Mr Moneybag by managore

Read This First
a little rogue-like about being a bag of money in a hostile dungeon
collect coins, shoot coins at shopkeepers to buy upgrades, and stay away from reds or shoot coins at them to kill them. you can stand next to shopkeepers to see what they're selling and how many coins it'll cost you. you can even shoot coins at walls to destroy them, but every coin you shoot is one less coin in your bag, so use them sparingly!
reds move after every second step you take, and if you end up next to a red when it's about to move, you lose a coin. if you get hit and have no coins, you're dead, game over!
step on the staircase to go down to the next floor of the dungeon. as you go deeper, enemies get tougher and more common, and shopkeeper prices go up
how many gems can you buy before you die?
also there's no audio, sorry

Controls
* hold down TAB to see what the numbers mean*
press ARROW KEYS (or WASD) to move
hold down SHIFT (or Z or SPACE) and press ARROW KEYS (or WASD) to shoot
press ALT and ENTER to toggle fullscreen
controller also supported (hold A to shoot, hold the shoulder buttons to see what the numbers mean)

About The Game
made in about 15 hours using Gamemaker Studio 1.4 and Aseprite. the colour palette is the beautiful Master Palette by Fleja. the (very basic) pathfinding script and a few helper scripts were taken from Death of a Lich, but everything else was written from scratch including the dungeon generation (which uses a corridor-and-rectangular-room approach)
I really enjoyed making Mr Moneybag and I hope you enjoy playing it!
BUILD VERSIONS
the Original Build is the one made during the 48 hours, with two bug fixes (listed below). the Updated Build includes slightly faster movement, animated reds and dead-end corridor prevention
BUG FIXES
- fixed a game-breaking bug where coin damage wasn't being calculated correctly
- fixed a game-breaking bug where one shopkeeper was improving the wrong stat
Ratings
| Given | 8๐ณ๏ธ | 0๐จ๏ธ |
Played until floor 6, spent all my money on a shopkeeper and ran from a red straight into a one way corridor. Whoops.
Good job on the entry, one of my favorites so far :smile:
Some critique:
-Player seems to move too slow(is there a time delay before each tile movement?), I would speed it up somewhat. If the player wants to move slower they can just tap the movement keys to go one tile at a time, but when I'm holding the keys down, it is a bit irritating how slowly I move.
-Combat was weird sometimes, it would be nice if I could shoot coins at them from a distance of 2 tiles
-Of course add sound & music when you have time.
-The HUD could be more intuitive, so you don't have to use text to show what each thing is. Honestly the only important HUD information that I would be interested in knowing is my health(coins) and my gems.
The graphics are simple in the best way. I like them and I like how the lighting works. Well done with the randomly generated levels. If you make any updates to this game, I want to be notified... the potential here is enormous. Great work Managore!
-Movement can be a little bit faster.
-I missed some intructions on the game (I downloaded the game and close this page before playing, so I couldn't figure out how to shoot coins).
-Some incentive for going down floors. At the moment the best strategy is to clean up every floor, there could be a risk-reward thing when going down to add more spicyness.
-I think coins some times spawn on top of each other.
Great job!
Will you put it on your itch page if you dev it further? And might we see an HTML5 build?
I tried to imagine coin sounds while I was playing the game haha. Really cool stuff though.
Same as @benjamin I also died because of running into a dead end.
Nice additional features would be a mini map and a more elegant solution for the stat UI.
@juicy-vegetable thanks for the feedback and the kind words! I've increased the movement speed when tapping movement keys in the updated version and I think it feels a lot better already. as for shooting from a distance of two tiles, you can do that already. coins keep travelling in a straight line until they hit a red, a wall or a shopkeeper. I'm going to try and see if there's a way to improve the UI, I have a few ideas for that!
@le-slo you're absolutely right about movement being too slow! and if I keep working on it I hope to incorporate the instructions and controls into the game itself so people can't miss it. as for going down floors, I hope that the enemies constantly spawning makes levels more and more dangerous to stay in, but it might need more tweaking
@jharler I appreciate the feedback. the dungeon generation was tough to get working, but it was really satisfying in the end, hope yours was too!
@fazz I'm always happy to hear people's ideas, but you're right, I have a long list of improvements and additions I'm excited to try out eventually. I'm going to put it on itch shortly, though I can't seem to get the html5 version working so it might remain download only
@joemanaco thanks!
@seconddimension glad you liked it, I'm hoping to keep working on it and making it more and more strategic
@barret hopefully you won't have to imagine the coin sounds for too much longer! thanks for the kind words
@petitpois, @adam-elaoud , @fahim-faysal thank you!
@yazara I fixed the dungeon generation in the updated build so that dead ends should be impossible, I realized how much it sucks to end up stuck in that position. going to look into improving the UI in a more fully fleshed out version of the game
@japes thanks! I think I'm going to crack open jfxr soon
I loved how the core mechanic ties everything together, and it also fits the theme like a glove.
Visuals, user interface and controls are clean and clear, and the overall experience feels really smooth. The shopkeepers' shapes hinting at what they offered and having the enemy HP be a part of their graphic were details I appreciated.
Exploration works well in general, but sometimes I missed a minimap. Besides this, eventually levels became somewhat repetitive, but considering those 15 hours of work the amount of content is more than enough, especially given how polished it all feels in general.
Amazing work as usual!
I had to switch back and forth from the game twice: one was when I actively look for explanation of the numbers, and the second time was when I "finished" with the game, about to comment that I noticed the part that say you can... destroy the wall!?!
Mind = Blown. Had to play the game again, ugh!
What I love about the game is the constant evaluation of cost vs benefit while play, in every action in the game.
What I hate the most is there's no indication of "what's now" - number of reds spawned (maybe not that important), remaining coins on this floor (pretty important), how many turn until next red (could be useful).
And I still don't understand the meaning of gem. What are they for, after all? Maybe I just never managed to get enough gem to trigger their event or effect (best I got was 5 probably).
- If they have no special effect, they're serving the same purpose as "floor level" imo.
- If they do have their "special meaning", maybe you could have an earlier indication of that "maybe just a message?" so the player could have a desire to gain more.
I wish I knew what my max coins were at some points Great job!
@avavt you're right about it not being as intuitive, and that's something I'm going to focus on in future updates. for now I have to hope people read through the block of text first, but I know that sucks when there's a game to play! as for gems, they're meant to serve as your score. I thought floor level might not be a good measure of success because that encourages people to jump down as soon as they found the staircase, and I didn't want that. thanks for all the feedback!
@josefnpat thanks! the pink number above your coins is your max coins (you can hold tab to see what that number, and all the other numbers, represent)
And that's when I was surrounded that I discovered one more strength of your game: there is a way out of this, just think.
TL;DR: You did an excellent job, congrats ๐
You always know how to craft very tight systems that work together in unison, and this game is no different. I thought all the stats were pretty compelling so the choices were pretty difficult to make, which imo is the sign of great systems. The most engaging part of the game for me was the stats and just building them up. For a roguelike, I think it's actually pretty rare to make the player want to truly explore the map and not just gun towards the stairs. I think classic RLs were good at that but for some reason a lot of modern ones make me not want to do it. You give the player a lot of incentive to explore so kudos to that and kudos to another excellent game.
After playing a while, I found myself very much wanting to see a "level map", in order to remember myself which areas I had not explored yet, or which shopkeepers I left behind. Looking forward to updates in the game!