A downloadable game

This entry for the 7DRL 2024 competition is a simple roguelike developed within the constraints of the Pulp game editor for the Playdate. The game mechanics are necessarily trimmed down to resemble a primordial roguelike.

Move with the D-pad, change direction with the crank, attack with A, and wait a turn with B (giving the monsters a chance to move). After a certain number of turns in each level, a portal will appear that will warp you to the next level. Don't wait too, long ... the portals attract baleful creatures better left unknown.

Secure the scepter to win the game, scoring points for each chest and monster skull you collect. Monsters are all killed in a single hit but may react differently to the weapons you find in the levels.

Note: To play this game, you must sideload the .zip to your Playdate or create a Playdate account, create a new game in Pulp, import the .json, and play in the simulator. Unfortunately, there is no way for me to provide anonymous access to the game in the simulator. The video in the sidebar shows both the editor and my entry if you'd just like to watch that to get a taste! My final run, ending in YASD three tiles from victory, starts at 14:38. ☠️

Extra note: Thanks to Oryx for the tiles! 😘

Download

Download
7drl-2024-ryanszrama.zip 66 kB
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7DRL 2024.json 89 kB

Comments

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(+1)

Looks interesting! As I'm working on a Playdate Roguelike in Pulp myself, I'll give this a go soon!

Thanks! Will check out your work, too. 😊

Had to work around some interesting Pulp constraints for this entry just to get it done, as I didn't start until Friday afternoon. For example, it's really hard (or impossible?) to have variable numbers of sprites moving around while preserving the background tiles. I ultimately decided to only let items and sprites appear and move on white backgrounds so I could always assume that they'd swap with white when they move or get collected. 

(Interestingly, this doesn't seem to work all the time ... portals and scepters occasionally place over walls, and I didn't have time to track it down. Additionally, I never implemented avoiding placing portals and scepters on the player itself, because determining if two points overlap is cumbersome with nested if statements. I could fake it for monsters by starting the player on a non-white tile in many of the levels.)

For this one, too, I thought about messing with menus to support more item types (e.g., magic potions). I figured I could open it with B and make "rest" a basic action, but I didn't have time for any of that.

Next steps will be to flesh out the monster types and add another weapon or two... I want bats that move twice randomly instead of once and bows to shoot them at a distance, ghosts that spawn around graves in a level, etc. Need to add more sound effects and potentially music, too, perhaps to signal when the portal has appeared and the danger is increasing due to portal demons.

I also think I could've done myself a big favor by faking function calling ... creating a single "place_tile" function and setting the tile to be placed to a variable before calling the placement function. Instead, I ended up with a lot of last minute copy/pasta that probably led to some of the occasional bugs I mentioned above.

All in all, I love working within the constraints of a platform like Pulp. Looking forward to refactoring this post-jam and carrying it forward!

(+1)

I played a couple of runs of your game. Never got very far, but I really like what I've seen. This type of game seems to be what the Playdate was made for: Quick to pick up and start a run, but deep and varied enough to keep me coming back.

I also love working with those specific constraints - and trying to break them. For my Roguelike I heavily rely on the fake function calling you describe, it will allow you to do some pretty amazing things. I also tend to use rect() a lot, but that can kill performance quickly.

If you're interested to see where my Pulp Roguelike project is going, you can take a look at https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@Braininabowl. I'm planning to resume working on it once I've cooled down from the 7drl.

Thanks for checking it out! Will be sure to keep experimenting / expanding this and will follow your dev - gif on your feed looks great. Gonna go kick some more baddies in your jam entry now. : D