The Games Foxes Play (github | original post | play online on itch.io)

More quality of life and UI features this week! Mouse support for cursor examination is now fully implemented. You can click to swap between viewing the "soul" (loot) of enemies, and their description/abilities, and all weird bugs that led to being able to let the cursor escape the screen have been fixed.

There are also two new enemies:

• Rosebound Brutes are very slow, but inflict very high melee damage. They are easy to handle, as you can simply stab them on each turn they skip thanks to their slowness to not take any damage. However, their slowness comes from the fact that their movements are entangled by...

• Roseic Bioembalmers, which always appear as the leaders of a pack of Brutes. These pests, on the other hand, are extremely fast and will constantly harass you, dealing zero damage but inflicting one point of Glamorous Toxin on every hit (Toxin is a hallucinogen that will kill you after 10 points have been accumulated). However, if you kill them, all Brutes under their command will be unentangled, and furious at having been kept captive for so long, tripling their once lethargic speed.

These are supposed to be late-game enemies, that you should be able to deal with after getting sufficient AOE damage, or summons to defend you. However, to keep the player on their toes, they will rarely spawn in early levels in much more thinned-out numbers. I might end up removing them from early levels if they are too strong!

New music has also been added to the game - two songs named Candles and Trinkets. I'll show the first one in this post here. It's a calm tune with a repeating motif that climaxes into a slightly dissonant end, inciting the player to realize their rest is only temporary.

The Games Foxes Play

I’m away from home right now so I cannot do as much of an in-depth writeup as I’d like, but I want to give a huge thanks to u/Spellsweaver for doing a playtest trade with me. He has outlined a lot of UI issues that I have been working on fixing this week.

For example, all abilities now show precise damage numbers for clarity. Health points are divided in pips instead of being a straight line. You can now mouse over Souls to get their descriptions at any time, and click to cast them. Additionally, the inspect mode cursor now follows your mouse.

The screenshots don’t show the true glory of mouse support, but it’s all I have for now. The build isn’t uploaded on the itch.io playable version yet, but I will do so tomorrow. GitHub is updated, though.

It would be nice to have full mouse support in my game - getting code to work to get the mouse position when it’s pertinent was the hard part, and now I can play around a lot of things that should really streamline play instead of having users roll their heads on the keyboard.

I also decided to remove the Rendfly enemies from my game. They were an annoying 0 damage monster that was extremely fast and would delay the death of other monsters by injecting them with tonics. Fun design in theory, but immensely annoying in practice and also the source of a terrarium-full of bugs. I liked the idea of a support-type creature, so they will come back eventually with a reworked design that’s not about chasing them all over the room while getting stabbed by roid-rage invincible dudes.