Dreams of Collapse

A 2D roguelike in a dream world that is constantly shifting ... but with Lucid Dreaming,  you can take control and  re-shape the dreamscape!

Wrest control of your dream from the creatures of your nightmares, lest you lose yourself to your dreams of collapse.

Novel world-shifting gameplay, enabled by GroundCollapse, a new constraint-based world generator that ensures the terrain will always match up smoothly, even when you use your powers to change parts of it!

Originally created for the 7DRL challenge 2020. Dreams of Collapse is free and open-source.

Story:

Your world seems like it is collapsing around you. Your troubles and worries during the day, barely controllable, take form during your darkest times as all-too-real nightmares. You risk losing yourself to them, falling to fear and giving up. But you have one last hope to regain control and achieve the sweet rest you need for the real struggle still to come.

You are sometimes a lucid dreamer: you can achieve moments of clarity and significantly alter the course of your dreams. Now, you journey through your own dreamscape, ever-shifting and full of nightmarish perils, to seek the clarity and comfort that will return you to dreamless bliss.

Your goal:

Achieve Dream Level 20, by gaining "Refreshment" through exploration and vanquishing your nightmares.

How to play:

"Repose" is like health - monsters damage it when they attack you. "Clarity" is like mana, for manipulating the dream world.

Move in 8 directions with the keys surrounding WASD. Attack nightmares by moving  into them.

If you get stuck or there are too many nightmares, you can use Clarity to perform "Lucid Dreaming," to re-imagine an area of the dreamscape. Start selecting an area with the R key, move the selection like your character, and then finalize the selection with S.

See the Settings menu for full controls details.

Credits:

Terrain is generated using the GroundCollapse procedural content generation tool, also by @NPCDev.

Art by Calciumtrice licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.

Art by Joe Williamson licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license.

Art by saint11 placed in public domain under Creative Commons 0 license.

Music by Nibana and Balancé licensed under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

Music by GreatOwl licensed under the CC-BY 4.0 license.

Megrim font by Daniel Johnson, licensed under the OFL.

Some code based on:

Nelson, M. J., & Smith, A. M. (2016). ASP with applications to mazes and levels. In Procedural Content Generation in Games (pp. 143–157). Springer.

Karth, I., & Smith, A. M. (2017). WaveFunctionCollapse is constraint solving in the wild. Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games, 68. ACM.