Welcome great adventurers! As you know lately we had troubles with the crypt of the old Lich King! His tomb attracted nearby goblin tribes and they set up camp on the many levels. We ask you to go and clean it up, find their boss so we can rest assured once again. The Lich? Don’t worry he was defeated decades ago, only bones remained.

Now, gather you party and go onwards!

Crypt

Crypt is a solo/couch-coop turn based dungeon crawler, heavily inspired by the tabletop game of draftCrawl from Luiz Bills! Venture into the old crypt, find treause, potions and goblins. Many many goblins. Your goal is to find their boss and eliminate him! That is all. Everything you find inside is yours!

This is the first published playtest version. You will probably run into bugs, which I'd be happy to hear about, so I can fix them!

Gameplay

Gameplay is divided into turns. Players act first, in the order of your choice, then enemies. They attack who you want, as the games places player agency highly in this regard. The game is based on a 1d6 system in the background for many things, keep your eyes peeled. And be careful, the dungeon might hide things you did not anticipate!

There is a little green/red dot in the corner of each character, showing if it can act, or not in the given turn.

Certain characters have abilities that modify combat and there are spellcaster who start with spells. Once you find treasure chests, everyone who has a scroll can cast a spell. Spells are listed on the status window and if you press the secondary button and the unit has spells, the casting window will pop up!

Wizards learn their starting spells, which resets (if cast) to the learned ammount. Learned spells are prio-d over scrolls. Spell GUI now shows Spellname (scrolls-learned).

Controls: Arrows and X and C (shown by a circle inside PICO-8)



Controls: Arrows and X and C (shown by a circle inside PICO-8)

Dev Discord

Started a little discord server around gamedev, gaming! Invite link: https://discord.gg/zjWFeSQnXa Best place to provide feedback about the game!

Also available on the Lexaloffle BBS: https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?uid=31390

Support:

My awesome supporters over at Ko-fi! They allow me to pursue this niche hobby of mine! If you'd like more, consider hopping over to my Ko-fi page, where I share pixel art, game devlogs, postmortems, code rundowns, all that gamedev jazz! And if you can maybe drop in a coffee so I can make the next one faster!

Thank you Csöndi, Nerdy Teachers, Fletch and Squidlight for allowing me to keep up this hobby!


100% Made by a human

I'm proud supporter of the "No Gen AI Seal" movement, learn more of it over at: https://www.polygon-treehouse.com/no-gen-ai-seal

Updated 7 days ago
Published 9 days ago
StatusReleased
PlatformsHTML5
Rating
Rated 4.0 out of 5 stars
(2 total ratings)
AuthorAchie
GenreRole Playing, Strategy
Made withPICO-8, Aseprite
TagsCo-op, Dungeon Crawler, No AI, PICO-8, Turn-based
Average sessionAbout a half-hour
LanguagesEnglish
InputsKeyboard, Gamepad (any), Touchscreen
MultiplayerLocal multiplayer
Player count1 - 4

Development log

Comments

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Love it so far.  Super charming look to the entire presentation, and the skirmish elements are fun.

I especially like that you got in a boss enemy that's larger than the usual sprites – that's cool. Not a lot of games like this do that!

The underlying skirmish mechanics feel good and seem straightforward and clear. You do feel like you can make decisions about how to best take on the enemies. And having different characters with different capabilities is pretty nice, too. Overall, a great flavor and puzzle-ish space for the combats. Love it.

Selection of characters and their actions is a real pain point, though, especially once you get some summons on the board.

I'd recommend to switching away from the stepping through characters to just a spatial interface, so that you select your next character to act by using arrow keys to move a cursor to a character with a green dot by it (I'd also make the green dots more prominent to assist with this).

If that's not feasible for some reason, I'd change the order of the stepped-through characters to be top-to-bottom-left-to-right so that if you want to select, say, your wizard, you can zip through the characters until you get to them, because the order is more predictable. As it stands, it feels like the cursor is randomly popping all over the place, even though there is a set order.

After attacking, it would be handy to auto-select the next character which hasn't acted yet.

It's also kind of easy to accidentally trigger a spell when looking at your options. Would recommend always having X to act and Z to cancel. When you select a character, pop up an interface that lets you choose their action between their normal attack and their available spells, navigating them with arrow keys, confirming with X, and canceling with Z. That way, nothing commits until you X and you can always reliably back out of something with a Z.

Since you show the enemy's health at the bottom when an enemy is selected, you might consider also showing their attack value alongside it.

I hope the above doesn't come off as being too critical. I really think this game is pretty great already, and would love to see it develop further. You've done an excellent job on it – easily one of my favorite PICO-8 games I've seen, up there with PicoHaven and others. Well done!

Fun game, really using PICO8 well, looking at the GIFs on the side of this page I feel I missed in changing the classes of the characters haha.

It was pretty fun, spells are nice and adds a variety (summoning wolves is the best!) to this game; I just wish there was more enemy variety earlier.

The way you move trough the units could use some tuning but, overall it's very well done and fun!

Also great job on the no AI seal of quality, we need more awareness about that!

Keep up the good work!