[Phaser] The Rogue Fable

[Justin_Wang123]

Link: http://www.kongregate.com/games/Justin_wang123/the-rogue-fable

Hi everyone! I've just completed my second attempt at a browser roguelike game and would love some feedback from fellow developers. Some thoughts that went into designing this game:

Deterministic:
The game is almost completely deterministic. Weapons always hit, all damage is constant (though mitigated by armor and resistances), healing recovers a set amount of hit points etc. I placed both the remaining hit points and damage directly on enemy sprites as I want players to know exactly what will happen in the next turn. In general I've tried to make the game as tactical as possible with the player given perfect information regarding the state of the game and the results of his actions.

No Health or Mana Regeneration:
The player either needs to consume items in his inventory or consume resources in the level to regenerate mana and health.

Character Development:
I've tried to strike a balance between allowing the player to define his character build and allowing the RNG to define it for him. The items in you find are the major way in which your character build is defined with skills playing a lesser role. Furthermore I included shops so that the player has some control over which items he carries. I intentionally made the inventory small in order to force players to drop or sell items that don't contribute to the strategy he's developing. I hope that each play through players will assess the sort of drops their getting and develop a unique character development strategy for that run. In this way each run should be unique.

No Useless Items:
Even though players will generally be specializing in some variation of melee, ranged, caster or stealth build, I wanted all items to always be useful. For example when a scroll is used, if the player has sufficient mana, then only mana is consumed, otherwise the scroll is consumed. In this way I hope that non caster characters will still feel it useful to carry around scrolls for emergencies. As a counter example, mana is balanced in such a way that casters cannot endlessly fling spells around but must rely on melee or thrown weapons to deal with trash monsters.

Multiple Effects:
I tried to make most items and spells have multiple effects. Healing potions can be drunk at full hp to increase maximum hit points, food also restores health, fire spells can ignite vines, ice spells also freeze enemies in place. There is generally no best weapon type: swords hit multiple enemies, pole arms have increased range, daggers can back stab unaware enemies. Heavier armor reduces maximum mana.

Feedback:
Any feedback is greatly appreciated. Until now I've focused mainly on small games with procedurally generated levels. For my next project I plan to use this games character development, combat and general gameplay as base on which to build a more extensive role playing game with hand crafted levels, NPCs, dialog and quests, so feedback will be informing my next project as well as this one.

[staff0rd]

Not bad, although the game crashed for me - got to 5/16 dungeon, went to attack a spider nest but it moved me on to it and froze, console displayed;

npc.js:195 Uncaught TypeError: this.type.attack is not a function

There doesn't seem to be much reward for killing the hardest mob on a dungeon level - kinda think the loot should be near them.

Otherwise, would have kept playing if it didn't die on me

[Justin_Wang123]

First, thanks for playing! Sorry to hear about that crash, never experienced that one myself, will have to look into it. I've gotten a decent number of bug reports so I'll be releasing a patched version in the next day or two.

The lack of reward was a conscious design choice. I didn't want monsters to drop loot simply because I don't want the player to have to feel like they need to kill all the monsters. I enjoy the idea of a roguelike being this great impossible heist with very limited resources and impossible odds. In later levels its basically expected that you avoid as many enemies as you can. So the enemies give you experience, which helps but I wanted to not punish the players for playing carefully and avoiding difficult fights.

[marcgfx]

worked for me, it's a pretty good game. I really liked that you could click on the minimap to move! the traps are not always obvious and I don't know if they have any strategic value? I did once see a mouse run through a red mushroom and get damaged.

[staff0rd]

17 hours ago, Justin_Wang123 said:

First, thanks for playing! Sorry to hear about that crash, never experienced that one myself, will have to look into it. I've gotten a decent number of bug reports so I'll be releasing a patched version in the next day or two.

Cool, let us know when it's up and I'll give it another shot.

17 hours ago, Justin_Wang123 said:

The lack of reward was a conscious design choice. I didn't want monsters to drop loot simply because I don't want the player to have to feel like they need to kill all the monsters. I enjoy the idea of a roguelike being this great impossible heist with very limited resources and impossible odds. In later levels its basically expected that you avoid as many enemies as you can. So the enemies give you experience, which helps but I wanted to not punish the players for playing carefully and avoiding difficult fights.

Yeah, makes sense.  I ended up putting a few points in stealth but I didn't really perceive a change in the mobs reacting to me or not.  On that note, I had no idea you could even assign stats until I hit level 5 and fell across it by accident.

[staff0rd]

Gave it another shot, died at dungeon level 7, cementing the fact that I suck at this game   Was unable to make the spider nest bug happen again.

[Luiz Bills]

No keyboard controls?

[lochrist]

I really like your game. I love tinkering on Rogue like on my side. Do you have any intention on putting your game on github (or making the game open source)?

Keep up the good work this is really promising.