Ludum Dare #40compo

Dungeon of Cursed Artifacts

by florian-van-strien

Overall★★★★★★★★★★3.71

Fun★★★★★★★★★★3.92

Innovation★★★★★★★★★★3.22

Theme★★★★★★★★★★3.50

Graphics★★★★★★★★★★2.69

Humor★★★★★★★★★★2.84

Mood★★★★★★★★★★3.50

In this roguelike game with ascii graphics, you want to get rich by selling ancient artifacts from an old dungeon. There's only one problem: the artifacts are all cursed! The more of them you have, the worse it is. Will you make it out of the dungeon alive? And how many artifacts will you take with you? Warning: the game is pretty challenging!

Controls

- Mouse: Examine things
- Arrow keys or WASD: Move
- . (dot): Wait a turn
- Space/Enter: Select in menus or continue showing long turn descriptions (ending with ...)
- Backspace/Esc: Return from menus
- Shift: Use an ability
- I: Show your inventory
- E: Show current status effects

Post-jam bugfixes

- Fixed keyboard input for Firefox when the game is played in an iframe (like on itch.io)

Tags: #ascii, #dungeon crawler, #roguelike, #turn-based

Genres: adventure

Tools: PixiJS

Comments11

bobombe4 Dec 2017, 12:53

Looks good, but I got stuck when dying. I imagine I have to refresh the page to play again.

Florian van Strienauthor4 Dec 2017, 13:03

Hi bobombe, thanks for your comment! Refreshing the page shouldn't be required, pressing enter or space (probably a few times, as the turn description is often long when you die) should restart the game. Sorry if that's unclear! Also, there may be a bug, of course. If you still have the page open by any chance, could you maybe see if there are any errors in the browser console?

Xacur4 Dec 2017, 19:22

It's a fun dungeon crawler, at first I was fighting monsters like a champ, but it's hard so I decided to choose my battles. I don't know why sometimes I needed to hit space to read the text and some times it worked with the arrows. I think it's because there's no more text, but you don't know and you keep pressing space and nothing happens, it feels broken. In general it's hard to understand what you are doing, but I guess that's the style of the game.
And those skeletons are hard.

AVAVT5 Dec 2017, 16:10

Too damn effing hard!! I always die at the %&Q#$ 5th level!!

Diamond Bell is sure death. Slow belt is strange - not sure what 20% slower means. The glasses are easy. Globet of alzheimer is globet of alzheimer is... what was I saying again?

Very fun game, but I died too many times, ragequited.

Oh and I agree with the above commentors on the long text, it's kinda confusing, luckily when I happened to me the first time I was on a great run and didn't want to F5.

Sanguis5 Dec 2017, 17:59

Butterfly licked you with its....

I like your game and it´s true that is is quite challenging, which is good :)

instantnoedel6 Dec 2017, 15:13

What a sweet and lovely dungeon crawler! It is not too hard yet still very challenging. Everything feels well balanced, though maybe things gradually got a bit too easy towards the end where you get quite powerful and have many healing oppertunities. I got pretty exited when I made it to the fifth floor. Died lots, but made it out with 1200 gold. Enjoyed this one very much, thank you!

Jegus96 Dec 2017, 23:52

I have to admit I ragequitted after my 3rd room 5 attempt. Looks like holding the dot button and waiting for the HP to regenerate only works for the earlier floors :(

Anyway the game was original. The fact that you're using ascii art and mostly (it seems) web programming makes it stand out in the crowd.

automatonvx7 Dec 2017, 00:19

Fun dungeon crawler, the ascii art style is always a nice change of pace, the level layouts were good and I liked the abilities feature and artifact curse idea, I didn't make it past floor 3 though. Some lo-fi sound fx to match the ascii art would have been nice.

Steve Johnson16 Dec 2017, 23:50

Really excellent entry. I've made two roguelikes for LD and this is better than both of them! Really good mechanics and balance, at least for someone who plays a lot of Brogue.