Dungeon of Lost Items by g12345
More on Rules:
There are lots of rules so here are some obvious ones that I didn't got time to put inside the game:
Swords in your inventory gives ATK, and shields gives DEF.
Keys open doors. It costs 1 key to open a door.
Potions just occupies space, and are good candidates to sacrifice first.
There is also a limit of 10 items in your Inventory. Any more and the first one will be removed.
Killing a monster will also sacrifice your item in your first slot.
(Sorry about forgetting to write these things, it's my first compo and writing instructions is hard.)
=============
Short Story
You, the player, has somehow find yourself in the middle of a dungeon full of monsters and items.
Your goal is to leave the Dungeon alive through the stairs somewhere near the opposite corner.
Keys and instructions
Your character :levitate: starts somewhere in the top left, and the exit is somewhere at the bottom right side of the dungeon. :door:
Use the cursor keys to move around, if you try to go to a place with a monster then you'll have a fight.
The keys X and C can be used to cycle through your inventory; this is important because the first item in your inventory will be lost after a fight with a monster!
My first Compo game
This is my first Compo game, and I've done Ludum Dare for some time now. I have never managed to finish within 48 hours but somehow this time I managed to do it! :smile:
I thought Jam was hard, but here I have even less time to add anything that's not crucial to the game!
No time for levels, sounds, special effects, more graphics, animations, or even instructions (I'm not very good at those, so it will only costs even more time...)
My goal here was to just make something that is challenging even if it's randomly generated, simple looking but still challenging every time I play. I have the feeling now that I can play a random level every day and not getting bored for at least a week.
Thanks for playing.
| Source code | https://github.com/g999888/lostitems |
| HTML5 (web) | https://g999888.github.io/lostitems/ |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/dungeon-of-lost-items |
Ratings
| Overall | 241th | 3.432⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 208th | 3.357⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 92th | 3.659⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 238th | 3.523⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 305th | 3.143⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 276th | 2.639⭐ | 20🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 202th | 3.273⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 24🗳️ | 18🗨️ |
The playing board holds far too much information, much more than what is needed. And it is very crowded and confusing.
It took me a while to realize how the game works, particularly what the items do and that I lose them on each monster.
Eventually I got it and reached the stairs.
I like the system and I think that with a bit of further work, an interesting puzzly dungeon game could run on it.
I'd say it's more likely to be Creeper World and Boulderdash for the masses of items and monsters on screen, or the completely randomized world layout. There are probably 3-5 other games to blame too. But I hope that I could make a game that I could play once every day with a randomized field and still getting a challenge.
I do plan to work a bit more on it to make a game I can play every day with some challenges in it. As you can see the simple layout can already be solved by using many of the rules together. In a later version I can make it easier too, but I just wanted something challenging for myself for the LD entry.
@sethr : This game being more of a challenging dungeon, I'd say you should try to learn and understand the rules, but the most important thing in this game is 'inventory management'. Your ATK and DEF is based on your inventory and that's basically the way to move forward. :smile:
Some kind of feedback would be nice to let you know when you've lost health and sometimes I'd accidentally move 2 steps instead of 1, but those were very minor issues that didn't hurt the overall game. Very solid entry!
@rebecca-kremer : the HP loss is a great idea too!
@jihem : I have no idea how to write for mobile. I also just added a screen capture in the description. I had planned that but I was very tired. Thanks for playing!
While the sprites are nicely done I do wish the graphics would be less busy and little more clear so that I could tell items apart from the monsters at a glance instead of squinting at the screen. Having just a few pixels more resolution per sprite and playing around with the palette (maybe reserving cool&dark tones for enemies and warm&bright to items?) could help?
@peachtreeoath @antti-tiihonen @loveapplegames It's funny you say it's like Desktop Dungeons. Obviously I've played that before (but a long time ago) and I didn't even noticed the similarity before. I wasn't planning to add more levels, but like Desktop Dungeons, it's possible to add new monsters into it and even more levels. I can try it but it will involve even more tweaking (and I'm really busy this month).
As for the graphics and music and other stuff, I can probably have an option to remove the brownish background tiles to make the tiles stand out more, but I'm really bad at making graphics and music...
@antti-tiihonen as for the squinting, sorry about that... I can probably try something to make the different categories looking a bit different, although I also noticed, while playing, is that part of the fun is to find the item patterns yourself. That doesn't mean I can't make it easier for the eyes for people who would like to skip that part. I can probably just change the floor colours to match items and enemies, but it take some time before I have time for it.
I really like the simplicity of the mechanics and sacrificing your inventory works well for the theme. A little hard to read at times but I can just zoom my browser window. :slight_smile: For people who like little desktop games like Minesweeper, this would be a joy to play every day to pass the time. Very nice entry! :thumbsup:
The game is NOT guaranteed to be possible. It's randomly generated. However, to mitigate that, you are given 5 items at the beginning, and there are lots of items to be found. So the chance is pretty much 95%+ I'd say that most layouts should be possible.
I just played the game today (again), and I could finish that one generated map with full health, so I can only suggest you to play again.
As for the small size of the game, with a browser resize, that's intentional. I've played games in this LD that didn't fit my screen, so I'd rather be conservative. (Also I can't draw so more pixels is just not going to help. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye: )
Indeed the rules are a bit confusing and overwhelming at first, but we eventually start to figure things out. To make things smoother, an idea would be that when you first try to enter a tile with a monster, the menu on the right could display the outcome before resolving the action, requiring you to press the key a second time to confirm.
One thing that is still unclear to me is what ATK vs PWR does. Maybe DEF is disregarded for damage if ATK > PWR? To me it what would have felt good is if we were simply prevented to go to a tile where PWR > ATK (ie. we can't kill the beast).
Fog would have been a nice addition as well, like you'd only see the monsters from tiles around you, instead of being incited to plot the whole route in advance.
A pretty fun game overall with good replayability. I've managed to win it once :)