A wacky broughlike made for the Seven Day Roguelike Challenge of 2019.

Controls

Movement: WASD
Cast: Arrows
Spin: QE
Confirm: Enter
Mouse can be used on Augment menu

Synopsis: Take Emmysaurus through 6 levels of THE PEN and use your SPELL WHEEL to battle everything from Jellies to Milk Bottles. Run for the exit or try to get a high score.

Your Spell Wheel has 4 spokes. Cast in one of the cardinal directions to activate one spoke. Each power on the spoke corresponds to a tile on the map itself and they are activated in order until hitting walls. Each power enhances the current spell and spells can branch into different paths, evolving independently.

Vending Machines: You can attack vending machines to get candy. Candy heals you or gives score if you are already full health. When the vending machine produces a piece of candy, you'll have to try twice as hard to get the next one but technically there is no limit.

Tips below, but they are spoilery!

Spell power descriptions:

Damage: adds 1 damage (the spell starts out with ZERO damage)
Multipliers (2,3,5): multiplies the power of all spell effects previously added
Poison: does 2 damage per turn. Power => number of turns
Fire: does 1 damage the first turn, but 1 extra each turn after. Power => number of turns.
Sleep: immobilizes the enemy. Power => number of turns
Confuse: randomizes movement. Power => number of turns
Recharge: recharges the wand itself
Rotate: spins the wheel clockwise or counterclockwise, one time per power block.
Pass through wall
Bone: summons your faithful companion Rosie. Power => Rosie's HP
Heal: heals affected monsters for the power of the spell
Explosion: applies spell effects to a a radius dependent on spell power
Heart: makes an enemy friendly, if the spell has power at least equal to their HP.

Tips:

You don't have to pick up the spell powers. Each one will spawn a new monster.
Remember that multipliers on the beginning of your spoke will have no effect since the spell starts out totally unpowered.
Spin your wheel to skip a turn.

Credits:

The Reid family (Emmy, Nicole, and Rosie). Developed by Jeremiah Reid.

Music:

"Suonatore di Liuto"
"Super Power Cool Dude"
"Pamgaea"
"Loopster"
Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

More information

Status	Released
Platforms	HTML5
Rating	Rated 4.8 out of 5 stars (5 total ratings)
Author	jere
Genre	Strategy
Made with	PixiJS
Tags	broughlike, Roguelike

Comments

joelcollins4 years ago

Really cool little game Jere. I think right now the main 'difficulty' is just figuring out how the whole system works. Once I got that down it was fun, if a little too easy, to come up with some game breaking combos. Obviously it's a 7drl so I can't be too harsh in that regard. ;)

A few pointers regarding possible uncheesing that you're probably already aware of:

Recharge is way to good, one next to the hub of you're wheel and you've already got infinite energy. Given that you can fire an infinite number of spells in a turn, put any damage at all on your other spokes and you can deal infinite damage in any direction. Perhaps the spoke that is fired shouldn't recharge? Also limiting each spoke to fire only once per turn would be beneficial.
Also it's really easy to make a spoke which will turn every enemy on the screen into your best friend. This combined with infinite energy made filling the level to breaking point (until new enemies can't spawn) a breeze. Infinite candy! Probably some higher tiered enemies that pop in in these situations would be appropriate? Eventually they could be too tough for your zombification ray... (but not tough enough to beat your 625hp Rosie!)
I found that with multipliers damage type is kind of redundant (except that poison less preferable) grab a 5* modifier and it will kill anything you throw at it anyway. more powerful enemy tiers might help?
Perhaps related to the above note, I didn't get the impression that there is any rarity modifiers for the different spell effects. *5 modifiers should be rare.

Anyway, I thoroughly enjoyed the quest for infinite candy. But now. with it's saccharin taste lingering in my mouth, surrounded by all my new monster friends (and dear old Rosie of course) I still can't help feeling that there must be something more to life than this...

jere4 years ago

Hippasus, right you are! I realized that Spell Wheel wasn't hard enough to hold interest for long and I considered several modifications that would extend the play time. Most of the feedback I got was that it was simply too difficult though. Very few people would say too easy. So I held off on updating it and haven't had much time lately anyway.

My ideas in case you are curious:

Make it harder to rotate freely, perhaps by preventing rotation to an uncharged spoke
Randomize starting wand and maybe do one power per spoke instead of 2
Reduce blocks added per floor to 2 or 1
Have a huge boss at the end of each run that is a crazier version of a normal enemy with a ridiculous amount of health and some special ability (e.g. Astronauts are twice as fast, Jellies produce small jellies)
Increase monster damage and/or HP over runs but give the player a way to match that power increase with proper play. My current idea is to have them find a rare spell that destroys their entire wand (so they start from scratch) but they get +1 damage each time they do this.

Reviewing this again, I worry that new players would think the game is even more impossible. More tutorializing might help though.

Thanks for the feedback!

Iziminza5 years ago

You might add a prompt that tells you that you have to press space to start ... I spent some time clicking the nice swinging logo with nothing happening, trying this out in Firefox and Edge :D .

Morph's Deathray5 years ago(+1)

High score: 0. I'm terrible at this game -- it's more difficult than I usually like -- but I think the concept is really interesting. I wish it was easier at the start so I could get farther into the game to experiment more with different spell wheel configurations. Animation and graphics are really great.

Hover tips on each spell power would be a great thing to add; I found myself constantly referencing the list down below and trying to interpret the icons (dagger = damage I assume?).

jere5 years ago

Thanks for the feedback! I will try to incorporate some of that if I put out an update. As always, it's super hard to balance these things. I was actually considering making it much harder because I find it way too easy as the developer. A few tips:

Use your bump attack when monsters have 1 health left. Otherwise try to use spells from as far away as possible
Confuse/sleep might let you get free hits. Poison and fire will do damage over time, so it's best to kite monsters with it
You can rotate to pass a turn if you need to
The safest thing to do is run for the exit. Avoid picking new powers if you're in a weak position because they spawn monsters. Monsters also spawn if you stay for long enough.
Since the recharge icon (blue @) recharges all spokes, it's best to exhaust your spell wheel before picking them up

Gerhard Wonner5 years ago(+1)

Very nice game design! The thing with the spell-wheel works quite well. This time I died on my third run in level 4 still with a score of 0. What do I have to do in order to obtain any points?

jere5 years ago

You can get score from candy which comes out of vending machines, but only when you're already full health.

samspot5 years ago(+1)

Great game! My high score is 1 after 6 runs but i'm starting to get the hang of it.