I've been playing this daily for a while. The issue I've found with it is that your health recharges every 100 steps. This creates a divergence between the fun way to play and the way most likely to win. The optimal strategy is to spend a long time button mashing between enemies, and to run back and forth for ages when facing a powerful enemy. I think it would be better if your health didn't recharge (with the enemies rebalanced to accommodate this). This would force the player to actually make smart decisions.
Isn't this a fairly central mechanic in many of the traditional roguelikes though? I know rogue and nethack both have this and it means that finding a safe place to rest for a while is an important part of your strategy. In nethack at least, there are more, faster enemies and you also have hunger to contend with so trying to rest to recharge your HP isn't an easy or boring way to play.
> Isn't this a fairly central mechanic in many of the traditional roguelikes though?
It's half of the central mechanic. The other half is hunger—if you starve you die, so you need to keep moving to find food. That forces you to balance between moving too fast (and running out of health) versus moving too slow (and running out of food). If you take away half of that equation, the whole mechanic breaks.
I find self-imposed rules make things like this more fun. Sure, you could run around and get your health back. Or you could tell yourself "that's not fun" and just...don't do it.
If the mechanics are tuned to assume you'll regain health this way, self-imposed rules add a pointless challenge. You're just "gaming" the game in a different way that defeats the purpose.
With the caveat that I do play a good amount of roguelikes, this one was far too easy. It needs better levels. You should add some algorithms that reject bad level generations. This one was beatable by killing the first two monsters and walking to the exit. Try generating levels until you get one where you need a strategy that is not that simple? Idk.
Agreed. This isn't quite like the classic roguelike in which it's a struggle to survive and a miracle to win. In fact it may be unrealistic to expect a "daily" game to have that. This is more about getting a high score and sharing with friends how you approached the same dungeon.
It's the button in the middle of the graphical arrow buttons. You need to tap it more than once to see your health start to go back up. Similar to other games of the type.
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It's half of the central mechanic. The other half is hunger—if you starve you die, so you need to keep moving to find food. That forces you to balance between moving too fast (and running out of health) versus moving too slow (and running out of food). If you take away half of that equation, the whole mechanic breaks.
Or try adding a time->danger game mechanic like Spelunky.
https://itch.io/jam/7drl-challenge-2023
How big a request is that?
https://github.com/chr15m/rogule.com/tree/master/src/rogule
https://github.com/rofrol/elm-games
I would suggest a simple "how to" pop up, like a question mark button on the side.
The big dot between the cursor keys doesn't seem to do anything. And on mobile there's no keyboard to push a . key.