No Heroes Belong Here by Shasaur
A reverse dungeon-crawler where you are the bad guy. Pick up cards every turn and use them to summon monsters - don't let the hero through!
Each dungeon is procedurally generated and the deck is shuffled every level. As you progress, the heroes that enter will get progressively stronger, and the dungeon layout more challenging! How many of these heroes will fall by your hands?
You can:
- Play the jam version here
- Play the post-jam version here. This one has a few small quality of life things to address some feedback from the comments (such as camera movement with the mouse and a small description for what each monster does). Feel free to play and rate based on the original jam version though! :)
Made by just me, with the help of some free music and the occasional sound effects, mostly in the first 48 hours.
I spent the last day trying to create an auto-balancer that would prevent some levels from being too hard, but ended up spending an unproductive 5 hours trying to fix one bug and ultimately ended up ditching the balancer due to performance reasons (turns out trying to predict every possible move the player can make quickly gets expensive). #regrets
EDIT: Thanks for all the positive feedback! It seems like some of you would be interested in seeing this game scaled up into a full version... so I might just work on that. The pixel art has been really fun to work with so I would definitely enjoy adding more content. If you want to follow along, I'll be posting game updates to my Twitter / X account: https://twitter.com/Shasaur
| Link | https://shasaur.itch.io/no-heroes-belong-here |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/no-heroes-belong-here |
Ratings
| Overall | 363th | 3.771⭐ | 37🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 328th | 3.729⭐ | 37🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 255th | 3.75⭐ | 36🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 407th | 3.897⭐ | 36🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 611th | 3.7⭐ | 37🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 514th | 3.145⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 713th | 3.441⭐ | 36🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 21🗳️ | 49🗨️ |
@sybert Thank you for the feedback! Indeed, the teleportation is both due to that rule, and the following rule "The hero will return to a previously unexplored room if he cannot progress". If I didn't waste so much time, I wanted to actually animate the movement of the hero (and gnoll) walking from room to room to make that more obvious. And yes, you got all of those monster special abilities correct! :) I'm glad you enjoyed it!
@drgcandle Thanks for such positive feedback! :D
Game looks finished and neat with cute pixel art.
Monsters are cool and I like the different perspective where we have to kill human hero invaders who are there just for loot. Dungeons are much more than just that and we are there to protect!
(I would love to control the map only with a mouse because using keyboard needs more energy:)
Nice submission, mate!
It took a while for me to understand what each of the monsters did, as well as the impact of status effects and whatnot, but after a few rounds, I felt like I was able to get the gist of it!
Is there an ending to this game? Or does the hero's health just keep expanding to an upper limit? I got to about 11 hearts and then decided to tap out since it didn't really feel like I was getting any stronger or the game was getting any harder (and I couldn't tell if the maps were repeating or not).
Regardless, super impressive you were able to put together such a polished experience as a solo dev! Awesome job. :thumbsup:
- Would be nice if rooms that the hero visited already were darkened, it might make it easier at first but on huge maps it's hard to keep track of it. Could be a difficulty toggle.
- I don't know what the spider does (maybe I didn't pay enough attention), but same goes with the Gnoll, would be nice to have a way to know how these interact (i.e. Gnoll always tries to move -> , v , <- , ^ , so you can plan around it better)
@ruslana @zippry @coleslaughter @dywanix @goofte Great suggestions! It motivated me to do a small update with a couple of quality of life things (mouse camera movement and little card descriptions). Of course, I've uploaded that as a separate link, so players can still rate the original.
@coleslaughter No ending yet, the mass of 8 billion humans stands ready to replace their fallen comrades and take revenge :D Though if I do a bigger version of the game, it would be really fun to add a story :)
I did like that the monsters had some behaviors, such as moving to new rooms. That made the dungeon start to feel dynamic. I would lean into that more! If you keep working on this, I would recommend to look for ways to increase the strategy even more. Maybe in addition to monsters, you could add "trap" cards that either slow the hero down or block his way, so that you can force a path.
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If the 'hero' jumping to another room once they blocked themselves in (due to the "no backtracking" rule) was not a deliberate choice to avoid soft-locking, then it was a fortunate oversight :D