itch.io

Oh my god this was such an immediately great game, makes me yearn for the Disc Room version of WarioWare!

I forgot to mention - I wrote up some thoughts before starting the game about multi-purpose design choices, and how to capture the design ethos of a game without simply aping specific design decisions (the extreme case leading to cloning): https://medium.com/@djdewitt/how-not-to-make-downwell-3ba4f46315a6

I wanted to really granularize this dual-purpose design ethos and build a sort of taxonomy for it, then use that taxonomy to "procedurally" generate dual-purpose design by randomly pairing actions with multiple consequences. I didn't get to fully explore that vision in the time though, so instead we get this, which creates chaos by randomly assigning more and more consequences to various actions.

One thing I did want to achieve was try and make sure that consequences weren't inherently negative. I only skimmed the surface on this, but there is still a distinct pleasure in getting cursed to auto-fire bullets upon turning, only to turn to perfectly kill an enemy chasing you.

Okay that's all have fun time for sleep for me! :D zzzz