Dungeons of Al'hebra (7DRL Version)
A downloadable game for Windows
I am building this game to test out possible ways of developing greater dynamics in game stories. In this particular experiment what I am trying to do is fuse the Roguelike genre with interactive fiction.
It turned out, by luck, that I started my experiment on the same day that I could qualify for the 2024 7DRL. So this version is what I have completed after just 7 days of the experiment.
The project was originally scoped to be a month of experimentation and iteration, not seven days of building finished game play. I only partially adapted my plans to the 7DRL challenge, so this demo is pretty rough in some ways. And it is pretty incomplete. In particular, the game will start by implying certain goals for your character, and lore about the dungeon, and none of these things actually exist in the game. There is no victory condition.
However there is a dungeon with three sub-branches, lots of enemies, a few items, and some interesting mechanics experiments. While what I've built may not resemble a typical Roguelike, I hope it will be interesting to the Roguelike community.
Download
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Comments
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Video of the game here:
Very interesting concept, I haven't tried much interactive fiction before, but I enjoyed it. Couldn't get past orc sorcerers on level 2 though. I was wondering about fonts, do you pre-rasterize the ttfs for a given resolution, or is it on the fly?
It's rasterized into an atlas on first use, and then kept in an in-memory cache for the rest of the program. It's okay, but not good enough for freely scaling the font size in an animation.
Not surprised that's where you got blocked! I spent basically no time making sure the game felt balanced. I need to learn more about RPG balance and pacing for future iterations!
Ah gotcha. Yeah I've been doing that too so far. But always wondered how people handle scaling. Also unicode...
Just wanted to try it but I get the following message box:
The resolution on my main monitor is 5120x1440.
Oh gotcha. I think I will be able to fix that, thanks for the info.
I've uploaded a version which should allow you to play it.
It works now, thanks! I like the game, it’s pretty cool. Good job. :)