JRogue - my first roguelike

[Justin_Wang123]

Hi everyone!

I just finished my first attempt at making a small roguelike game and would love some feedback to help guide future development.

For JRogue my goal was to focus on unique content and avoid many instances of similar items/enemies differing only by stats. I also tried to put the focus as much as possible on items and kept the players power curve from leveling quite shallow. I even toyed with the idea during development of simply removing all leveling but my love of watching a little experience bar grow proved to strong. The combat mechanics are also almost entirely deterministic as I wanted to emphasis tactics and avoid as many random deaths as possible. I tried to keep the scope small while still delivering what I believe is the core roguelike experience. There's a lot more I'd like to add in the future but I'm eager to hear from you guys while the game is still small and 'malleable'.

I'm particularly curious about to the difficulty level for other players as I find myself dying about one in two attempts (a complete run through only takes about 20 minutes).

For those interested the game was developed with Javascript and the Phaser framework and should work on all modern browsers.

http://www.kongregate.com/games/Justin_wang123/jrogue

Justin

[Avagart]

Man, please, try to develop game further and make a standalone, offline build. I hate roguelikes via browser only.

Your game is very generic - and it's not very well. But I must say that your work is quite impressive. Interface is intuitive and constrols are smooth. I was surprised  when I noticed that player in water moves slower. Good idea and implementation Nice to see more than one type of terrain - dungeons and caves. I don't recognize this tileset, but isn't bad.

I encountered one 'bug' - sometimes dunggen algo creates single door in corridor which is two-tiles wide.

Game is not bad in balance - could be more difficult.

You also implemented sleep/stealth system?

Man, for the first roguelike - you made good work, good luck with this and all next projects

[dscreamer]

Welcome to the Temple!

Overall, nice work so far. Now some specific things:
-The important info is easy to find. Hover for description is great.
-Browser games are just fine but I wouldn't play long without a keyboard interface. (Moving with the mouse is too slow and imprecise for me.)
-Weapons with different abilities are great.
-No speed issues, which is nice because my comp is kind of slow.
-I agree that the core mechanics seem solid here.

I died on level 5 to a rat (I think it was behind a snake), but it was a reckless death because I still had healing.

Anyway, good luck!

[Justin_Wang123]

Thanks for the feedback.

The generic aspect is basically intentional as I wanted to assure myself that I could actually finish this project before moving onto anything more innovative. I'm really interested in the future in exploring sci-fi or post-apocalyptic settings as these are my favorite genres and I feel they are under represented in roguelike games. I'm also interested in developing some kind of party based roguelike with AI controlled allies who's behavior you can tweak in game.

The level generation is still a bit of a mess, I think I spent more time on this then the rest of the game and will probably spend a ton of time in the future to get rid of all those oddities.

As for the difficulty, roughly how many times did you die? Or did you die at all before winning. I'm trying to err more on the easy side as I want to the game to be approachable by non hardcore roguelike players (thus the simplified interface), but obviously my conception of my own games difficulty is biased.

I made the graphics myself so 'not bad' is the highest praise I could possibly expect with my limited programmer art skills .

Thanks again for your feedback and encouragement.

[Justin_Wang123]

Thanks for the feedback dscreamer.

I'm gonna look into implementing keyboard controls for the next version, just need to figure out a good way to do long range targeting.

[Tzan]

Great job for a first RL.

I didnt have any food problems.

I only played once, got to dungeon level 10 and died to a knight.

But that was my fault, I backed away into an unknown area and ran into 2 wizards.
I healed, moved at them dragging the knight, did an inferno on them all (whatever its called), but then immediately died because I hadn't done enough damage to the knight before that.

I found my inventory full too many times to pick stuff up.
But I had junk I wanted to drop, but couldnt.
Having two amulets is not good, you can only use one, +5 hp or + regen.
Once you choose, you'll never use the other, you can of course but its not worth passing up on getting food.

- So having a way to drop items would be great.
- Also when your character dies, show the attack that killed him, do the damage number animation, replace the graphic with a dead character body, wait a few seconds or click to continue, go to the death screen you have.

[Justin_Wang123]

Thanks for feedback Tzan.

I'll add a drop button in the next version. I thought it wouldn't be possible to get enough items to actually fill the inventory but apparently I was wrong. I was hoping to find a way to encourage the player to swap amulets depending on the situation but I don't think there's much of a point right now. Maybe in the future if I add different types of magic resistance this will work as intended.

That's a great idea for the death screen, I'll look into adding that.

I've updated the game to guarantee food drops on some of the levels since a lot of people seem to be struggling with not finding enough food. Reduced the actual random drop rate of food at same time so hopefully the actual amount of food in game should be the same, just better distributed.