Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[blackreaper666]

Hello everyone! Since early November, I've been building a little game called Gloamvault in my free time after work. It combines First-Person Dungeon Crawler elements with Monster Collecting.

What it's about? You build up your party of monsters by charming them (e.g., stealing them from enemy parties). As a resurrected evil wizard specializing in charming and transmutation in your former life, you can fuse monsters together to enhance their stats. Additionally, you can use upgrades, spells, and items to refine the build you're aiming for. The goal is to progress as far into the dungeon as possible. If you die, you must start over. The game relies heavily on procedural generation, so the levels, monsters you encounter, item stats, and more are different with each run.

My ideal goal is for it to be a "numbers go up/create broken builds" type of game. Games like Path of Achra or Path of Exile come to mind, where you can combine a huge array of abilities to create all kinds of "broken builds" to beat the game. That's something I personally have a lot of fun with.

Screenshots

Maybe some people here would find such a game fun too! I'm happy to receive any feedback you have. It's probably a bit rough & unbalanced at the moment and could use more abilities, upgrades, and spells.

You can play it for free (browser, windows, mac, linux) here: https://bigjk.itch.io/gloamvault

[delphonso]

I love this idea. I'll give it a go and let you know how it goes.

[nenjin]

Looks charming. Sounds a bit Shim Megami Tensei inspired too.

[blackreaper666]

Looks charming. Sounds a bit Shim Megami Tensei inspired too.

Oh wow. I didn't knew that fusing demons was a thing in Shin Megami Tensei. So it's pure coincident I only know about the game on a surface level. I will probably need to check it out in more detail

[martinuzz]

The 3D block maze reminds me of the old Morraff's World and Dungeons of the Unforgiven.
I tried the browser game. I can't get the windows zip file to unpack, 7zip slows down to a crawl halfway through the file.
Also not sure if it would work, I am running intel not AMD

[Dostoevsky]

Oh wow. I didn't knew that fusing demons was a thing in Shin Megami Tensei. So it's pure coincident I only know about the game on a surface level. I will probably need to check it out in more detail

Some of the SMT games (1 and 2 in particular) also feature grid dungeons like this. It's typically you the player character fighting alongside your demons, and maybe with 1 or 2 other humans depending on the game and plotline you're following. Being SNES games 1 and 2 are arguably rather dated in a lot of respects, but I still consider them pretty solid games of the era (2 especially).

The early Persona games also feature grid dungeons like this, but they don't include demon summoning - instead the daemonic component more akin to the junction system from FF8 (you 'equip' a demon for stats & abilities).

[blackreaper666]

The 3D block maze reminds me of the old Morraff's World and Dungeons of the Unforgiven.
I tried the browser game. I can't get the windows zip file to unpack, 7zip slows down to a crawl halfway through the file.
Also not sure if it would work, I am running intel not AMD

I use the utility of Itch.io to package the .zip files and upload them. It seems the resulting zips are not working with 7zip, which is really strange  You can just try to use windows build-in unzipping, that and WinRAR work for me just fine. I will try to investigate further why the Itch.io bundler is acting up.

Oh wow. I didn't knew that fusing demons was a thing in Shin Megami Tensei. So it's pure coincident I only know about the game on a surface level. I will probably need to check it out in more detail

Some of the SMT games (1 and 2 in particular) also feature grid dungeons like this. It's typically you the player character fighting alongside your demons, and maybe with 1 or 2 other humans depending on the game and plotline you're following. Being SNES games 1 and 2 are arguably rather dated in a lot of respects, but I still consider them pretty solid games of the era (2 especially).

The early Persona games also feature grid dungeons like this, but they don't include demon summoning - instead the daemonic component more akin to the junction system from FF8 (you 'equip' a demon for stats & abilities).

That's super interesting! Thanks for all the trivia

[martinuzz]

Killer clowns. Just killer clowns.

[IncompetentFortressMaker]

Is there a limit on how many levels are generated, blackreaper? If not, I would like to report a bug: I played a run earlier today and got down to Level 4. I cleared what was available, but there were no exits to be found - I went looking in nooks and crannies too, didn't find any. If there is a limit, that's understandable (this is active development after all) but you might want to mention that somewhere.

Side note, you mentioned your objective was to make a "numbers go up" type of game. While I don't have a picture, I think you've succeeded, as I managed to get a monster doing at least 100 damage per attack with a near-50% crit chance, high dodge chance, and a capped 85% resurrection chance plus 30% chance to poison... with over a hundred HP. Even in Level 4, the farthest I could get due to the aforementioned lack of an exit, that monster could still oneshot anything that didn't dodge or resurrect. I'm not sure how you do the sprite combinations, but I blended so many monsters into that thing that it had become a vaguely shaped mass of pixelated flesh of wildly varying colors. Definitely my best minion yet.

I'm playing on the Linux version on an AMD CPU and GPU with the Fedora distribution, currently running version 40, if any of that matters.

[martinuzz]

I quit after getting a team of five 3000-4000 Hitpoint summons that all summoned +1000 summoning power summons themselves at 85%
Summoners summoning summoners (killer clowns) are a bit overpowered.

[blackreaper666]

Is there a limit on how many levels are generated, blackreaper? If not, I would like to report a bug: I played a run earlier today and got down to Level 4. I cleared what was available, but there were no exits to be found - I went looking in nooks and crannies too, didn't find any. If there is a limit, that's understandable (this is active development after all) but you might want to mention that somewhere.

Side note, you mentioned your objective was to make a "numbers go up" type of game. While I don't have a picture, I think you've succeeded, as I managed to get a monster doing at least 100 damage per attack with a near-50% crit chance, high dodge chance, and a capped 85% resurrection chance plus 30% chance to poison... with over a hundred HP. Even in Level 4, the farthest I could get due to the aforementioned lack of an exit, that monster could still oneshot anything that didn't dodge or resurrect. I'm not sure how you do the sprite combinations, but I blended so many monsters into that thing that it had become a vaguely shaped mass of pixelated flesh of wildly varying colors. Definitely my best minion yet.

I'm playing on the Linux version on an AMD CPU and GPU with the Fedora distribution, currently running version 40, if any of that matters.

Normally the game is endless. So there should be a door. But I don't rule out that there is still a bug that places the door wrongly. One thing to try is to hold SPACE for autowalk. Sometimes the Door might be placed in a way that you can easily miss it... Happened to me a few times a The sprite blending is very simple atm and after enough merging you will end up with your eldritch pixel mash minion

I quit after getting a team of five 3000-4000 Hitpoint summons that all summoned +1000 summoning power summons themselves at 85%
Summoners summoning summoners (killer clowns) are a bit overpowered.

I'm glad someone else found the Killer Klown summon combination 

Regarding the "numbers go up". I got a bit of feedback that the game is too easy atm because you can just squash together one big monster with all abilities and the stats increase so much that you don't really have to do anything else. So I'm thinking about introducing a bit of a stat system where depending on the type of the monster it has more affinity to certain abilities. A "bat" won't be good at healing but can be good at "dodging" because it's winged, while a necromancer would be good at "summoning" but not at dealing "damage". But I'm still brainstorming

[martinuzz]

You could also implement some form of auto-scaling.
Look at the hitpoints of the player's party when changing levels. Generate the next level with those numbers in mind.
I quit because my 3000-4000 hitpoint uber klowns were still fighting monsters with 100-300 hitpoints

[nenjin]

You could also obfuscate combinations.

For example, in SMT Nocturne, there is a moon phase. And it has an impact on how the combining goes. You could add something like that so combining isn't as predictable/repeatable.

[blackreaper666]

You could also implement some form of auto-scaling.
Look at the hitpoints of the player's party when changing levels. Generate the next level with those numbers in mind.
I quit because my 3000-4000 hitpoint uber klowns were still fighting monsters with 100-300 hitpoints

I setup a beta page on the website to test out the new stat / combination system. It should now be far less easy to build a 3000 hitpoint klown

You can try it out here: https://gloamvault.xyz/beta/

[martinuzz]

I will give it another spin if I can find some time this weekend