Lenna's Inception (Now at v0.12) $

[getter77]

http://lennasinception.com/ ~$5 Win/Mac/Linux 

Adventurer Lenna sets out on a quest to hunt down the Archangel that disembowelled her bright young students. Armed with discarded weaponry, divine artifacts, and blood-thirsty pets, she soon becomes mankind’s only hope for survival.
Lenna’s Inception is an action-adventure game with procedurally generated locations. It has a Gameboy-like aesthetic and a top-down view. The gameplay consists of action-driven combat segments, seeking out new items and upgrades, and solving simple puzzles.

Features

Huge procedurally generated world, different every time you play
8 permadeath challenges with an online leaderboard
Pets that offer to fight alongside you with their own AI
Beautiful Game Boy-style pixel art with occasional gory scenes
Meaningful narrative (under development)
Chiptune soundtrack composed by Warfreak2
Conscience

No DRM and no IAP
All updates free
No copyright take-downs on Let’s Plays
Privacy policy
Early Access

This is an Early Access title! That means things will be broken from time to time and many of the most interesting features haven’t been finished yet. If you don’t like that, please wait for its release at the end of the year before buying.

The game is just £2.99 while it’s in beta (approximately $5.13 USD) and will go up to £5.99 at release.

System requirements

Windows / Mac / Linux
Oracle JRE 7
4GB+ RAM
Dual Core 2GHz+ CPU

Beta 6:

Lenna’s Inception version 0.6 (beta6) is live. Get it from the usual place. (There was no beta5, I’m just doing a Windows 9.)

As per usual, in order to access most of the new features you’ll need to visit the starving artists’ house in the town and speak to the NPC inside to regenerate your maps. This won’t cause you to lose any progress.

What’s New

Features:

New story-line character Delvin is introduced during the “save the prince” quest.
More story-line content occurs after completing the “bring Rupert peace & quiet” quest, including:
A laboratory location.
A new NPC.
Progression in the main arc pursuing the Archangel that killed Lenna’s students.
Unfriendly guards in the main town.
New boss fight at the current end of the story-line content. This is the penultimate boss fight, so the final boss is still yet to be added.

Bugs fixed:

Pet corpses should now always be somewhere reachable by the player after the pet has died.
Wearing the speed tunic or using the speed potions no longer allows you to run straight over holes and water without falling.
The chicken boss no longer gets stuck on walls.
Slime babies created by the slime boss no longer get stuck on walls.
If you encountered the kitty boss as one of the first three bosses in beta4 it would have been impossible to deflect its fireballs with your sword. This has now been fixed.
There’s a bug causing keyboard input to be lost after going fullscreen on Mac OS X. I’ve added a workaround that should fix this.
Pets low on health now return to the screen when the enemies in the room have been killed or when there’s a heart available.

Polish:

The knight boss fight has been reworked.
Text for the whistle has been modified to clarify that you do already need to have a pet before it’s any use.
The effect of the Missinglasses item is now automatically disabled when the item is unequipped.
A few dungeon tiles have been tweaked for better legibility in dark color-schemes.
The text that appears when you pick up a lost library book item has been improved to tell you how many you’ve found so far.
Items Lenna has a full stack of won’t appear as drops quite as often.
The version number is now included in the crash log, which will help with bug reporting.
The cursor is now hidden in fullscreen mode.
The effect of the Frugal and Undead potions/tunics is explained in a brief text box after you use them for the first time.
Mr Cuddles’s (kitty boss) pattern of attacks has been made slightly easier to anticipate.
Random item drops now do not always re-drop from the sky when you enter the screen again.
In the “Rescue the prince” quest, an extra hint is dropped that you need to return to the palace after finding him.
The triggers for the tutorial screens have been adjusted so that things make more sense in your first overworld playthrough.

Certainly looks promising and a very different take on the somewhat-Zelda aesthetics and whatnot versus something like Isaac.   

[getter77]

Beta 7a

I can release beta7 to you today, which includes these lovely new features:

The autumn biome has been added.
The graveyard biome has been added.
Randomized caves have been added to the overworld.
An obtainable bicycle has been added. This can be used for fast travel by selecting it on the inventory screen.
 
The coffee break challenge has been added. This is a short (~10 minutes) challenge mode on a single dungeon with a random ruleset from the other challenges. There is no online leaderboard for this.
The daily challenge has been added. This is like the coffee break challenge, but based on a standardized per-day seed shared between all players. The leaderboard for this challenge is cleared at the end of the day.

New music has been added to the laboratory and the nuclear dungeons.
New music has been added to mountain biomes.
A new story line chapter has been added to the graveyard area.
A new building has been added to the town: the Church of N’GHA.

[getter77]

Beta 8a 

New title screens and menus
New items
New abilities on old weapons
Combat improvements: telegraphing, knockback, hitboxes etc.
More secrets

Also
60 FPS, widescreen rendering
And countless internal engine improvements and minor tweaks.

[getter77]

Beta 9 

The beta9 update is now available. This update contains a lot of new content, bug fixes and polish.

Amongst the changes are:

Local co-op multiplayer – attach a second controller to let a friend to control your companion
5 new enemy types
1 new companion
Redesigned inventory
A new telephone that can be used to contact NPCs remotely and access secrets
Dripping blood that heals monsters when low on health, and the ability of the player to bleed out
Old-timey CRT shader effect
Tons of bug fixes
There are some massive story changes occurring, but they’re not complete yet. In its current state, not all quests are completable. If you’re not sure where to go next, check your map for the location of the next dungeon.

[getter77]

Beta 10

It includes new areas, story events, various graphical and map generation improvements, and fixes for some serious bugs affecting Mac users.

Lenna’s Inception has come a long way in the three months since beta9. Beta10 is almost here, so here’s a quick roundup of screenshots and information I’ve been sharing on twitter!

The storyline has been mostly implemented. Just the endings, and the optional side-quests are missing right now. The laboratory and palace locations have been redesigned and reimplemented, along with hand-designed puzzles you’ll need to solve to get through them.

The laboratory has fallen into disrepair:

In the palace, you’ll need to figure out how to get through a locked door, while the key sits on the other side:

Another, smaller hand-designed location has been added, but to avoid spoilers, all I’ll say for now is that you’ll need the missinglasses to reach it.

Thanks to some improvements I made to world generation, the generator can now handle larger buildings:

And the overworld and dungeon generators now mix in a larger set of prefab (hand-designed) elements, to give the world some more of the character I wanted it to have:

And dungeons (and caves) are generated with a wider variety of room shapes and sizes. Corridors exist now!

Jay has continued to make progress on the ‘advance’ (32-bit) graphics mode, however this won’t be ready for release with beta10.

As we’ve found out through the course of adding this new mode, ‘upgrading’ the graphical style is not as simple as replacing the art assets.

The original graphical style was fashioned after the Gameboy Color, whereas Jay’s new graphics are designed to be more like games on the Gameboy Advance. What we didn’t realize was that when you see screenshots from games on one of these consoles, you also assume certain other properties of video games on that console hold true. Properties like the level of interactivity, whether it’s important that perspective and scale are correct, the framerate of animations, how much tiles visibly repeat, etc… Games that violate your intuition about these properties just look plain bad.

So every update since the announcement of these new graphics, I’ve been adding new systems and features to the engine to make sure it can provide a consistent experience.

Some things I’ve done for that in this update are:

An experimental tile variant system so that the same tiles can come in different varieties and can be seen to repeat less often.

Some tile variants can be animated, like these torches:

A new system for adding basic animated insects and other critters to specific biomes in the game.

[getter77]

v0.12 

Local co-op

Local co-op has been completely revamped. The second player now controls Shadow Lenna, a character with all the same abilities and stats as Lenna herself.

To use local co-op, simply make sure two controllers are attached and configured, and then start using the second controller. If left alone for ten seconds, Shadow Lenna will despawn again.

Since local co-op requires more HUD space in order to display a second health bar, the UI has undergone a minor redesign, which can be seen in the GIF above.

Bosses

Four out of eight dungeon bosses have now been redesigned with improved graphics and mechanics. The new bosses are located in:

The first dungeon
The dungeon containing the bow
The dungeon containing the swimming shorts
The dungeon containing the amulet of strength

A previous update introduced side-quests with rewards that weren’t used for anything at the time. Those rewards can now be made use of in combination with the prince’s power and the new bosses, although the ultimate purpose of doing that is still not implemented. Yes, I’m being deliberately obtuse—it’s super spoilery!

Exploration and collecting

The game makes better use of the overworld now. Exploration is encouraged in order to find ventricles and atria (heart pieces), as well as meteorite chunks. Additionally, meteorite chunks can now be used for a wider variety of equipment and item storage upgrades. And finally, all caves are guaranteed to contain items that contribute towards a permanent equipment / stat / companion upgrade of some sort.

The update also includes dozens of bug fixes, smaller features and polish items.

The Future

Here’s what we’re planning for the next update and beyond:

Implement the remaining four dungeon bosses.
Implement the four final bosses, and the three story endings.
Complete our GBA-like graphical mode.
Implement Shadow Lenna’s introduction at the beginning of the game.
Write the modding guide!
Tweak the dialogue in a few places, to flow more naturally and include more jokes.
Add more polish and secrets!

Minigames

On the left is the gambling / banking minigame. Spend your spare ¢oins on six stocks, then pull the handle to watch your investments go up or down. But pay attention to the headlines, or you might invest at the wrong time!

On the right there is the Hallucinatory Battle Arena. Enter the cave and defeat 11 waves of enemies to win an exclusive prize!

(There may also be one other, secret, minigame…)

Side-quests

Eight side-quests have been added to the game. Some build upon content that has been in the game a long time, and others involve new content. Pictured above, we have one portion of a trading sequence (left), and a short stealth mission (right).

New boss

Most of the work in this update has gone into building new systems to support better boss battles (multi-part sprites, behavior trees, beams, etc.).

Pictured above is Crabaddon, the first of the new bosses, designed largely by Jay. Crabaddon will replace one of the old bosses in the randomly-generated dungeons. Since you can get these bosses in any order, these new bosses will all have two phases. You’ll always fight the first phase… But you will only fight the second phase if you’re in one of the late-game dungeons.

A wealth of other improvements and bug fixes are going into this update. Mac users, for instance, will be pleased to hear that the game is now packaged as a standard .app bundle.