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[jwwest]

A classic dungeon crawler with a twist for iOS.

The Pitch

There's nothing about the idea of roguelikes that I don't, er, like. In practice though, the personal nature of a roguelike is so incredibly suited to a personal device such as an iPhone, it's incredible that there's not a flood of them on the app store.

Gameplay

However, playing a roguelike takes time and dedication that you just don't have on the phone. Inspired by Half-Minute Hero, Hurry, Heroes will have a time limit mechanic. I love the idea of an incredibly fast-paced dungeon crawl with full Zelda-like action controls. Dungeons will be randomly generated, as well as loot. Enemies will scale to your level as well.

The idea is to create a game that has a lot of playability packed in small bursts. You can find time extensions in treasure boxes, but for the most part, it's a mad dash through the dungeons trying to grab as much loot as possible. Your character is saved after each run, and you can equip the loot found in your playthroughs before each attempt.

Hurdles

I'm a relatively new game developer without a lot of experience in programming specifically for games. I'm also quite limited when it comes to artistic ability and hopelessly lost when it comes to sound.

I do have an artistic friend that is willing to lend a hand, however he's not that much into video games. This could be a good or a bad thing.

Tools

For now I'm using cocos2d. However, there might be issues in regards to poor documentation and support that keep me from using it. My second choice would be Corona, however I would need to learn Lua (specifically how to develop OO style in it). Corona has a large yearly fee, but the upside is that I can compile for both iOS and Android.

I'm currently working on a prototype in cocos2d. I've thought briefly about switching to Game Maker or something similar, but I would have a learning curve greater than the one with cocos2d to face.

[Inanimate]

I think you stumbled upon my dreams and decided to make them real! I've always liked portable games that can be played sporadically, and I've always liked dungeon crawlers and such, AND roguelikes. Adding a time-limit is something I hadn't thought of, and I feel it'd make the game a lot cooler! If you make it so you can save anywhere, I think you have a real starling gem on your hands!

[jwwest]

Spent most of the night working on room generation. Had a bit of difficulty with converting pixel coordinates to tilemap coordinates, but it seems to work pretty well. I need to add some code to keep the rooms from intersecting so much, as well as increase the min number of rooms.

After that, I get to figure out how to connect the rooms.

I made a video, please forgive the watermark.

[jwwest]

I think you stumbled upon my dreams and decided to make them real! I've always liked portable games that can be played sporadically, and I've always liked dungeon crawlers and such, AND roguelikes. Adding a time-limit is something I hadn't thought of, and I feel it'd make the game a lot cooler! If you make it so you can save anywhere, I think you have a real starling gem on your hands!

Awesome! I'm also thinking about porting it to the desktop, but certain things would need to change: increase the time limits, bigger maps, etc.