TOYROGUE

TOYROGUE

2d, permadeath, pico-8, pico8, pixel-art, rogue-like, rpg, short, toyboxjam, turn-based

Standard Pico-8 controls, arrow keys, x, z, enter for pause menu. *May* work fine with gamepads or on touch devices.


Welcome to TOYROGUE. Fight your way through an endless dungeon of horrors in this turn-based rogue-like.

ATTACK randomised enemies in turn-based combat

EQUIP randomised items to power-up your murder hobo

THROW bad items at the enemies to lower their stats!

EAT fortune cookies

CHOOSE to be a dragnet of death and entropy or skillfully navigate your way through the dungeon


Made in Pico-8 January 2021 for ToyBoxJam2020. ToyBoxJam is hosted by Tom Hall (of Id Software, Commander Keen, and Ion Storm fame) and gives everyone the same starting graphics and music as a Pico-8 cart. The gameplay and everything else is up to you, so I decided to have a go at making my first platformer. So of course, it had to be a platformer with no jumping*. For more info about the jam or to try out the other submissions and see how others used the assets, visit the ToyBoxJam page on Itch .


This is a Rogue-like and features very high randomisation and perma-death . Do not be surprised if you get one-shotted by a dragon on the first level or never find a decent weapon. Losing is fun!


Known issues:

There's a rare bug where the game may crash after the victory screen when starting a new game.


Version history:

1.05 - Fixed a bug where an infinite combat loop could start when running away from enemies into a wall.

1.04 - Added enemy scaling, the more game hours pass, the stronger the enemies get.

1.03 - Fixed bug where HP wasn't reset when starting a new game

1.02 - Squashed lots of text display bugs.

1.01 - Fixed a crash when trying to sell items when inventory is empty

1.0 - Initial release


Tips and Tricks:

  • Throwing is a really powerful ability. Even if a thrown item doesn't do any damage, it can change the stats of the enemy it hits. Hang onto all those otherwise-useless items with -3 to defence etc. and hurl them at the enemy. This will be the only way you can defeat the more powerful enemies.
  • If you run from a fight you will start back on the map on top of the enemy, and you can move in any direction. You can do this if an enemy you can't beat is blocking a narrow corridor.
  • You can rest as many times as you want at the tent. Each rest takes two hours. You will have a quicker one hour rest each time you leave a level.
  • To start, you might need to equip a bad item so you can at least attack.
  • You can sell items in the inventory by pressing right.
  • You can re-arrange your stats when you start, try different builds.
  • The game is highly randomised. Some play-throughs are going to be much harder than others.


Development:

This is my second submission to the jam, as the jam was extended a whole month I had enough time to rewind after my first submission, get together some ideas and knock this one out. This game was a lot of hard work, despite having given up on a turn-based combat game before because it was too hard I still somehow managed to underestimate how hard I would find this. The game also needed a lot of UI stuff, and UI stuff is hard.

The hardest part was the (extremely limited) animation in combat. I avoided adding animation until very late, and it's clear I should have had it in mind from the start.

There were a lot more features I wanted to add but ran out of time/tokens. The one I'm most bothered about is not being able to get palette-swapped enemies into the game, increasing the randomness even more.

Genres