Mercury (Now at Beta 1.3)

[getter77]

http://www.decisionproblem.com/mercury/

Win/Mac experimental Roguelike with a nifty arcade premise:

As the banner says, Mercury is an experimental, winner-generated arcade roguelike. That’s a lot of modifiers, so let’s break it down.

At its core, Mercury is a roguelike. A roguelike is a type of game where you descend through a dungeon, killing monsters and equipping items in an attempt to see some sort of victory or survival. By roguelike standards, Mercury has a very simple combat system. When you attack a monster, you deal damage based on your attack, and when it attacks you it does the same. When you run out of health points it’s game over and your score is your final score for that game. Mercury also has a turn limit, and each action you take draws from your total bank of turns. The only way to replenish these turns is to venture further into the dungeon, as each floor down you go gives you more turns.

However, unlike most roguelikes, Mercury is also fundamentally an arcade game. That means that Mercury is a roguelike that is based around points and high scores. As players play the game, they earn multipliers from boss monsters on each floor which multiply every point they earn in the game. Additionally, clearing any individual level of monsters results in a board clear, giving the player a huge amount of bonus points.

So that’s one way that Mercury stands out from other roguelikes. But the truly experimental part of Mercury is that all the game’s content is winner-generated. That means that the game starts out barren. One class for players to play, one monster to fight, and one item to use. But every round, the top two scoring players use a tool built into the game to make a monster, item or class and then that object is automatically inserted into everyone’s game, and players fight for new high scores in an entirely different game every round. In short, I just designed the thing. It’s going to be the community that really makes it.

So that’s Mercury.

I can foresee interesting times ahead indeed with this one should it continue to grow at a good rate in scope and variety...  

[Skeletor]

Very nice.

[Nachtfischer]

Very interesting concept! What if the winners don't really care for designing a reasonable/meaningful object? Some losers might fill the game with even better stuff? We'll have to see how it evolves (and I obviously have no idea about how the editor works in detail).

[getter77]

Looks to be a way around...or directly into considering...that:

Hey all, just wanted to tease part of the stuff I have planned for Beta 1.1 which is due in the next week or two.

Chaos Mode is a mode into which anyone and everyone can submit monsters using a similar form to the one winners use to submit in the main game. Every time you start your game, Chaos Mode will grab 20-30 of each of these from the bag and lets you play with them for that instance of the mode. It's basically the crazy antithesis of Classic Mode, and will be absolutely insane to play. Scores will not be posted in this mode.

[Nachtfischer]

Sounds great indeed. The gameplay in itself is also quite nice actually. Clear and easy to pickup, very tactical, nice graphical style. I'll play it from time to time for sure.

[Skeletor]

I am having some fun even with the very basic (one enemy, one class) Classical and New Dungeon versions so the game has for sure potentials.. the only thing I'm not sure is wheter this "player generated content" thing works or not.. I mean, wouldn't be that fun it was about a furry version of capt. Spock fighting little ponies and pikachus, and this is the sort of gayness we can expect.. and let's not talk about balancing.

[getter77]

I would imagine the developer has some ability to curate content to come, though it IS meant to be an experiment of sorts so it all depends.

[jim]

I will never play this again.

[AgingMinotaur]

While I've yet to try this, the screenshots look gorgeous!

As always,
Minotauros

[getter77]

Beta 1.1 is live

Added Chaos Mode
Chaos mode is a mode where anyone can make anything, and see the (currently ugly) creator that the winners use to put stuff into the real game. You do earn points in this mode, but no scores are posted and there is no leaderboard. This may change in the future

Vastly increased reset intelligence
The game will now ping the server to see if there's stuff it's missing during a reset, and update itself if there is. No more restarting the client to get new stuff!

A lot of bugfixes that I don't even remember

[Legend]

Just tried it out. Got to floor 9 but my score came out as zero for some reason. I was playing in Classic mode.

The game is pretty fun and looks great. But as usual, fullscreen would be greatly appreciated.

Some sound effects would be cool too to go with the nice art style.

[getter77]

Beta 1.3

Patch 1.3 is out in the wild now! Here’s what’s new:

– Added personal servers, you can make your own servers at: http://www.decisionproblem.com/mercury/startServer.php

For more info on servers, see the Private Server FAQ: http://decisionproblem.com/mercury/forum/index.php?topic=724.msg1058#msg1058

– Added dynamic ambient music, composed by Dan Peck (http://vimeo.com/danpeck)

– Added 16 new item sprites and 6 new monster sprites

– Polished rollover states and general UI polish.

– Added a Home button that allows you to go to the main page

– Added sounds

[guest509]

The game is pretty fun and looks great. But as usual, fullscreen would be greatly appreciated.

Lol. Legend when I was messing about making Sun Crusher I tested Fullscreen over and over thinking of you. I knew if it wasn't in there I'd be going back to fix it immediately.

EDIT: As for this game, I like the idea but I'm a poor player. Woefully bad.

[Legend]

The game is pretty fun and looks great. But as usual, fullscreen would be greatly appreciated.

Lol. Legend when I was messing about making Sun Crusher I tested Fullscreen over and over thinking of you. I knew if it wasn't in there I'd be going back to fix it immediately.

EDIT: As for this game, I like the idea but I'm a poor player. Woefully bad.

lol. Nice to know you were thinking of me. :p I think I make the same two request for just about every roguelike that comes out that I enjoy.

1. Fullscreen

2. Being able to navigate all in-game menus using the arrow keys and Enter or space key to make selections. This is mostly because I like to use xpadder (similar to joytokey) to play roguelikes. Being able to navigate menus with arrow keys and enter key makes this a lot more plausible in most cases. Like it works perfectly for DoomRL, Berserk, Infra Arcana, Hydra Slayer, and a couple others. Still waiting for this to be implemented in Frozen Depths.

[guest509]

  I just mentioned to the Herc guy that you are a big Joypadder, and to check out Infra Arcana on how to make an RL that supports the pad.