itch.io

Thanks for the comment!

As far as I know all levels have exactly 3 keys. Is it possible that the other keys were just unidentified (the "???"s)? It's not impossible that the level generation has a bug somewhere, but I haven't encountered any issues with number of keys.

Music and sound effects are definitely high on the list of things I'd like to add whenever I get around to releasing a post-7DRL version.

In terms of difficulty and luck, that's also been my experience playing through it. It's winnable at least some of the time but there's a large amount of variance in difficulty depending on what combination of enemy types you run into. At a minimum, I think it was a mistake to have a random number of links per level. If you've got multiple next levels to choose between then you can skip the worst ones but currently the level generation sometimes only generates one option.

The next major change I have planned is probably going to make the game significantly easier (I want to give the player access to limited use special abilities, but ran out of time to include them in the 7DRL version). I expect some of that to be offset by compensating difficulty increases elsewhere, but if nothing else it should give you more options for getting out of bad situations and/or avoiding getting into them in the first place.

This was a lot of fun. It didn't feel like it was generally worth attacking enemies directly, but getting enemies to kill each other made for an interesting tactical challenge.

There's definitely something fun here. It can be a bit tricky to avoid getting stuck in situations where it's impossible to avoid taking damage and sometimes that feels unfair (like when teleport drops you into a single square hole or you get a particularly bad starting position), but mostly that just adds some challenge. It does feel like most of the challenge is at the start of levels, though. Once you have more breathing room and have thinned out the enemies a bit it become much easier to deal with everything.

Having enemies with random sets of triggered effects that can help you, harm you, make that enemy stronger, or buff other enemies is an interesting idea that feels like it has a lot of potential. And having a party of allies with those effects adds a lot of potential depth. But in actual execution you can trivially outpace enemy max health via damage gain, one shot everything, and just not take damage.

To add some challenge, it probably shouldn't be possible to boost your health and damage arbitrarily high. Probably buffs should have a limited duration and/or reset between floors? Things which prevent the player from fighting enemies one at a time like ranged attacks and enemies which are faster than the player would probably also help.

Also, it wasn't too hard to figure out what was going on, but the game could really use some help text to explain the systems, especially what the different letters for the ally/enemy abilities mean.

Automating the part where you actually have to play through a level made for a fun challenge of evaluating difficulty and plotting your way through the generated skill trees. Definitely enjoyed this one quite a bit.

A few things I noticed:

• Being able to repeatedly buff yourself is pretty overpowered relative to a lot of other skill options. Speed and evasion in particular are a very strong combination if you can repeated buff both of them. I don't think that's a problem, exactly. You still need some way to actually kill stuff and some fights can still kill you if you're not careful to avoid them. But it would be nice to have a greater range of viable strategies.
• The game has a tendency to hang for a while if you can't win quickly, though to some extent that's probably expected since it has to simulate an ungodly number of turns while you and the enemies repeatedly miss each other.
• The list where you choose which skill tree to use can have the same skill tree listed multiple times.
• Greater Attack Shrines feel far more threatening than most other stuff. I don't know that that's a problem since a big part of the game is picking which fights to skip, but they ended up being the main thing I looked for when evaluating a fight.
• Somewhere around floor 70 I had enough teleports saved up to skip all the way to the victory screen, which felt a bit anticlimactic. Even just detecting when that happens and having a button to skip directly through the rest of the floors instead of having to do it one floor at a time would probably help a lot.

It took a bit to work out what was going on, but it's a neat spatial puzzle. Getting through a single run was fun, but I don't know that there's enough depth currently that I'd replay it. The strategy mostly seems to be comboing items that add damage with items which can achieve large damage multipliers, with limited variation in how you go about that. Defending against enemy attacks was nice when you could pull it off but seemed less relevant latter in the game as enemy damage numbers got too big to effectively defend against.

A few quality of life features I would have appreciated:

• The ability to undo actions (at least for moving items around, attacks would be nice too but IIRC there's an item that draws an item from your deck when it breaks, making attacks nondeterministic)
• A damage total for the entire attack and/or a preview of enemy health after the attack
• An indicator for which side of the suitcase would be on the bottom after the attack to make it a little easier to reason about how things would be moving around

Overall, an interesting concept executed with a nice amount of polish.

I love the way the ascii graphics, bullets, and explosions look and the turn based dodging of projectiles was a lot of fun! It tended to devolve into a game of dodging the initial volley of bullets and then dealing with the few enemies that managed to survive all the friendly fire, though, which presumably wasn't exactly what you were going for. I did enjoy the chain explosions and getting enemies to hit each other, but the current rate at which it happens seems a bit excessive. Still very challenging and satisfying to complete a sector, though.

I enjoyed the stealth aspects of this game, but combat felt overpowered. Probably item use should take a turn (I'd probably keep it so the enemy that you attacked doesn't get to move, but it's a bit weird that all the other skeletons stand still and wait for you to kill your target).

Some other highlights: the lucky item mechanic is an interesting alternative to HP, and the map generation looks great and works well for stealth gameplay.

My main complaint is there's a fair amount of jank in the controls (this is playing in the browser in Chrome):

• As you noted, moving stuff between the belt and pack when one of them is full can soft lock
• If you have enough items then pressing 'L' just immediately moves the item in the 'L' slot of your pack to the belt
• Movement keys like 'A' and 'C' will still cause you to move even if you press them while interacting with the belt or pack
• Inconsistent lettering of belt items, if the first belt slot is empty and the second one has something in it, then the move to pack UI will label that item with 'A' but 'B' is the control that will actually move it to the pack
• The auto targeting on weapons often picks a far away enemy to aim at instead of the closest one (and something like Tab to rotate between valid targets would be a nice quality of life feature)

A few other notes:

• Skeletons don't block movement
  
• It would be nice to able to drop items
• It's not obvious what the win condition is. There's a down stairs on depth 10 that isn't usable. I eventually tried ascending back up all the way out of the temple which got me a win screen, but explicitly stating that you need to do this after getting the amulet would be helpful
  
• The game doesn't let you move into the top row or left most column. I saw a down stairs generate on the top row once, but it was depth 10 so I guess it wouldn't have been usable regardless
  
• Going up stairs seems to result in a bunch of unkillable enemies with no HP on that floor. It works pretty well from the perspective of making ascending with the amulet challenging, but it's not clear that this is intentional

Anyways, I think there's a pretty great core here (and even with the issues it's fun to play), but it needs more polish to clean up the bugs and adjust difficulty (descending is pretty easy at the moment since it's pretty easy to just kill everything).

Thanks! That fixes that issue, but I'm now stuck at the end of the Cathy scene with !GotoContinueButton;;;GetTicket

I ran into a bug while encountering Cathy where the text GotoContinueButton;;;CanneleRageMania appears on screen and there doesn't seem to be a way to progress past that point. I'm playing on Linux, if that makes a difference.

Another (but not game breaking) bug I ran into was an error in the Hee Cup scene complaining about $victory = true using an assignment operator instead of an equality operator.

Otherwise, I've been really enjoying the game, it's unreasonably good and the conspiracy board in particular is great for making you feel like you're piecing together the solution to some large overarching mystery.

This was a lot of fun! It took me a handful of tries to win it, but experimenting and figuring out a viable build was pretty satisfying.

Having to power up your ship at the start of combat was nice because it meant that there was always a risk of unlucky early card draw killing you even if your overpowered deck was steamrollering most enemies. That said, the only strategy I found for mitigating that was stacking my deck with a ton of engines since besides having a basic or fusion reactor, none of the topdeck cards seemed consistently useful enough to justify having them. Once you're drawing back up to a full hand every turn, you can use all those evade cards you also have to survive pretty much anything and take your time sifting through your massive deck looking for the cards you need to actually do damage.

I also appreciate that the enemy was playing by the same rules since it led to high variability in what the enemy was able to do, sometimes failing to play anything useful and getting crushed and other times getting an advanced weapons system out early and causing problems. It also led to an amusing accidental cheese where I let my opponent clog up their hand with 4 evade cards so they were only able to play 1 card per turn.

Another observation, early on it's advantageous to fight all the enemies to build out your deck, but once you reach the later sectors it seems better to avoid as many enemies as possible since they don't drop better cards and there's a very real risk of dying to unlucky card draw.

I feel like the game would benefit from more enemy types (maybe including some mini-bosses and/or a final boss) and a bigger variety of cards, but it's a nice amount of content for a 7DRL.

Thanks for the feedback!

If you haven't tried using the examine feature, it lists all of an enemy's special properties (well, except for a few last minute behavioral changes to spiders). I do think there's room for communicating more information without relying on examine, though. Poison is probably the worst offender here. The only place it's explained is if you examine a creature which is already afflicted (potentially yourself). A message log hint like "You can remove the poisoned condition by waiting" the first time per game you're poisoned would probably help a lot. Also, at one point I planned on including static properties like "flying" in the monster list but didn't actually end up implementing it and I can see it helping as a reminder/hint of what the enemy does.

I don't really have an easy solution for diagonal movement clarity, though. I'd probably have to rework my entire UI stack, which I'd like to do anyways at some point though not necessarily for this game specifically.

In any case, I probably won't update the game until judging is over, but I've added some hints about using examine and what status conditions do to the game page.