FoonLudum Dare ExplorerLD32 → Calling Mr. Blacksmith

Calling Mr. Blacksmith

By junber

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CategoryRankScoreCount
Coolness1100
Fun4113.22
Overall4693.26
Innovation6183.00
Humor6992.44
Mood8212.59
Theme8912.84

Comments

tomdeal 2015-04-20 06:48

Ah the old days :) It works surprisingly well once you read how to find the ingame help and that the world is round :)

sbot1101 2015-04-20 06:53

Love it. it's hard, but addictive. I should mention it took me some time to figure out you can move diagonally using the 7,9,1,3 keys. Otherwise good job :)

robothobodanceparty 2015-04-20 06:56

Not going to lie, this is REALLY hard. I can never find enough materials to craft a weapon before dying (I guess bare hands are really unconventional). This game is very clever however and despite my lack of skills I really did enjoy this as more of a challenge. Great work!

threeup 2015-04-20 07:00

I have a tenkeyless keyboard. I did get a couple fights in there though, plus there is crafting. Cool retro vibe. Nice to just crack open the cpp!

jprogman 2015-04-20 07:17

It took a few minutes but I got the hang of it. I always have a thing for games using ASCII characters.

ym 2015-04-20 12:26

I don't think I can get to these stairs: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2126504/stairs.JPG

junber 2015-04-20 13:44

YM: The stairs are reachable. You need to wrap 3 rows below your character. But its strange that the crafting menu is shown on the map and that there is no 'Done' below your weapon parts...

jepp2078 2015-04-20 14:41

Really cool game man! Good job! :)

marcellus 2015-04-20 15:00

This is quite hard, having to rely on luck to find medikits is a bit sad. Ascii games remind me when I was programming my casio in high school, yours is challenging and intresting. Good entry.

sydan 2015-04-20 15:05

Took a while to work out how to play but once I did it got quite fun. Then it got super hard. I feel that your QnA about J enemies in unnecessary, I would just make them a little less tough to kill. It takes a while to get your head round the crafting and to even ensure that you get the money and parts so it would have been better if that barrier to entry was not so high. I must say the crafting was brilliant though! I love my SUPER SPIKE SWORD.

lespingouinsduciel 2015-04-20 15:54

A simple rogue-like. Nice to play a bit if you use to play those kind of games, hard if you don't like those. It doesn't match the theme to me though.

morgondag 2015-04-20 15:58

Nice Ascii and textbased!

tapisama 2015-04-20 17:01

I really like ASCII games. This one is really old school and really hardcore. I approve XD. Just one thing, I can't see how this fits the theme.

stevenlr 2015-04-20 17:16

Good game in its genre. A bit hard to handle at first but once you get used to it it's really easy to play. The crafting mechanics are fun. I didn't get to the end though, only to the 6th level. :/

maral 2015-04-20 17:25

Nice game with cute graphics (well, cute colors :)), was a bit slow, not quite sure wether it was meant to be :D

huvaakoodia 2015-04-20 19:44

An enjoyable streamlined roguelike, now with crafting!
I wouldn't call the weapons very unconventional though, weird maybe?

The heavy reliance of RNG is the source of undoing here.
15hp left, spawned in the middle of monsters, closest health item not even in sight!
Though luck, try again? Not after the Nth time I won't.

alexdjones 2015-04-20 19:52

Interesting use of ASCII, nice to see that kind of variety! This was a real challenge - I got swarmed by enemies before I could afford to make a weapon the first time. But a neat entry! :)

hercludes 2015-04-20 20:12

I love text games, and I love crafting stuff with randomly generated items. This game was awesome, me and "Mr. Nuclear Sludge" beat the shit out of some foxes. Though I think you could make the controls better (allow more keypresses and the such).

leaden 2015-04-21 16:29

I was not obvious that I can go beyond one side of the screen and appear on opposite side. I thought it was level border. And I didn't understand how to craft best weapon. But in any way this game reminds me about good old times. Thank you for nostalgia feelings.

kipelovets 2015-04-21 21:11

Man, it's awesome you made a text roguelike, but it's kinda hard to get into this kind of games for a not so old-school guy like me

druid 2015-04-22 09:40

Childhood restored! :D I really enjoyed this game!

fleegle2000 2015-04-22 16:03

I found the controls a little unintuitive, but then text-based roguelikes have never been known for friendly controls. Even just letting me hit "enter" to confirm a menu selection would be a great improvement. Other than the controls, it's a great idea and a fun little game. Good work!

lukbebalduke 2015-04-22 20:07

I'm not going to lie, I didn't understand the controls very well, actually, the 'h' didn't help either. I'm sorry to ask it, but, could you explain a little bit better the controls to me? (That's the first time I see a game in that style)

junber 2015-04-23 04:35

Lukbebalduke: Well the numpad key are arranged in a square and you press a key to move in the correspending direction. For example 7 is in the top-left corner so you press it to move to the top-left. The other keys mentioned in the help open a menu each while c and e also work as confirm in their menus. Hope that helps.

nowandstudios 2015-04-23 15:51

Nice job! Interesting idea executed in ASCII, something quite unusual nowadays.

siryakko 2015-04-23 20:55

That nice Dwarf Fortress feeling, excellent!

kate-kligman 2015-04-25 04:12

I love the format of this game! Would suggest keymapping to the vi keys also (ex nethack), though I did get my full keyboard out just to play this. :)

I had some weird issues with keyboard lag, but I was able to fight a few of the monsters. Cool mechanic idea with the crafting.

lizard455 2015-04-26 20:48

Neat mechanic!

sorlok 2015-04-26 20:55

Excellent game! Wish there was some way to recover health (or maybe there is!). Felt like Rogue with crafting!

geckoo1337 2015-04-29 16:29

Nice ASCII game. It is really impressive. A good vibe ++

tmpxyz 2015-04-29 16:34

"ASCII game", this reminds me of old days. Good work.

chaoseed 2015-04-30 01:29

"You died. You fought using a double bacon whip consisting of:
Whip
Bacon
Shortsword blade
Bacon
Golden handle
Spikes"

Pretty fun! (Note I'm judging the original version; I'll try the post-compo version later...so if you've addressed some of these issues already, I apologize!) There were a couple of things that I feel should be spelled out, in the help or something...like, the fact that the map is a torus, and that you can use the 5 key to 'pass' your turn. The gameplay is simple, but nice, although I feel there should be some way to recover your HP eventually (I found one item, a first-aid kit I guess?, but it didn't help that much). The combat system is a little hard to figure out, because it's not clear what's happening; Nethack, for example, has a "combat messages" system showing you just how badly you're doing against the monsters. Even showing the HP on the screen would help! Also, I think it would be cool if you had to put more thought into the weapons, rather than just piling everything on. (And it would be awesome if the game could come up with a name for your weapon automatically.) Still, though, it was fun to play!

junber 2015-04-30 05:13

Chaoseed: That the map is a torus was mentioned in the and that there where med-kits which look like a + too but i cant really expect anyone to read all this text and remember everthing just for a LD game. You are right that waiting was explained (i think i mentioned waiting somewhere in the help but didnt really explain how you could do it) and med kits were somethimes really spare in the original version.
I didnt implement combat messages because the combat is fully deterministic. I decided not to show the HP on the main screen because it just didnt looked good at all but it's shown in the inventory menu (stats menu in post-LD) if yu havnt noticed that.
The weapon thing you mentioned is exactly what i think but I didnt have time during LD and didnt want to change too much for the Post-LD version (I also cant come up with a good way of generating weapon names without ignoring stuff which the player might find important especially as the list of parts gets longer)