I've been playing this daily for a while. The issue I've found with it is that your health recharges every 100 steps. This creates a divergence between the fun way to play and the way most likely to win. The optimal strategy is to spend a long time button mashing between enemies, and to run back and forth for ages when facing a powerful enemy. I think it would be better if your health didn't recharge (with the enemies rebalanced to accommodate this). This would force the player to actually make smart decisions.
Isn't this a fairly central mechanic in many of the traditional roguelikes though? I know rogue and nethack both have this and it means that finding a safe place to rest for a while is an important part of your strategy. In nethack at least, there are more, faster enemies and you also have hunger to contend with so trying to rest to recharge your HP isn't an easy or boring way to play.
> Isn't this a fairly central mechanic in many of the traditional roguelikes though?
It's half of the central mechanic. The other half is hunger—if you starve you die, so you need to keep moving to find food. That forces you to balance between moving too fast (and running out of health) versus moving too slow (and running out of food). If you take away half of that equation, the whole mechanic breaks.
Not true .. if you keep walking aimlessly, your health replenishes. I found that I could run in circles enough to replenish my health and kill all the monsters that way
I find self-imposed rules make things like this more fun. Sure, you could run around and get your health back. Or you could tell yourself "that's not fun" and just...don't do it.
If the mechanics are tuned to assume you'll regain health this way, self-imposed rules add a pointless challenge. You're just "gaming" the game in a different way that defeats the purpose.
With the caveat that I do play a good amount of roguelikes, this one was far too easy. It needs better levels. You should add some algorithms that reject bad level generations. This one was beatable by killing the first two monsters and walking to the exit. Try generating levels until you get one where you need a strategy that is not that simple? Idk.
Agreed. This isn't quite like the classic roguelike in which it's a struggle to survive and a miracle to win. In fact it may be unrealistic to expect a "daily" game to have that. This is more about getting a high score and sharing with friends how you approached the same dungeon.
> This isn't quite like the classic roguelike in which it's a struggle to survive and a miracle to win.
Most classic roguelikes are reasonably easy to win provided you know and follow the obscure, nearly impossible to find by yourself and very rigid optimal way to go. That’s why I like to call checkbox ticking games.
You're just playing them wrong. The optimal way to appreciate rougelikes is to spend days reading the source code and constructing a set of spreadsheet models, simulators and research collection of obscure forum posts. Then grind patiently along the extremely boring, very rigid optimal way to go.
Apologies, I was being too brusque. I mean that this new "Wordle variant" kind of popular daily game which takes about ten minutes, is easily shared with friends and family, and requires hardly any practice/knowledge, is not that well-suited to rogue-likes. I feel that most people playing Wordle variants enjoy getting a daily sense of accomplishment after 10-15 minutes, from day 1. Perhaps I'm wrong!
There’s a subgenre of traditional roguelikes known as “coffee break roguelikes”. These games are specifically designed to be highly compressed experiences without sacrificing the characteristic difficulty of the genre. They happen to be a perfect fit for this sort of daily game. I’m not aware of any that actually do this though!
The roguelite Spelunky HD has a daily seed with a leaderboard. That game can be finished in 10-15 minutes (if you’re really good)!
It's the button in the middle of the graphical arrow buttons. You need to tap it more than once to see your health start to go back up. Similar to other games of the type.
This definitively needs a few easy maps that can be replayed multiple times as a "tutorial". Otherwise it's too difficult to get casual users. (And apparently too easy for hardcore roguelike fans.)
My suggestion is to keep the oficial daily map with bragging right, and also add a few "tutorial" maps.
Monster only see in a small radius. In today's map (2023/03/06) go a few steps to the small passage, so you only fight against one ghost at a time. Don't go too low because you will wake up the wolf. Kill both ghost, and pick some price at the top right.
Now go to find the wolf and kill it, and pick the prices there. Try to be as far away from the vampire.
If the vampire chase you, go to the top right and go in circles until your health go up.
