KORZ-RL (7DRL 2015) - FINISHED

[vincent]

Hello,



My brother asked me to consider doing a 7DRL 2015 entry, but after checking out the high quality releases of last year, I was not so sure.
Still, I though of a game that I would like to play myself and thought that was a good reason to join the party

I have not created a game in years, let alone finished one, so I am quite pleased that I did both, although it's a very simple game in essence.

KORZ-RL is heavily inspired by Apogee's classic "KROZ" series of ASCII-based action games. You are in a single-screen dungeon with dumb enemies that follow you on every move and die when they hit a breakable wall. You can kill enemies and/or break walls by using your whip. Gems are your live energy. On each dungeon there are whips laying around as well. The enemies also take each gem and whip that they find. Your goal is to reach the door that will lead to the next level.

Being a 7DRL entry, I thought it needed a RogueLike-ish mode as well. During development I came up with the idea of being able to switch back/forth those two game modes by the press of a button. I really wish I had more time to make a real RogueLike-worthy level generator, field of vision, enemy AIs, etc., but I simply did not have enough time for this.

In the RogueLike mode you can also use gems to get new whips and/or transport you to a random location on the screen (in action mode you are too busy running to deal with magic spells ).

The game is written in Java 7 and so requires a modern Java 7 JRE. It's a graphical game that uses emulated ASCII graphics by using Trystan's excellent AsciiPanel Swing component (which was a joy to use). I have not tested the game on any other machine than my own, so I have no idea how - or even if - it will run on non-Windows/core i7 machines. I should mention the default key bindings uses the keypad, a lot of you won't have them (especially laptop and Mac users). There's an option to redefine keys though.

For the download link, see http://korzgame.wordpress.com

If anyone has played this and would to share their opinion and/or is encountering issues, I would love to hear them.
Because it is a 7DRL game I do not plan to do additional work on this game, but I will try to fix nasty bugs.

I had so much fun working on this, that I do consider creating a non-7DRL sequel game though.

Thanks for your time!

[vincent]

Here's a short gameplay video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4aheA55JQM

[KhaoTom]

Kingdoms of Kroz, there's a name I hadn't heard in a long long time. Nice blast from the past The addition of the turn based mode is quite nice, and I like that switching to it limits your vision as a trade off.

[Avagart]

Pretty nice little coffebreak. In roguelike mode too easy.

[Samildanach]

Pretty nice little coffebreak. In roguelike mode too easy.

Yeah, roguelike mode is incredibly easy. Let enemies clump up, whip them down until they're all gone, then switch to action mode and spend 5 minutes collecting gems in peace.

[Avagart]

...gems and wips!

[Samildanach]

...gems and wips!

Indeed!

Have you found the bug whereby you can reliably destroy 90% of the enemies on the level by making one of them walk into a wall? That really needs attention.

[vincent]

Hello,

Great to see some feedback, thanks!

I fully agree with the criticism... The truth is that the roguelike-mode should have been given much more play-testing and balancing than I could afford. I completed too much of the game in the last night and really needed to cut corners to make it in time.

Personally I still quite like the game's main idea though and I am considering doing a non-7DRL sequel that is closer to my original vision.
It should have different enemies (not all of them dumb enough to die on a wall, different speeds and different AI's, etc.) and different kind of levels (not only consisting of breakable walls, and not all completely randomly generated) and a level editor would be nice. Also the game should have more magic spells for the roguelike-mode.

Most importantly I'll need to find a way to make the whip somehow work better on roguelike mode. I guess at least most enemies should require more than 1 hit to die.

BTW I've uploaded a small v1.01 update today, but it does not address any of your concerns unfortunately.

[Samildanach]

I fully agree with the criticism... The truth is that the roguelike-mode should have been given much more play-testing and balancing than I could afford. I completed too much of the game in the last night and really needed to cut corners to make it in time.

Don't worry about it. While the games have to be evaluated on their strengths and weaknesses, any criticism isn't a personal insult. We're all aware that making a game in 7 days is a tall order, and having something that works and is playable is an achievement by itself.

I do think the ideas here are interesting. In its current form the game is too easy to abuse, but I can fully sympathise with running out of time. This year's 7DRL was my first ever attempt at (co-)creating a game, and we ran out of time so badly it was painful. A point arrives during the week where you have to cut back on luxuries like balance and playtesting just to get the thing running.