itch.io

Thanks for checking it out and glad you liked it and/or I'm sorry it gave you vertigo.

If you install the Itch.io app, you should be able to download and play the game offline.  Let me know if it doesn't work, but it's worked on my previous projects, so should work on this one too!

Thanks for playing and glad you enjoyed it!  Hah, love the random luck you got on your leader choices (didn't even occur to me that could happen, but with 100 names and 3 faces to choose from, odds are it'd happen to someone, I guess ^_^).

The CRT filter may have a bit more of an impact on a lower resolution screen, though it also helps more with the hard pixel boundaries and blending colors there too, but it is a bit of a matter of taste.

There are no plans for a separate downloadable, however you should be able to download the game via the Itch.io app and play offline.  (I haven't tried in a year, though it worked for people after last year's jam, let me know if you try!)

The cat is simply a reference to my game in last year's Dungeon Crawler Jam (same engine and similar quality, though pretty different kind of game), you may enjoy =).

That typo is just a reflection of the mental state of the captain when she wrote that log entry, all part of the story! ;)  Good catch on the typo, fixed now, thanks!

I don't mind at all, I love it! =)  Glad you enjoyed the game!

Nice job on these assets!  I used these (purchased in a bundle a while back), in my recent entry to the Dungeon Crawler Jam, and it came in first place!  Apologies for using them basically verbatim on my game page's background though -_-.  They're slightly better integrated within the game itself =).

Wonderful job on these assets!  I used these (and a few of other packs I've purchased of yours), in my recent entry to the Dungeon Crawler Jam, and it came in first place!  Couldn't have done it without you!

Wonderful job on these assets!  I used these (and a bunch of other packs I've purchased of yours, here and on HumbleBundle), in my recent entry to the Dungeon Crawler Jam, and it came in first place!  Couldn't have done it without you!

Thanks for playing and glad you enjoyed it!

Party members left (and you get a replacement at a higher tier) once they were fully upgraded (assuming they weren't at max tier, and a couple extra little checks like that you had enough XP left over to level up at least one of their skills, or if they were way behind the rest of the party's tier), but there was no way you could prevent it (and, mechanically, you probably wouldn't want to, as the higher HP+shield from the tier increase kinda trumps everything else).  It understand it didn't really feel good though, as a player =).

Originally I had the party dialog all deactivating after reading it once, but a little too often I ran past one, and then stepped on another, and was like "wait, what was that?", and of course there was no way to go back.  I'm not sure if anyone actually went back to read things they kinda missed or not though.  Glad to know it spiced up backtracking though!  The quantity and quality of those dialogs is all thanks to the writer on the team, they really do add a lot!

Ah, restarting at the latest health point wouldn't have been too bad =).

For the visual bug, at first I thought it might be an enemy, as the first time it seemed like it was right when I walked over a corpse (that maybe came back right when I stepped on it?) but it didn't seem tightly correlated, and there was no enemy anywhere nearby when I escaped the bug.

I did see the game restart, and saw the "Later..." message, and I guess it does say "THE END" and "Thanks for playing", but I couldn't quite remember if that's also what it said when I died =).   I thought it might be the end, but since it felt like it was half way through a level, I wasn't quite sure... had it been right at the beginning / after going down the stairs, or a clear end of level dead end, maybe it would have been clearer =).

Visuals are just lovely, although the pixel-art UI being misaligned by half a pixel in places relative to the pixelated world bugs me a bit =).  I love the lighting and the monsters, it all comes together really nicely.  The reload mechanic was great, I thought I was dead once, but apparently two enemies lined themselves up and politely died to a single shot ^_^.  I would have liked a little audio cue when a tick of the reload completed, as a couple times I thought I was done reloading a segment, so let go, but apparently it had visually finished the segment, but not actually finished it, or something like that.  I made it through to the end and it was very satisfying.

Overall, love this!  Visuals are cool, although maybe a little less variance on the font would have made it easier to read =).  Monsters are really cool.

I made it through the 4th, I think, level (lots of invisible walls), and on the next level my one remaining character committed suicide shortly after entering the level.  So sad.  I can't remember if anyone died along the way (besides the scripted events), but if I had lost no one, was there potentially more content after that?  I liked having to choose who to sacrifice along the way, although I couldn't imagine playing with automap!  On that note, the dungeon design was wonderful and devious, all of the elements I'd love to see.  Unfortunately after my scout left me, it turned into a bit of save-scumming (just reload if I stepped on a trap).

I couldn't tell where consumables were coming from, seemed often like exploring the dungeon wasn't providing much of anything except danger?  Were consumables just coming from combat drops?  I was definitely low on medkits the whole time, thanks to my Doctor being the first one to go mad, I guess =).  I had *tons* of ammo though, so started just minigunning through everything.

Great job on this!

I'm not sure I trust the yellow "energy drink" I found in the bathroom...

The objectives were nice polish, but honestly it may have been a bit more fun exploring without them (or, slightly more work, but if they only show up if the player hasn't made any objective progress in 2-5 minutes or so?).  I don't think I was ever confused on where to go (e.g. the dialog about dumping liquid on the console was perfect to get me to remember I saw a bucket earlier).  OMG, I love the fidelity transition, the different lock-pick UI even was a nice touch!  Cutscenes and such were great and really showed a lot of polish.  Nice job!

You had me at "Rescue cats."  Visual style is cool, although I think the scan-lines on the main viewport was a bit much (doing something like just duplicating every other line and dimmed by half, like you seem to do on most of the interface itself, would probably give a similar feel but not be quite so hard on the eyes).  The UI and framing around the viewport looks stellar.  Monsters are great too.

I didn't like that rotating counted as a turn, more than once I tried to turn to face an enemy, but strafed into the square instead (stupid game I played before this one with backwards turn/strafe controls confusing my brain!), and then I got attacked, and then got attacked twice more as I turned to face them, instead of getting the first attack in as I'd planned and thought I instructed my character to do ^_^.  Having no queuing of movement nor being able to hold down a button to keep moving made navigating the dungeon a bit of a chore.   I would have liked a little more choices in combat, there didn't seem to be anything I could do to increase my longevity, no healing or anything, so whether or not I survived just game down to luck of how many times I missed between now and my next level up :(.  I got down to 2hp before my last level up, so, luckily, didn't die, but it was close!

I would have appreciated a compass somewhere instead of having to look at "moved north".  The fact that the map just showed a general overview was really nice, made me feel like I had to keep track of where I was exploring, but still got a general sense of where I was.

The verticality was great, those rooms really had a nice sense of place and were fun to explore (and recognize, as I learned my way around).

There's a bug/issue where if the game is not in focus it's still capturing my mouse, so if I alt-tab to another program, my mouse is locked to a tiny corner of my screen ^_^.  Overall, cool entry, glad I rescued all of the cats!

Graphics are lovely, really nice consistent style and sense of place.  I'm glad I was invincible, I would have "died" once and restarting would have been annoying ^_^.  I got what is I guess a bug a few times, some big black blob seemed to attach to my camera, couldn't see where I was going unless I was strafing and could then just see a little bit, and it usually cleared up when I got near a healing area.    One time near the purple orb, something similar tinted part the screen yellow (subtractive purple?), I think, instead of black, maybe some effect was going awry?  It took me quite a while to find all 3 orbs (just didn't see the door to the purple orb area ^_^), but I made it back home in the end!  I liked "forward" being attack for the simple combat, made things flow pretty nicely.

Sounds good!  Yeah, the combat was a bit janky, but working on atmosphere over better combat seems like it was the right choice =).

Cool entry!  I wish I had slightly more interesting choices in combat... it seemed very rarely did I have enough information to do anything other than "choose the safest row", or even when I had information, I really had to analyze things closely to find any row that was actually safer than whichever row had the fewest Xs... if it did something like the row patterns were (relatively) fixed so that with a little information you could make a guess about which row might be the one you want (e.g. I remember it had an empty spot in the 4th column) or something like that would make it just a little bit more engaging.

I figured out what everything did (eventually) except for CBT (which, I'm assuming, stands for Cognitive Behavioral Therapy here, and not what it usually stands for on the darker reaches of the internet...).  Reading a comment below I guess that's because I also didn't notice there was a map until I had 1 trauma left to deal with =).  I would have liked a slightly simpler way to pick up things in a room (maybe have one less menu and then just B = open menu, and A = pick up?), it got a bit cumbersome - same with repeatedly using the same item (maybe just press A on it repeatedly, with a 1-line message about what it did? =).

I like the visuals, nice, simple, clean, and the ending song was nice =).

Nice game with great vibes!  First combat was confusing, I lost 3/4th of my health and I'm not sure if I was doing something wrong or not.  Monster was in the same tile as me for most of the combat.  Second combat I tried dancing more, but still didn't get it.  Mostly figured things out after that.  I think my confusion mostly comes from the attack sound sounds like a miss/"whiff" sound even when I hit, and that I needed to keep them at least a tile away from me to be able to hit them, I guess?  I would have liked some clearer indication of a hit (both audible and visible) so that I could figure out if I'm doing the right thing or not much quicker =).  Not sure if it's a bug, or just ghostly enemies, but one moved through some walls and attacked me through them (right after going through the second torch-able door, I think - there were a couple spaces I couldn't get to myself to the north that the enemy went through).  The shark was great, and terrifying.  Did I imagine things, or did it come back to life and attack me from behind? (Or were there 2?)  I managed to make it through the end, I hope my sacrifice was not in vein...

Great, thanks for playing!  Very little of the visual art is original (mostly a bunch of the UI and some of the environment art), the portraits were from the same artist's assets (Tyler Warren), although with only a little bit of editing here and there - he might call them "monsters", but I call them friends and aliens =).  I've updated the page to better attribute the portraits to him now.

I'm glad you liked how it all came together, I really liked how the dying/recruiting/retiring ties into the story and setting, but not everyone likes their characters leaving suddenly on them ^_^.  Thanks for posting a video (and sharing bug report details), I will have to check it out later!

Thanks for playing!  I have played Dicey Dungeons, though I had to look it up to remember exactly how it worked (apparently I 100%'d it on Steam though, so enjoyed it very much =).  _None Shall Pass_ (board game playable on BoardGameArena) was my main inspiration for this, but there's a lot of good ideas in Dicey Dungeons that would perhaps blend well here too =).  Sanity was a bit tacked on, and was originally planned as a resource to limit reaching the next safe area with respawning monsters, but then balancing XP and player levels with respawning monsters sounded problematic, and my goal of many combats having 1-2 deaths didn't mesh with anything other than complete health restore between combats (with the low health numbers, if anyone wasn't healed it seemed the chance for a party wipe skyrocketed), so really only the "max sanity" became relevant (which, if you were playing really well, you may not have even noticed was going down ^_^).  We also had a *ton* of cool ideas for visual affects to apply as you started getting insane, but that simply didn't make the cut (it was either that or a day of polish, and polish trumps all ;).

Interesting bug!  I bet that only happens in browsers that suspend the tab when in the background (which I have disabled because it makes debugging really painful ^_^), and I should be able to reproduce and fix it pretty easy, thanks for reporting!

As for the max discoveries, amusingly my balancing spreadsheet I used to calc how much XP a player would have says there's 84... I have *no* idea where I miscounted or which one was never implemented... but it's fine ^_^

If you want to go back and find it just for completionists sake (or to up your score ^_^), your progress should be saved in your browser =).  Assuming it's what I think it is, the quick hint is that there's 2 secret doors in the cave.

Thanks for playing, and glad you enjoyed it!  Yeah, the tier-upgrading-via-leaving mechanic really didn't work great (and was done really hackily via an even on a floor trigger, hence the not happening for a few steps ^_^), losing someone you just upgraded didn't feel good (even if it seemed to make sense mechanically that only fully upgraded people would get their tier increased...).  Nice job getting to the end, and that's a decent high score location =).

This is fantastic!  I managed to make it through to the end, but I had to watch CaptainCoder's recording to find a couple spots ^_^.  When I got the hammer, the game trained me that the map would have icons for breakable walls, (and I saw no visible difference in-world upon first inspection), so I never even thought to look for them later :(.

At some point I noticed that if I died it auto reloaded and I had max HP, so I started doing that instead of using healing potions, and I ended the game with exactly the 4 I needed... without abusing that bug, it would have been really frustrating, as I likely would have been at 0 potions at that point :(.

Controls on gamepad played pretty great (despite the odd shift+arrows to strafe ^_^), and it felt nice and snappy and I love the visuals.

Ah, yeah, building rails would be perfect and fun =).

Simple and elegant!  I like this take on dungeon crawling, although it feels like it could use just a little more going on - solid walls you can't mine through?  Teleporter to get back quickly?  I enjoyed it nonetheless!  Decided to keep playing (until the 40k mark) with a podcast on in the background for some nice, chill relaxing =).

Also, the Mining minigame worked much better when I figured out it was registering on key-up instead of key-down (which means, hold the key right away, then release in the bar, instead of trying to press in the bar, which always made me late ^_^), woulda perhaps felt more responsive (the movement too), if it were on key-down instead.

Pretty cool!  I love the visuals and level design, it had a real nice sense of place and atmosphere.  I got stuck for quite a while looking for the crystal ball to add to the shelf - I'd interacted with the girl's body once (and got a note, I think?) but didn't realize I needed to interact again to get something else from her.  Combat felt a little clunky, maybe due to very limited feedback about when I was able to attack again?  Some sound there maybe would have helped.  I got the hang of it though, and managed to make it to the end of the game, with plenty of medkits to spare, once I got in the habit of shooting everything once while it was at a distance.  I started to get a little worried when I was donning the madman's top hat and turning these unknown orbs red that I _might_ be the bad guy, but it all worked out in the end =).

Really cool concept!  Intro text went by a bit too quickly to read, I had to restart to catch it.  I accidentally made a bunch of omelets out of my eggs, which apparently do nothing for me, so I got a bit stuck :(.  I think I was about to win, as I was backtracking to the one Spiderwolf I'd left alive when apparently I died of hunger, despite a backpack full of broccoli, but that tracks with my behavior in real life, so I'll take it.  The monsters looked great, really cool combinations!

Environment art is gorgeous, and the horrors are horrifically cute!

Apparently I misinterpreted the save/load icons and never saved my game (or, if there was a save, I immediately saved over it when starting a new one :( ).  At least saying "no save game available to load" when I kept clicking on the "load game" icon while playing would have been nice to know it wasn't actually saving :(. Note to self: top one is save

After dying and starting a new game, all of the dialogs appear to have not reset, including, perhaps very importantly, the one that gives me stimpacks from the backpack... I suspect I need to restart again...  Yup, had to restart, couldn't make it back to the Captain on just 1 stimpack it seems.  On my third run, after a complete reset, this time with much saving, it all worked out.  And, apparently, I was right before the end when I died!  I would have liked one more level, I think =).

It feels weird that encounters are sometimes triggered upon turning, I usually think of looking around as a "free" action in this kind of game...  Although, I can't quite figure out how it works - sometimes I can sit and spin in circles and eventually I'll get an encounter, but then sometimes not... are there like invisible monsters roaming around and not actually random encounters?  Nope, doesn't seem like it... minimum distance since last encounter?

Combat felt nice, although wasn't much depth, at least I could think a little bit about whether or not to do a dodge attack or a main attack and hope to save a few HP, although the randomness in damage meant it was often unclear if my strategy worked =).  The sounds on combat were very satisfying, and I liked the monster names and their descriptions as they arrive and leave.

Great job!

After getting the portal, I clicked on the thingy in front of me a couple times, and couldn't hear what it was saying because it was garbled, so I clicked a couple more times to listen after that...  and then someone died...  Well, I guess I didn't need them anyway? >:D

Great entry!  I liked the leveling up and finding loot, I wish there was a little more variety in the loot though.  I couldn't tell if not meeting the apparent strength requirements was actually causing any problem, as it seemed I could equip them and my damage went up, not sure if that was a bug, or I was just missing more often because of it =).

The Crit-Tick was fantastic (both mechanically and atmospherically).

Really fun!  I love the intro, especially the sword =).

While playing I kept pressing Escape trying to close the inventory, I wish it would do that =).  Inventory has some (presumably well-known) issues that were frustrating (couldn't swap things around without dropping something / making space, couldn't use things from the inventory, had to unequip weapon, equip potion, exit inventory, use potion, open inventory, re-equip weapon, which was really cumbersome).

First run I was killed by a rat on the other side of a door that I didn't notice :(.  It would be nice if it would have restarted me at the start of the floor instead of back to the beginning or something, but it didn't take too long to do the first floor again, and then I was much more careful of critters on the other side of doors =).

I made it to the end, and loved the little final animation, that was nice!

Nice visuals, everything feels pretty consistent and meshes really well.

It took me a while to discover how to open the inventory, a hover effect indicating the portrait was clickable would help =).

Got surrounded upon leaving the jail on my first run and died.  Second run I tried drawing them one at a time, but the "wait" button doesn't seem to do anything, at least for these enemies, and I died again.

Having to re-fight these same cultists again... combat is a little slow and uninteresting.  Since it's turn based, and no interesting choices especially at the beginning, it'd be nice to be able to just click repeatedly and get it over with.  Once I speed hacked it to 5x speed, it was bearable =).  Also once getting through the starting area for the 5th time it wasn't too bad later, as the combats were much more interesting.

3rd and 4th tries I died to the pair of cultists and the dog, just ran out of healing potions and couldn't survive.

5th try I stumbled upon a secret room and that run I managed to make it to the end and win.

Fun entry.  Inventory and leveling up was cool.

Really cool!  Amazing monster design and great texture work, especially in town and the transition.  The blob of screaming faces was my favorite.

The quadrant-locked mouselook worked pretty well and was great for spatial awareness while moving in larger areas (the town).

The map that gives you partial information is a neat idea, made it still fun to explore after getting the map, and it was cool it then tracked my exploration progress on it.

Cool entry!  I love the visual style, though wish a little more had been done with the voxels - they were nice in the first room where it wasn't just sprites =).

Not being able to see the ground of the tile to your right/left made navigating the planet with lava nerve-wracking, I did walk into lava accidentally a couple times, though it was probably due to thinking I was turning when I pressed the Strafe key, not the visuals -_-.

I got the console dropping down and saying `Error in put_entity (lava planet - walking out): Invalid entity.`

For some reason the "space" key couldn't open the engine room, I was stuck for a while on that until I tried reaching for the mouse.  Other than that, it played pretty well with just keyboard.

After the "oh no not again", I got lost, went to a planet I'd been too, and then it reset so I had to go to cryosleep again.  After reading here, I guess that's the infinite loop (maybe mention it on the game page would be less jarring ^_^)?

I love the grid based space travel, it felt surprisingly good.

Pretty cool!  I like the old raycaster feel =).  I didn't managed to escape after a few tries, my health dropped without me noticing getting hit (I guess, shots from above?) and then it was too late.  I wasn't able to figure out if there was any indication of which places I could go up and which I could not, so often found myself next to a wall that I couldn't climb and needing to backtrack, which was a bit frustrating.  Enemies were really cool looking, and I enjoyed the switching mana color mechanic to keep me on my toes!

Thanks for playing, and glad you liked it!

Yeah, the dungeons definitely needed some more love, but after polishing the combat, not much time was left, I just barely got in enough dungeon floors that the 5 levels of encounters I had (somewhat) balanced had a place to live ^_^.

Final boss probably could have been harder, although for the most part I was thinking of clearing the floor before as the "final boss", and defeating the actual boss was just triggering the narrative ending, but I guess that just felt like a bit of a let-down.  I really didn't want a party wipe and people to have to re-do the final floor though, if they got that far, as it was already getting long =).

As for backtracking to level up, you may not have noticed you can click on the map to move to where you've already explored, makes getting back to Solitude painless.

I'm also not sure on the constant renewal, had the endless stream of replacement adventurers not been our primary "endless" theme idea, I probably would have done something more traditional there, though I did like being forced to use different skills at times.  I think if I were to expand this into a fuller game, it would treat character replacements similar to equipment - you find someone new and decide whether or not to swap out an existing party member or something.

The enemy types were fixed on what they used - basically there was an armored/balanced/hp sponge/damage/aoe enemy type for each floor, and they were always the same.  The in-world enemy sprite you see just represented an "encounter" (usually containing 2 of the variety you see, and one other), although since each encounter was only seen 1-2 times in a floor, it's not something you'd actually really discover (or, if you did, you'd likely not change any behavior due to it ^_^).

I apologize for the lack of cat petting.  I don't actually have any "interact" functionality in the game (it's just movement and combat ^_^), but I will keep that in mind for next year, as I'm sure the cat will make a return.

Thanks for posting the playthrough video, I'll give it a watch later!

Really like this look of this!

Received "Wonkey Runtime Error: SIGNAL: Memory access violation GC state=IDLE" while viewing the controls.  I had pressed the arrow keys and alt-enter a few times before going into the controls (none of them seemed to do anything, although on a second reproduction I noticed "old coins" showing up on the main menu when using the arrow keys, I guess I'm moving around?  crash happened again after similar steps when trying alt-enter or enter on the controls screen).

I seem to almost always move at least two spaces when I press a key to move, usually resulting in damage when hitting a wall :(

F4 seems to instantly exit :(.  Oh, possibly it thought I had "alt" held due to an earlier alt-tab and it didn't reset the keydown states upon focus/activate or something.

Way too difficult (maybe due to controls?) for me, I died 3 times before managing to get the three fish -_-.  Finally did that a few times, and not sure what keeps killing me, I seem to walk in front of a snail and instantly go from full Hp to 0 :(.

Looking forward to playing more in a post-bugfix version =).

I'm mixed on illusionary walls - for people well versed in the genre, they're kind of fun, especially in a well-made, tightly-packed dungeon where the empty spots on the map can clue you in to where they might be.  For people not well versed in the genre (my first two people I watched play it), even with really strong hinting they just don't ever find any of them, or even really think to stop and look, so I think it's maybe something best lest out of the genre if we want a larger audience to enjoy it... I also made the mistake of requiring an illusionary wall to progress at one point, and even with the newly edited, giant crack down the middle, sprites, some people can't find it ^_^.

Thanks for playing, and glad you liked it!

I think compared to last year the dungeon design suffered a bit - I spent so much (well needed) time on the combat and combat balance that some of the floors were a little weak or uninteresting (at least, for me, although it's hard to tell when exploring your own levels ^_^).  Although, I guess there was more variety than last year (mostly because I'd balanced 5 tiers of encounters, so, darn it, there was going to be 5 floors! ;)

Glad you loved the XP from exploring, I mostly did that because I loved the stuff the writer was making so much, it seemed a good way to encourage finding, if not reading, it =).

Hah, awesome bad luck with the reload timing.  In practice, the fully leveled characters are the ones that leave and "tier up", so not too surprising it happened to one you didn't want to lose =).