Dungeon Explorer Alpha
Controls: Click tiles to move, and attack in the respective phases, right-click to zoom out, and click on the respective abilities in the bottom right to change them. Try to reach the hatch on each floor to get to the next level.
This is a very early version of the game and everything here is susceptible to future change, and I'll try to keep this page updated as further progress is made. If you enjoyed it it would be appreciated if you leave your feedback, as well as any unintended behaviour/ bugs you may have encountered.
There will be a tutorial/controls page in a later version of the game.
Download
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Comments
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This game is... interesting. I don't see any game genre anywhere here, is this a rogue-like game? I noticed that every new game the map on level 1 changes layout. Either way, I had quite some fun playing this game for a short while.
First of all, I think the combat mechanics are very interesting. This, sort of chess-alike battle mechanic? makes you consider what abilities you should use and where you should move in order to survive. Though after you have a good understanding of the combat mechanics, the combats will feel a tad bit too easy afterwards ngl. I’m pretty sure this will get revamped at some point, but at the moment it’s quite balanced, I guess. Smart players would probably breeze through battles easily though, but I figured this is mostly because the lack of variety or something, the usual combats are kinda bland after you play it for a while (but again, this is an early release, can’t complain too much on that). And I found several bugs here the more I play the game. More on that later. Honestly, despite all of my complaints, the battle mechanics is easily the best feature this game has, imho.
I like the music in this game, and knowing you, I bet you composed the music yourself. There’s just one problem, but it’s kind of understandable for an early release game. It’s repetition. Since as far as I know, there’s no story behind this game, it’s only a loop of one song over and over. This is more or less a problem for me, since I’m used to games with repetitive songs (cough cough Shattered Pixel Dungeon cough cough). But I figured this might be something people might not enjoy. On the topic of repetition, I’m also going to say this game lacks objective. It’s just an endless cycle of collecting gold and killing mobs, no interesting lore. It’s alright for now I guess (since it’s an early release, god how many times I have to say that to myself), but a more interesting objective will engage the player more I think. Adding some sub-areas with different songs will also be a good way to keep the player interested in exploring the dungeon.
The dungeon itself is confusing to navigate. It consists of several rooms that connect with each other, but often times I find myself getting lost with the rooms around and began moving in circles. I personally think this is my least favorite thing in the game. I’d say a mini map that consists the rooms you have explored would be one of my suggestions to mitigate that.
Overall, I see this game as an attempt of yours to create an interesting rogue-like exploring game concept with a very solid and interesting combat mechanic. If this was your intention, then I’d say you did an excellent job. Especially on the combat mechanic, it’s a really good implementation you attempted. This game is, of course, unfinished at this point, but with a proper revamp of the exploration revamp, and a bit of polishing in the combat mechanics, I think this game can be an interesting and fun game.
Originally this was supposed to be a full one page review, but this was too long to post lol, so for the bugs I found I'll post in a reply.
To finish this review off, I did find some bugs during my gameplay, which is kind of expected on an early release game. Here are some:
- This one was kind of minor, I couldn’t open one jar with the use button for some reason. This only happened once, so I couldn’t say for sure what happened.
- This one is major. Sometimes, if you hold down a direction (i.e. down or s key), you will transition to the next room in the down direction, but then you somehow “blinked” and then transitioned to the next room again (if there’s a door in the same direction). This is kind of difficult to explain, so I’ll demonstrate this in an image:
I’ve got this bug several times. Sometimes while I got this bug, the next room didn’t have a door so it kind of just leaves me stranded in a void, rendering my progress a failure and leaving me stuck forever. This "blink" can also skip through battle rooms.
I’m not sure what causes this since this doesn’t happen 100% of the time, it could be a chance of me doing this because of holding down while moving, or could also be this along with the fact I’m also holding the right mouse button to zoom out. I only got this bug with either of these behaviours. (It happens randomly, even when I released the control buttons it sometimes does that)
- Another bug that makes the combat experience kinda clunky at times. Sometimes, the shield ability doesn't block enemy attacks. This also happens randomly, even after you used the shield ability (and hit the enemy). Another bug (or feature? lolol) is that sometimes skeletons can shoot through walls, which hits you even if you're behind a wall. Also, after a bat moves (since they move twice), you can move to the position where they're at (if it's reachable) which is their second move during the enemy's turn. This makes it that you are able to stand on the bat's current location, which is janky. And to finish this off, I don't know if this is intentional or not, but during a room with enemies, if the same room also has the hatch, you can move to that tile and use the hatch to basically progress to the next floor and effectively skip the battle.
That’s all for my review! I didn’t expect this costed me like 1-2 hours to made, but this was everything I wanted to say, so it’s pretty worth it I guess! It’s the least I can do to support your work, so I poured the best I can within my ability. I'll be updating this review if I find more bugs. Good luck Tyrant!