itch.io

Thanks for the advice, something to consider if I return to this game and finish it. Though at this point I’ve already learned so much more about gamedev I’d probably start from scratch.

I’m quite fond of the excessive alliteration, but I agree it’s quite the mouthful. ;)

Though “Drungeon” sounds a bit close to “Gungeon” and similar names, so I’m a bit worried that another portmanteau of dungeon might be easily confused.

In retrospect, I realize that if I’d had time to implement weapon cooldowns as planned, a lot of the pacing issues with combat vs. movement would have been easier to solve. I could simply have lowered the time per tick to make movement smoother and more responsive, while also avoiding combat becoming too frantic by having weapon cooldowns over several ticks.

Unfortunately, button-mashing is pretty much it for now for combat. I was planning to introduce cooldown for attacks, and things like different weapons, consumables and special abilities to make it more interesting and bigger differences between the characters.

Yeah, all victims of too little time and being a one-man team.

The movement rate is something that I would have liked spending more time tweaking, possibly adding a dash or similar. Movement is tied to the internal tick/round system, like a rogue-like, and in the current implementation, it’s a trade-off between actions (attacks) happening too fast, or movement is slow. After the jam I might revisit that, possibly making the grid movement “softer” (while still on a grid), so it feels more responsive.

I also really wanted to add more SFX in general, e.g. attacking, getting hurt, movement, crackle from the torch/campfire, etc. It would be really cool to hear the monsters moving around in the dark. High on my list for possible post-jam improvements is adding more audio-visual cues to combat, especially when getting attacked from the sides and back.

If this type of auto-require is added, I hope it's opt-in. For some apps, require order matters and it's a real pain to debug...