Sewermancer

A roguelike game for 7DRL Challenge 2022.

You are a Master of Sewermancy! Or a magical janitor if you want to be rude about it.

Controls

• Move: WASD or ARROW KEYS
• Cast "Combust" spell: SPACE BAR

Bump to attack or interact, use your Combust spell to clear enemies.

Design

I've been wanting to make a roguelike (somewhat) inspired by Conway's Game of Life for a while now. In this game, I explored the "Mold" entity which replicates and/or dies based upon various conditions (like the number of living neighbors, etc).

The player is given a tool, the "Combust" spell, which can damage Mold (and other entities) but is tied to a resource.

Additionally, the player must manage their Poison resource such that they don't die from the damage over time.

For those curious about the inner working of the system, the following rules apply:

• Mold can replicate or die every 20 steps
• Poison damages the player every 20 steps
• Poison damage done uses the formula: floor(POISON / 25)
  • At <25 Poison, no damage is done
  • At 25 - 49 Poison, 1 damage is done
  • At 50 - 74 Poison, 2 damage is done
  • and so on

Development

I started with the guts of my two previous 7DRL games, Catacombs and H@CK3R. Some improvements:

• Improved level generation and entity placement
• "Game of Life" style entity behaviors
• New Poison resource
• New Magic resource

Credits

• DB16 Palette by DawnBringer
• The Essential Retro Video Game Sound Collection
• Matt Hackett (for talking out design)

Postmortem

What went well:

• The "Game of Life" systems feel pretty interesting and serve to make the player think about where to step and how to effectively use their abilities
• The Poison resource is an interesting version of the "Hunger Clock" in that it "costs" life to move, but only when you have enough Poison. This means the hunger clock is only in effect at certain times, depending on your resource management.
• I drew all the graphics myself and I think both the Sewer and Library environments feel nice

What went badly:

• As usual, I didn't have enough time to finish everything I wanted to accomplish.
• I wanted to have some kind of meta game, aside from "get to the lowest floor"
• On that same note, I wanted to have an end boss / game over state instead of infinite floors
• I ran out of time to do a good job on the more complicated sprites, like enemies and the player, especially
• Not as balanced as I would like (e.g. I have no idea how easy/difficult the game is at deeper floors, but there's very little difficulty scaling)
• Game feel isn't 100% there, needs some love around timing
• Some bugs