Deep Dungeon Tactics

Great job guys! loved it all! was able to clear a small room before getting my characters killed. fantastic job!

Nice amount of work for a jam but clearly not play tested! Completely impossible haha.

A really cool idea and it looks like an impressive amount of work went into it but it's just insanely too hard. My characters just died within a few turns on every map.

A lot of very impressive work for a jam! Like some other comments, the game is unreasonably difficult at the start and you really have to learn some "cheesy" strategies in order to get more than 1 or 2 kills before dying.

Some difficulties in seeing which character was selected and choosing a character that might be standing a tile above another character.

Really cool! Some brutal rng on the first floor but if you are able to single out some enemies and not run into the mages you can get some level ups and start being godly.

I noticed you can shoot through walls with the ranged characters, maybe make it so they block line of sight just like they block movement

@cryptomnesic We actually did a lot of playtesting, but most of it was done by seasoned turn-based strategy gamers, so I guess we failed to optimize for the general audience xD. We pushed a balance patch, hopefully that fixes it a little. Thanks for giving our game a shot!

@juliofesch @pandepic yeah, we really should have taken general difficulty into account beforehand, glad you liked what you saw so far!

@ohmikron you say cheesy, I say "tactical" :laughing: . But we seriously do appreciate the feedback. And you're right about selecting characters. The UI took a lot of iterations and we still didn't get it quite where we'd like to.

Great work! I guess the first floor was really brutal before the balance patch! I got a bad RNG on my first run, my mage got fried by 2 enemy mages in the first enemy turn. But my second run goes well and I was able to clear a few floors by carefully luring single enemy out.

I liked the mood

This is some really impressive work for a jam. Didn't get to try it pre-patch, but the mechanics and numbers feel solid, the art is pleasing and the music and sound effects are great.

Good choice of music, and similar to others it was super-tough pre-patch. I enjoyed the game though, and the music is so good I may just leave it on in the background while I work today. :smile: Clean controls overall, and amazing that you pulled off a game this complex in such a short time.

You must have put a huge amount of work into this. The music and pixel art is great. Really solid LD entry :smiley:

@enreh thanks! it's good to know our rebalancing worked out, balance and design is definitely something we struggle with and we're trying to get better at it! :)
@cheesepencil @kylethecoder @oddsocks i'm glad you guys enjoyed it, thanks for the love!

It's pretty awesome, conceptually. I do love some turn-based strategy games. Sadly though, getting to the second floor went from manageable to one-shot city pretty damn quickly. Needs some numbers balanced, but for what it is, good show.

Love the sprites! Wish i knew how to heal

I had a great time! It could be better if you had the health of the players characters stay the same between levels, but overall I loved it!

I loved the pixel art! Awesome sprites!

I stuck in the second level twice, I need a better strategy to reach a high level! Pretty good game, graphics and SFX! :heart:

Great job! The game can be quite challenging if you don't take time to heal! Well done on the aesthetics and game feel.

Awesome work! I love tactics games so this was right up my alley. Is it somewhat proc generated? Nice work!

@picross glad you liked it! The levels are procedurally generated, yes!

A really solid start, making a functional SRPG in a weekend is really something. Definitely a lot of potential in putting a SRPG into a roguelike structure.

Nice mechanics, it nice to kill all enemies )

just like other comments say, the game was fairly difficult at the start. overall a decent game with easily understandable mechanics

Super cool game, but I felt like only the melee character was good and the other two just got oneshot in a turn. Keep up the amazing work!

Making a T-RPG during a jam can be a tough gamble (we made that exact decision some years ago, we know). In the end you pulled off a pretty solid entry, well done. The sprites are cute, I would've like to play the game in x2 or x3 to enjoy them even more.

Very cool Game, the background music fits the game really well and the pixel art was also pretty nice.
But I feel like the player and the enemiees can shot through walls, it would have been nice to hide behind a wall if one of the characters is low on health.
I am definitely not good in such turnbased games but I really enjoyed playing your game, well done!

Great Game! I really liked the mechanics felt very D&D. The enemies did box one of my characters in a corner one time, and even after killing them more would just take their place, this was annoying but a hard issues to fix. AMAZING WORK!

Very cool little game. Nice to see the strategy RPG genre represented in LD48, and a unique spin on the theme. I'm definitely going to save it and come back and try and finish it. Great work!

Liked the pixel art, the whole concept is also pretty cool. The scaling is pretty annoying, tho and also I think it is hard to keep the party members' level proportional.

Fantastic art, love tactics games! I streamed this game a little so here are some of thips I had from then:

The procgen needs to facilitate player options, alternate paths should be DIFFERENT, otherwise theres no point in having branching paths and it should be linear

Environmentals will immediately enhance any amount of tactics, when designing environments make sure they are both positive or negative depending on positioning or character class

Simply adding item pickups with different uses (shields, damage, healing) will give unique utility to characters who don't normally have them

Giving the mage several spells will also enhance the tactics if you do a bit more with the projectiles

I would suggest making some projectiles friendly fire, while others are projectiles that can go through friendly units, this way you can add some balance to your stronger spells and enhance the tactics of positioning.

Over all very impressive for the jam! Good job.

I;m a huge fan of fire emblem games and tactics in general. This was very fun to play around and fresh with the procedural generated levels. The difficulty is a little weird since there could be some levels were you just get very unlucky with the starting position. I managed to get one of my characters extremely over leveled and they just swept the floor with everyone in that level, however I accidentally hit end turn and they ended up dying and that was the end of my run. Great job on making such a complicated system of tactics in such a short amount of time!

I really enjoyed this. The music is great. I'm big fan of this style game. From shining force and advanced tactics. You get super powerful, once you get the hang of it, which is fun to 1 hit everything, beast mode!

I really like Fire Emblem games so this was a fun surprise. The first two I had a hard time beating the first floor, then the third I had no problem at all. Jut balancing issues, but that is really hard to get right without tons of playtesting from various users, so you did a really good job with the time you had. I enjoyed the music and the art style as well. Good job!

Great game! I like the procedural take on this genre. One idea that I think would be interesting to try out would be procedural characters as well? For example the characters you play as, and the enemies, are just generated to have different looks and skills. I can see how this would be a nightmare to balance, but if it could be figured out that would be a really cool addition on this.

Nice job!

Uber fun! I played it for a while. Lost my knight and archer at the beginning of the game, only had my mage from then on. Got to depth 10, got my mage up to level 50+ and was one shotting every enemy. Obviously as you said in stream, there's still some balancing issues to figure out. But there's a basis for a really good game here. Thanks for letting me play!

Amazing that you did this with an engine you hadn't heard of. Liked the turn by turn game mechanic, I kept just the mage and blasted thru every enemy.

Very cool tactics / dungeon crawler / rogue like. The art style reminds me of very early Final Fantasy games. The tactics are layered using a manageable number of elements that fit together to create a huge number of options. The music is well selected and the SFX match the art style to give the game a great cohesive feel. This is a very ambitious project for a JAM, Nicely Done!!
Thank you so much for bringing this by my stream. Here's a link to the VOD:
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1007852839?t=0h13m30s

Thanks for bringing your game by my stream for playtesting! If you’d like to revisit the play and commentary you can view the highlight at https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1008703437

solid game you've got here! Solid game system, really nice graphics, nice music. I think I might prefer things to be a lot "smaller" and more puzzle-y; like, divide all the players stats (health, movement range) by about 10, and rebalance the enemies/hallways/etc to fit. No idea if this would actually _work_ at all, it's just one of the only concrete things that feels a bit off to me (although it's mainly a matter of personal taste, I think). Nicely done, this was fun!

:musical_score: mary had a little lamb :musical_note:

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1008781774?t=01h15m44s

I have become a god level wizard. That is to say I think there is some mechanic tweaks needed. Once I realized I could just use one character primarily it made it too easy to start one shotting everything with my wizard while hiding my other characters in the corner or letting them fall to the wayside dead in a ditch.
The basics of a really good game are all here, the level design is a little lack luster, I would love some different environments/ rooms with different elements, maybe even some interactive stuff that lets you use the environment against bigger enemies.
Xcom ran into a similar problem with their games where people would be way too methodical and careful in their games due to the fact that your troops have perma death and only the ones in combat get XP, I think there is a happy medium in there somewhere.

Very impressive, considering the time limit! The controls were a bit clunky and the music stopped working after I refreshed the page a couple times, but I had a good time once I figured out how to play better. I tend to be awful at these kinds of games, though, so I only ever made it to the second floor, haha. Great work!

Well done! The only other recommendation I'd make beyond what I said yesterday on stream would be to display the movement / range of enemies on mouse-over.

I really loved the game, that's why I played 4 runs one after another hahah so much details and interesting mechanics, unfortunately it's not my favorite genre but I had lots of fun. I struggled with some bugs, like my turn and the enemy turn overlapped and I lost my chance to play so a character died because of it. But besides that I had a great time. Thanks for the entry!

Neat little tactics game! Art assets and music are good, the UI docks some points for me. Not a big strategy player so my brain is too smooth to follow all the numbers, but seems decent! Fits the theme naturally, overall a 3.5/5 :smile:

Hello! Your game was played on stream ( https://www.twitch.tv/ursagames/videos ) on 5/03 (Day 2 of LDJAM streams).

You can find the timestamp of when your game was played here: https://tinyurl.com/LDJAM48-ursa

Saw your game in a stream :thumbsup:

Really cool game! Nice mechanics. The game is a bit challenging.
I had a wonderful time!

Good job :clap:

This was a really cool game! It looks for sure like a ton of technical work went into it and I'm super impressed by it. Unfortunately, as a smol brain, I had a real tough time getting through just the first level. Really tight otherwise! Great work!

Thanks for submitting your game to our stream!

You definitely nailed the Fire Emblem aesthetic here! I do kind of wish I would get some confirmations (or even be able to undo) my mistakes before I commit to them, but I guess that's half the challenge, haha.

Observe the stream below, where I completely exploit unbalanced parts in the game to my advantage:


Believe it or not, had a lot of fun with this entry. I'm really impressed with what your team was able to create, given tactics games aren't easy to make on a game jam schedule. The simplification of the genre is really appreciated, making it relatively easy to learn and master. Tutorial was informative and not too long. I personally would have liked to see more explanation on the stats, but at least at first blush, I did feel I understood most of economy that the game had to offer.

There were some UX problems and stats balancing issues I would like to see fixed in a post-jam version of this game. The level-up dialog isn't displayed as such, making it look like any other stats dialog that often pops-up (not to mention it appears with seemingly no context). I would have liked to see the enemies travel and attack range when I hover over them, so I can make a more informed decision. As much as I like the procedural aspect of the game, the progress in the game did feel disjointed at times. I also thought the healing by staying still was a badly exploitable mechanic, and think having items or healers would have been a better choice (though I can understand the time constraint). Finally, most of my gameplay was just letting my ranger level up like crazy, which might need some more careful observation like adding level caps and whatnot.

A lot of these problems, though, are nitpicks to an otherwise solid entry. Made it to around level 7 or 8 pretty easily.