Thanks guys! It's definitely a labor of love. My favorite action roguelikes are Spelunky and Nuclear Throne, and this has a lot of DNA from both of them, but the story and setting make it special too.
It takes place in a world where National AI regimes are running most of the planet, and the bulk of the remaining humans are in cryo-sleep to sync with the relativistic travel of interstellar space missions. Big Brain is the AI running the US and Europe, and you play as a small kill drone sent to clean up a mess for him...
This looks very cool! Is the AI-generated dialog from an LLM or have you made some kind of custom procgen AI?
We actually do have LLMs generating the dialogue in a test branch, using the OpenAI API. Here's a video I made about it:
I also wrote
a blog post about the technical and creative process of getting this LLM system going in the game, which you can read here.
The reason I say test branch is because the business model for Cloud Hosted LLM APis means In-App Purchases, or some other scheme.
I'm waiting for a decent local model that I can use to generate dialogue at about a GPT-3 to GPT-3.5 level. If anyone knows of something like this, let me know, because if that's the case, I'm confident in being able to use the LLM for more than just dialogue. If I can get it to respond in structured text that calls my game "APIs", I can use this LLM system to act as a Dungeon Master, much more than simple text copy. I think this would be a first in a graphical roguelike!
Looks cool!
The first gun you have (I think you refer to it as the assault rifle) doesn't seem to go with the whole aesthetic you have, it looks too CoD. The rest of the guns look like they are from your game. Obviously, you don't ever want to have a level with 2 of the same upgrades because it is a major bummer. Or if you get the same thing it makes your upgrade/gun level 2 and more powerful.
It's ok to make your RNG not 100% random just to make your game more fun. You might want to reward the player a bit for destroying CRT and cameras somehow.
Also, when you beat a level there should be more fanfare, I'm not sure if you are pushing a button to go into the hole or if there is some kind of room where you can go to the next level, but the Level Clear needs to be a bigger thing.
This obviously deserves more attention than youtube is giving it, lmao, it's really cool!
I agree with all your excellent feedback, Michael. First thing I'm going to add today is a system to make sure you don't get duplicate gear (or make that really rare). The assault rifle *is* too Call of Duty-coded, haha. We'll work on that. We're also thinking about making the weapons procedural, and componentizing all their models into modular bits to enable this.
You're right that the end level transition needs work. You're not the first person to point out an issue there. I'll devote some time to it to make it more special.
One thing the game definitely needs is more items and affectations that vary up the possibilities in each individual run. One of the most fun things about roguelikes are rare scenarios that make you ridiculously overpowered, or change things like the number of enemies and their vulnerability level. We should allow for seemingly "broken" runs to make the game more wild!
Thanks again for the great feedback, you guys! It's heartening to get good feedback on a thing you've poured so much work and love into
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