itch.io

Thanks for the great feedback! Right now the letter pool is a fixed probability for each letter. It should be ~40% of your letters are vowels, which if you're like me and carelessly make short words with multiple vowels, then you will start to run dry. I do recommend using the spells and items to manage your letters and find more of what you need. In the future I think moving to a system where the odds change based on the letters you are holding could help to make the experience smoother.

You won't be able to just open the page in a browser and have it run, you would need to serve the page using a simple http server to host the files.

I'll take a look at bundling up an executable that's runnable on desktop.

Deceptively this plays more like a stealth game than a hack & slash, but that makes it more interesting. Interesting monster AI. Eventually you can go infinite and get absurdly high scores, this is what I got before running out of time to play and killing myself intentionally:

Overall it was fun to explore the systems here and the UI is very nice and clean.

Thanks for the feedback! The mapgen bugs have been tricky for me, but I think I nailed down the "door to nowhere" issue. It may have also been responsible for inaccessible areas. Newest version hopefully fixes those issues.

Just wanted to say thanks for the bug report and I am looking into it, but don't have a fix or cause yet.

Thanks for playing and the nice words!

There's a Flask of Restoration you start with and is restored every time you rest at a shrine _, but the UI doesn't lead you to use it that well. If you missed it, that should help a lot on the first floor to get your bearings. You can also return to a shrine and rest to change the map and find a more favorable path, but I agree sometimes the initial spawns are a little intense.

Fantastic game, been playing it quite a lot over the past week + and still am not tired of it. 

Really appreciate the balance on the pieces and the scoring interaction means most high scoring boards generally strike a good balance of the 6 pieces which makes the game thematically satisfying no matter how long you play it.

The RNG nature of the game is surprisingly manageable given what you'd think on first look. There's numerous optimizations and tricks to build better boards and score well. Most of the really noticeable variance is in just a few cards that are more finicky: forests & mountain adjacency (any forests not adjacent to mountains are a big drain on points) and waves only having one way to contribute more than 2 points (house adjacency).

A bit beyond the scope of this great game, but one thing that can be really satisfying for games like this is a score mode that averages multiple runs together. It can give a little something more to work towards that doesn't rely quite so much on hitting great draws eventually.

Sorry to hear about the lost source code :(.

Here you go. I still didn't manage to have a fast run through where I  skip to the purple key and back before the angler fish, but maybe I'll come back for that someday.

Really great graphics, and I like the gameplay idea a lot, I think it has a lot of potential.

I think the abilities need more balance and work though, there's a lot of situations you'll lose that you have no control over. Like:

• Spawning on a floor next to a ghost
• Teleport putting you into a bad situation
• Teleport 1 killing you outright (land on ghost/wall)
• Chaos causing the ghost to randomly move into you next turn

Just in general there's not a lot of ways to actually make the ghosts walk into each other unless they happen to spawn in a way that makes that happen. Your control there is very limited. So you're hoping for good RNG with the ghosts so you can get some extra mana early on to access the more powerful spells.

This reminds me a lot of Chip's Challenge. I think I could well under 100s with a skip, but my hand is tired.

Clever Idea, and already makes for some interesting ideas. I think with a little more work you could have something pretty great.

Using your resources to their maximum potential feels great, and there's a lot of depth in that aspect to the game, but I think there's maybe a flip side that could use some work. There's no mechanism to 'pass up' a resource or attack. So that creates a problem where an attack is not very efficient (say hits 1 square) or a resource is not useful (yellow when you have 5+ of them), but you end up having to eventually collect it anyways just to cycle and spawn a new resource. This is a big part of what eventually causes you to lose more so than the enemies; at some point you can't afford to waste turns just to pick up a yellow resource you have no use for so you end up with 1, then 2, then 3 of a resource you don't want while getting starved out on the other resources.

It's quite the thing to setup and score a point, and quite a lot of fun to do it. Really clever mechanic and it's fun to try and wrap your brain around it.

My only complaint sounds sort of silly, but I spent an awful long time trying to push enemies into the graphical side of the walls thinking it would do something. Especially the spiked wall. 

I agree! Fun graphics and theme.

Clever theme! The gameplay is pretty straightforward once you get the mechanic, but it's an interesting take and it's pretty fun to try and manage your time. I wish death was a little more forgiving, the game is more interesting the further you get but replaying the first 3-5 levels gets a bit repetitive and it's easy to make a mistake later and die suddenly.

Interesting Game! I think the mechanics work well for a rules obscured setting and they were fun to deduce. Once I did get a handle on the rules I did wish I had a little more control, it can be quite challenging to handle even 1-2 health enemies let alone the 3+ health ones! Overall a really nice small sized game, I enjoyed playing it.

Working on it! I'm implementing particles right now so you'll be able to see where the gunshots go, who is shooting at who, and so on. Right after that, or as part of the same work, I'm hoping to implement a more involved system for the ranged combat. Both so it's more intense and so that there's more room for different weapons to have different uses.

Really enjoyed how this one plays out and moves on from a pretty standard door & switch puzzler. I think it's just about the right length, the hook doesn't get stale before the game ends, though I do think there's some visually ambiguous parts (it can be hard to tell how the doors will behave in response to the switches). The difficulty is also pretty low, which is mostly a good thing, but a harder level or two to cap off the experience would be great.

Plays pretty well and looks pretty good. The movement/drifting mechanic is really fun to interact with and works pretty well for making puzzle situations. The content you have is all pretty good in terms of the enemies and obstacles. All in all pretty fun.

I think you could maybe recharge ink on going to the next level, at least if all the enemies are killed. Of you clear the enemies of the level you have the luxury to refill your ink anyways so there ends up being an extra chore to most levels.

I think the idea would work even better as a handcrafted puzzle game where you could really add a lot of interesting enemies, hazards, and obstacles and make more difficult challenges without risking impossible scenarios.

Very clever! I like the gameplay and objectives, it's a great use of chess moves.

It would be great if you weren't allowed to kill yourself since the game already tells you what moves will kill you, it's really just a matter of making a mistake or miss clicking.  It's especially important because there's a few gotchas that aren't entirely obvious, like the fact that enemies can move through other enemies. Since they move simultaneously this makes sense, but is unintuitive if you think of it as chess. Also that the 'x' on an enemies tile implies that another piece covers that tile (which in hindsight is obvious, but is also easy to miss).

Love the visuals and audios of this! Great use of ASCII and it looks and sounds amazing.

The gameplay is pretty interesting, but could probably use a bit more time and balance, but it's real fun building up your board with flowers. If the goal is to gain as much money as possible you can do that by sitting on one money flower in the corner of the board indefinitely. If the goal is to grow a plant in each tile, at some point you really end up at the mercy of the enemy spawn patterns and which flowers you are offered. At around 7 or so flowers there starts being a lot of enemy spawn configurations that you can't defend in time unless there's some mechanical hook I am missing. The two biggest challenges are the next enemy way spawning immediately and with only one turn notice and the fact that enemies can kill the flower you are standing on.

I never did figure out what the yellow squares mean, or any insight into the enemy AI beyond them acting every other turn.

All and all I really enjoyed playing around with this. Thanks!

Thanks for the nice feedback, glad you had some fun.

I'm definitely hoping to expand the UI elements and help make the game easier to understand and play, a lot of the missing information is missing because of the time constraints rather than by intention.

Please report any Bugs in this thread here!

Known Bugs:

• 'null' display for weapon souls and xp instead of 0.

Not at the moment, I may consider it once the code is in better shape.

The display is handled by Rot-JS though: https://www.npmjs.com/package/rot-js

Additionally I have open sourced the ECS library I made to back the project: https://www.npmjs.com/package/ecs-next

Thanks for the heads up! There was an issue where the storm was collapsing much faster than intended for the first few movements. The newest version should resolve this issue.

Post-7DRL versions of B-line will be available here:

https://slogo.itch.io/b-line

This version will remain as-is to preserve the 7DRL entry.

I'm after a lightweight Web deploy with a more straightforward API but with good animation, gui, and effect support.  Haxe Flixel is the engine I'm most interested in at the moment, but it means I'd need to do a fair bit of prep getting used to haxe and the environment.

The other option is to use phaser so I can code in typescript and take advantage of the large code library I've built up in that environment. If I don't feel like I'm making enough progress with Haxe I'll go that route I suppose.

Thanks for the great feedback! A new Mapgen and animation support are my top 2 priorities right now before I move on to flesh out the gameplay some more. So hopefully it won't take too long to have something a bit more in depth to play with.

Strange! Enemies should take damage from the void so it must be some sort of bug (clearly), sorry to have your run stopped short because of that :(.

I'd *love* animations, it was basically the next priority on my list of things to do when I hit up against the deadline. I just didn't have any pre-existing code or support for them coming into the jam and couldn't manage it in time. Kind of unfortunate because it really would improve the legibility of the game a ton.

Thanks for the great feedback! I'm definitely hoping to make an addition version that fixes some of the issues you bring up. The difficulty is interesting, I had gone in expecting the end game to be more intense as the enemy density increased and the play area shrunk, but it ended up almost the exact opposite where the beginning is very hectic until you can horde some resources and get a weapon.

For moving down corridors you can use SHIFT+WASD or SHIFT+HJKL to move 1 tile & end your turn instantly, but I think I'll need to come up with some more ideas on making movement feel fluid with the energy system.

Awesome! I thought I saw you in Vivafringe's Discord. Glad you're enjoying it

I think there's some value in playing without knowing the language, a lot of initial fun of the game is about the discovery of wand abilities (it also happens to be a really fun & deep game to try and clear).

The Vivafringe posts mentioned before are here:  [CAUTION SPOILERS]

https://vivafringe.wordpress.com/2017/12/27/cinco-paus-wand-ability-list/

https://vivafringe.wordpress.com/2018/01/06/cinco-paus-treasure-ability-list/

Game plays great on Windows, but it's a bit cramped to use the arrow keys + a right handed mouse. Supporting WASD controls in addition to arrows would be awesome if you can.

Glad you enjoyed it, it's always great to hear feedback! If you like this style of game I highly recommend checking out Michael Brough's games like Cinco Paus and Imbroglio, they were a big inspiration for this game.

http://www.smestorp.com/