The One Road by Dietrich Epp

[raw]
made by Dietrich Epp for LD26 (COMPO)
This is the online playable version.

This is an RPG with: one town, one road, one dungeon, and one boss. It's a straight line to victory... or defeat.

This seems to work for me (including audio) on Chrome, IE10, Firefox, and Safari although audio playback seems laggy on Firefox. It works on my old PowerPC Mac from 2005, for crying out loud, if you don't hear audio after starting a new game try a different browser. Or don't, it's not like I'm your boss.

TOOLS: Everything is done in Javascript with no frameworks. In my timelapse, you can see me Google "how to make a simple HTML5 canvas game" about two hours into the contest. Graphics with GIMP. Music with Logic, Reason, guitar, bass, and MIDI keyboard. SFX with microphone, Amadeus, Logic, Reason, and a stick of celery.

BUGFIXES: In-battle potion formulas corrected (there's a difference between = and +=), and hitting "escape" during a battle no longer locks the game.

POST-COMPO VERSION: Armor, sword, and hit sprites were added. These sprites were created during the compo but never inserted into the game. Fixed out-of-battle potion formula.

SOURCE CODE: Everything is in "game.js".

Ratings

Coolness 100% 1
Overall 3.41 323
Audio 3.46 138
Fun 3.44 198
Graphics 3.18 452
Humor 2.64 306
Innovation 2.40 1044
Mood 3.08 409
Theme 2.76 1169

Feedback

Linus Lindberg
29. Apr 2013 · 08:42 UTC
Haha.. cool game :)
errorage
29. Apr 2013 · 13:21 UTC
That was fun! :)
Jod
29. Apr 2013 · 13:25 UTC
Potions are awesome! I was at 22/30hp and it gave me 73/30hp. I choose to interpret this as the shopkeeper accidentally giving me the +1 potion instead of the normal ones.

Quite charming little game, played it on Hard. Enjoyed it! Great audio!
DustyStylus
29. Apr 2013 · 14:23 UTC
Nice production! Great audio. When confronted by the red imp, I pressed escape when I wasn't doing any damage and seemed to lock the game somehow? (i.e., couldn't attack or leave). I broke it. :(
EdoMiyamoto
29. Apr 2013 · 14:32 UTC
Very fun !
AndyBumpkin
29. Apr 2013 · 14:36 UTC
Nice, won on easy mode, didn't go for the hardest mode (I felt clever by then and didn't want to ruin it!)

The attack sound effects were a bit lacking and in stark contrast to the music which was good.

Good stuff :D
robertcalvert
29. Apr 2013 · 15:05 UTC
This game has a nice feel to it. I only played on easy (im a noob) but it was very enjoyable.
yetanother
29. Apr 2013 · 17:11 UTC
Nice work, for a game made on a weekend!
sanojian
29. Apr 2013 · 17:20 UTC
Great presentation. Great music. Really enjoyable!
Guardian_Bob
29. Apr 2013 · 18:01 UTC
Escape locked the main screen for me, and I was able to hit escape during a fight leaving me with no menu. Despite that, it was fun. A solid entry.
GertJohnny
29. Apr 2013 · 19:02 UTC
I got jumped by two rats right at the start on easy mode and got rocked. Other than the balance issues, nice work !
moomoo112
30. Apr 2013 · 02:46 UTC
seemed to get stuck when moving occasionally and then it just jumped around.. interesting though
LizEngland
30. Apr 2013 · 04:29 UTC
Great fun, and the music was really catchy.
HelkeGames
30. Apr 2013 · 05:31 UTC
Nice game! Well Done xD
William Bundy
30. Apr 2013 · 07:51 UTC
I had a lot of fun with it. The graphics were really good, and it had a wonderful feel of Chrono Trigger to it. Unfortunately, it seems like some things don't run properly in firefox, my browser of choice for linux, but that's not a big issue as I have chromium installed too.
hissssssssss
30. Apr 2013 · 10:02 UTC
Twice the game froze on me after fighting imps, when I had the best gear and after crossing the bridge. I never heard any sound, either.
Still, it might be a browser issue for me and not a problem with the game. I enjoyed it nonetheless.
mewmew27
30. Apr 2013 · 22:51 UTC
Cool game, sweet tunes and graphics. I had the same escape button issue other commenters mentioned, but also I noticed that when I used an item, rather than granting me 50 points HP, it brought my HP down to 50, which was a bummer at higher levels. Was it meant to do this? Started using just Elixer, so I triumphed nonetheless.
richtx
01. May 2013 · 01:10 UTC
Enjoyed it. Embarrassed to admit I didn't get far on Easy.
Per
01. May 2013 · 06:59 UTC
I love those rpgs, can't stop playing!
You did a great job with this game.
Very nice music as well!
Test User
01. May 2013 · 07:39 UTC
Nice audio, I like the music. A few balance issues with the monsters, but still fun overall
hypp
01. May 2013 · 07:47 UTC
Fun! And very nice audio!
LTyrosine
01. May 2013 · 17:57 UTC
Nice game. More help would be cool but I liked it. Amazing that was done in pure javascript. I liked the graphics too.
jim3wg
01. May 2013 · 20:03 UTC
Fun !
Galvesmash
01. May 2013 · 22:37 UTC
Great game!
Nanolotl
02. May 2013 · 03:39 UTC
Really cool. The transitions between battles and the overworld were a nice touch. I also enjoyed the shop keeper's dialogue.
recursive frog
02. May 2013 · 07:18 UTC
Best use of Potato in the competition. :)
GranaDa
02. May 2013 · 15:34 UTC
Nice game!
SnoringFrog
02. May 2013 · 21:04 UTC
Beat it on both easy and hard (tried impossible, got beaten badly). Hit a bug with elixir in the compo version, and it spiked by HP/MP well above their limits. Other than that, no problems and I enjoyed it .
Zim the Fox
03. May 2013 · 05:04 UTC
Hey, I wanna know what your solutions were! And there is no unorthodox solution, just creative ones (or unexpected ones. I didn't have much time to make levels, but I intentionally made them so you could solve them in different manners).

The game is an RPG boiled down to its essentials and it works great. I managed to beat the impossible difficulty (at first I thought it was seriously impossible, but once you kill the first monster and get a potion, the rest is just grinding ;P)

And potatoes! They are so OP!
PPLo
03. May 2013 · 22:46 UTC
That was fun!
Simple but all the main RPG features are here. Your game made me think about Half Minute Hero. Something similar in the mood.
Good game :)
jacklehamster
04. May 2013 · 05:55 UTC
Very nice. RPG is always one of my favorite genre
someone
04. May 2013 · 22:00 UTC
Heh, good game. Yay potatoes!
messiano
05. May 2013 · 04:31 UTC
Great RPG. Actually, pretty amazing for only 48hs! Congrats.
Royal Railway
05. May 2013 · 05:31 UTC
I think I saw you telling us about this on IRC before you started! What's your name there? At #ludumdare. Anyhow, this was fun. Great music, helping with a pretty nice mood. I grinded my way up to higher levels and bought everything before I went on to the boss, whose fight was fittingly minimalistic. The vendor had nice lines. Overall, one of the best so far, as for the game. As for the theme, while this was minimalism from a point of view (compared to other RPGs), I'm not 100 % sure of how well it sticks to the concept of minimalism in its own right, though, but still good. A short, solid game. One bug I found was that I was able to overload my stats from the menu (http://i.imgur.com/fQmarSi.png), but I see that was fixed in the post-compo version. The other was that when I died (post-compo), the game reloaded with me still being level 2. If that's a bug, it might have something to do with me spamming the return key as the game was reloading, to quickly pass the title screen.
TammiLion
06. May 2013 · 09:38 UTC
Fun to play. Liked the speed of playing ^^
GSM Productions
06. May 2013 · 10:05 UTC
Great! I loved the music and sounds, and I loved how you really managed to strip down the JRPG formula to its very basic core. Really, really cool!
DST
06. May 2013 · 11:01 UTC
Thanks for telling me my link was broken :)

Great game you made, having played a lot of old consoles, the graphics reminds me of something from a better (and simpler) time, the gameplay itself also works very well :)
Tifu
07. May 2013 · 21:41 UTC
Good job, completely linear RPG satirising the state of current games in the genre, maybe? %D
Seriously, nice concept, great music. It's a little easy to get to a state where only the king demon things can hurt you (on hard mode, I was level 9 with the best armour and nothing could damage me except them and the boss).
Typedeaf
12. May 2013 · 00:08 UTC
Pretty neat base to build upon. How ever, it wasn't really well balanced... at all xP
lightnarcissus
13. May 2013 · 02:37 UTC
Cute game with some really charming aesthetics.
MinionStudios
14. May 2013 · 01:39 UTC
Fun and awesome I like the quick leveling system
Idovoodoo
15. May 2013 · 19:28 UTC
That was awesome! Well done :)
rogueNoodle
16. May 2013 · 15:13 UTC
Very cool entry. I found it pretty tough even on easy, but I'm not that great at turn-based rpgs :P
Evil Cult
17. May 2013 · 01:19 UTC
Addictive! This is probably the game I spent the longest on the whole compo :) (I Played through once on hard then once on impossible). Things I might add would be a Run button and maybe a scroll of town portal.