indicator that a bomb was used, etc.
3) Maybe instead of using upper-case letters for the rock/ore types, those could just be filled tiles of a solid color? (like 1-bit graphics) Then the enemies can be upper-case ASCII characters and it might be a bit more readable.
I'll add more if I think of anything else. I really enjoyed this entry though. It just needs some catchy music and I'd be hooked :)
Hi xyncht, thanks for reporting this to us! I was able to replicate some of the behavior that you're describing. The monsters seemed appropriate to the setting, but the items were generic, which suggests that something went wrong. My guess is that our item prompting is a bit too tailored towards traditional roguelike themes.
I tried a few variations on the prompt, and some of them also had the same issue, but not all of them. In particular, the prompt "Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions" or "Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin Abbot" do not have this issue (although the AI definitely doesn't get the literary reference :) We can take a look tomorrow at the server logs and try to figure out what happened.