Pixel Dungeon (now at v1.7.3)

[watabou]

Hi guys!

I'd like to present my upcoming game for Android devices "Pixel Dungeon". It's rather tradional roguelike in many ways (random levels, permadeath, identifiable items etc) but utilizes uncommon stats system similar to Brogue's one. The game got pixel-art graphics and I tried to make UI as easy and intuitive as possible.
I'm going to release Pixel Dungeon within a week.

Here's the link: http://pixeldungeon.watabou.ru

Right now it redirects to http://pixeldungeon.launchrock.com/ - "please enter your details blah-blah-blah", don't take it too seriously, I'm just trying this service out I will announce the release here anyway.

Cheers!

[watabou]

A couple of screenshots:

[getter77]

Welcome, and good luck with your Android Roguelike project.      I like the start screen, and it would appear that the visual style will work for the device.  Any plans for a PC port somewhere down the line if all goes well?

[watabou]

Thank you! On mobile devices these pixels shouldn't look so fat
Actually I thought about porting Pixel Dungeon to HTML.

[mrrstark]

Wouldn't mind giving it a try when it's available (for android).

[Alex E]

If only I had an android 

[guest509]

Thank you! On mobile devices these pixels shouldn't look so fat
Actually I thought about porting Pixel Dungeon to HTML.

I was going to say it seems so soft and blurry. Pixel art at the wrong resolution can look blurry, too small can look over detailed and hard to make out...I shrunk this down to 33%.



Better?

[kraflab]

Actually, I really dig the art style even in the blown up resolution.  Nice job!

[guest509]

Actually, I really dig the art style even in the blown up resolution.  Nice job!

Yeah, looking at it a second time I think it's all good. I've been studying pixel are creation a bit lately and am working on developing a more clear style, staying away from over shading, as least staying away from having too many variants of the same color. So I had my critics hat on.

I hope to one day make some pixel art half as good as that above.

[watabou]

Those 2 big screenshots are taken on my Galaxy Nexus and its screen size is indeed about 3 sizes smaller than the screenshots on my pc display. But it's not correct to simply downscale them because of resampling which blurs original images (even when using "sharper" option). In the code I take some measures to keep everything (images and fonts) sharp and "pixelated" on different screens.

That was about pixels from the technical point of view, but speaking about "art" aspect of pixel-art I must admit that I'm not an artist at all Painting all those pixels was rather painful for me (let alone sprite animation) and I can't say that I'm satisfied with the result. So any piece of advice is welcome because I have many more monsters and tiles and items to draw 

Here are some more screenshots I'd like to share. I'm was going to post them to show some game features so I scaled them down this time

[watabou]

Finally released! 

Here is the link:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.watabou.pixeldungeon

[mrrstark]

Looks really awesome so far. Played it for a bit during breaks at work

Noticed 2 things:
 - one time, somehow my character ended up in the same tile as a rat. I could move off, but the rat got a free turn cause i couldnt attack... myself?
 - I picked up a longsword and leather armor, put them on, and for some reason the next rat got 2 attacks for every one of my turns. Is there some speed reduction? How does combat work?

[watabou]

- one time, somehow my character ended up in the same tile as a rat. I could move off, but the rat got a free turn cause i couldnt attack... myself?

It's a bug. I noticed it too late unfortunately (after publishing) 

- I picked up a longsword and leather armor, put them on, and for some reason the next rat got 2 attacks for every one of my turns. Is there some speed reduction? How does combat work?

And this behaviour is correct. I have to describe it in more details somewhere, but in short, yes, there is speed reduction. There are penalties for using weapon that is too heavy for you (slowing attacks, reducing attack skill). There are also penalties for using armor that is too heavy for you (reducing motion speed and defense skill). To be able to use heavy items you have 2 options:
1) Use Potions of Strength to increase your Strength.
2) Use Scrolls of Enhancement to increase quality level of your item and decrease its Strength requirement.
The problem is that strength requirement of the item is not shown until it's identified that way or another, because I don't want to reveal it's quality level before that. Maybe I should display "typical strength requirement". In your case that will be "11" for leather armor and "16" for longsword.

Thanks for your comments!

[mrrstark]

Oh. It sounds similar to Brogue's stat minimums. Perhaps you could take a similar approach to what they do for the stat min's & penalties.

After your explanation that there were stats at all, is when I guessed that, ok, if there are stats, how can I see them? hm.... click click click.. oh ok click on the character's portrait. Makes sense.

Could use a help screen, or one of those annotation overlay graphics.

[watabou]

It is indeed very similar to Brogue's system.
Penalties work like this: "Ok, you can put on that chain mail, but it's too heavy for you. So it protects you from damage, but you can't run really fast and it's much harder to dodge enemy's attacks because of its weight".
I do understand that good explanation doesn't guarantee good gameplay but I don't want to clone Brogue