unknown grounds
A game made for LOWREZJAM 2017 using the Fantasy Console TIC-80
You are stranded in unknown alien ruins and have to fight off monsters. There are powerful substances and weapons
It uses a turn-based system familiar from nethack / rogue. I was planning procedural generation but ran out of time and ended up designing 3 levels. Hopefully that will at least give a good basis for voting :)
How to play:
- Use arrows to move (1 step at a time). When you move - enemies also move 1 step.
- To attack an enemy, move towards it when you are adjacent.
- To open inventory and interact with your items, use 'x' and 'z' for exiting menus.
Windows and Mac versions are also available if the browser version doesn't work well for you.
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Comments
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Awesome game. Sometimes I wished I could use a button to skip a turn without moving, just like I use to do in roguelikes with the 5-Key on my numeric keypad.
WALKTHROUGH
Spoiler alert. If you wanna find out for yourself how this game works, stop reading now!
…
Since I’ve played through, and beat the game a few times, here’s some observations:
Unless you reboot the game you will keep all in your inventory except what you have scrapped, or are wielding when you die. So, if you can tell you are going to lose a round, try switching to cheaper gear.
When you pass the teleporter to the next level, the weaponry you’re wielding becomes your defaults, so bring out the good stuff here.
The color effect on weaponry and potions is random so test them in less harmful situations first. They remain the same in the next rounds even if you die, and until you reboot the game. The effects I have identified are:
HEALING
DAMAGE
EXPLOSIVE
POISON
CURE POISON
They will distribute roundabout like so: Explosives are great as thrown potions, not so much in melee combat on a sword or shield, as you will take damage as well, and they are a very bad idea to drink.
A potion that damages you will heal your enemy. Likewise if it poisons you, it will cure a poisoned enemy.
ENEMIES from weakest to strongest
Pink cyclop
Red spider
Orange bat
Green frog
Blue skull
White giant — can poison you randomly
TACTICS
Do not take on every enemy, retreat if necessary, and take another route. Enemies are not really aggressive — although they do seem to circle in on you and protect loot — so it is often possible to go through the room and bypass them completely. But they drop weaponry and potions so kill them if possible. Higher enemies drop better gear so conserve your energy for those.
If health is low and you have no healing potions, heal yourself with a sword on lower enemies til health is back up. Healing on high lvl enemies does not work as well, (though I suspect a higher lvled weapon migh be better).
These are just some preliminary observations, there is still stuff Ithat needs to be uncovered — like what imbuing potions does for instance — but I’d need to crunch more numbers to do so, and … well you know, I’ll prolly not get round to that. Hehe.
However if you, like I did to begin with, think this game can not be beat, there are strategies that will get it done. Hope this helps, and happy gaming!
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PS: Game dev. do correct me if I’m wrong, or feel free to remove this comment if you dont wanna reveal the inner workings. :)
Hi, first of all - thanks for taking your time and do a write-up. This means a lot for devs and it was very interesting for me to read!
You got many things right here, but some observations are incorrect. But I think I will not reveal which observation(s) that is to keep a little bit of the mystery in still ;-)
I think your gameplay strategy is good and more or less how I envisioned it to be played.
Got to a teleporter. Died on level two. Fun graphics, fun game!
Me too at first! A lot of dying goin on at lvl two, not much else until I kinda cracked the code. ;)
Great job, fun to play and real smooth.
Awesome game! Nice graphics and is real smooth and simple to play. One of the best "rogue with graphics" I've tried.