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.

After almost letting this project go, I clung to my willpower, and got back into the fray. I know I have a very volatile personality when it comes to discipline, but "anchoring" my project by talking about it routinely to friends, and even posting here, really helps keep this game in my mind.

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

Yes, the hallmark of this week was getting a very early alpha playable online in browser! The game may be very nascent, but already has a lot of depth to it. My composer friend has been playing non stop (I do not deserve him) and finding a terrarium-full of ridiculously obscure bugs, that I have now fixed.

Seriously, how does he do it? I'm terrified that he found out you could duplicate a certain Soul if you casted it, then kited a Serene Peacekeeper into a Soul Shard trap, then killed the Peacekeeper, and then waited for the resulting Crawling Husk to kill the Felidol that had just spawned. What brought him to do such a complex and unnecessary procedure is beyond my understanding.

As for proper new content, there is a new Modulator, the Fluffian Hover-Field. It grants immunity to floor hazards, and allows for flight in vertical levels with gravity. Really useful against goop-trailing enemies of various kinds!

There is a new enemy, the Messenger of Aculeo. Watch out for its constricting, rib-crushing hugs!

Additionally, all modulators (except one) will now grant a special passive ability to all Serene-type allies and summons. An Alacrity module will grant haste, a Selective Algorithm will grant an infectious touch that turns damaged enemies into more Serene-type allies, a pair of Thrusters will let Serene-types perform an additional dash attack, and the aforementioned Hover-Field will occasionally let Serene-types place down Harmony traps. These traps will convert any unfortunate foe stepping on it into another Serene-type ally.

This means that once a few modulators have been acquired, the player is encouraged to start off fights with the conversion/recruitment ones, and then swap to the more offensive ones when a good snowball of Serene-types has been acquired. I want a Serene-type strategy to be one of the possible "builds" that can win the game - it would resemble necromancy magic in other roguelikes.

I've made it so every game starts with a random modulator. I am not sure if some are really objectively stronger than others - yes, Alacrity is very good if you are going full blaster and fireworks, but the more subtle ones can really shine when a lot of allies are placed on the board. There's currently a few overpowered synergies and recipes here and there. I'm not quite sure if I will be nerfing them, or letting them in just because they are fun and hard to achieve anyways.

I haven't won my own game yet... My best so far was area 12. EDIT: 13 now! My friend is obsessed and has played it for hours, and died in area 17, which is in fact the very last level. I have a feeling it might get a little bit easier as I continue adding more player options - I think it's better for a designer to move from too hard towards good than too easy towards good.