Entry 2020:The Depth of Nitemare

[Kiwi]

Inspired by Grail of the Gods
 

A rogue-like game with RPG turn-based battle. Basically, go into the depth of the dungeon to retrieve a precious treasure from a dangerous creature, called the Nitemare. You pick up gold pieces and items to help you along with your journey. You level up from defeated enemies. If you go deep enough, you'll come to a choice to either fight Nitemare, or pick a random floor to level up on. Which is which? You'll find out.
 

Pick a difficulty to start the game. Easy and Normal have a fixed depth pattern and starts you off with a wooden stick and some clothes. Picking easy will fill your inventory with seeds, so consume them all before picking stuff up.  Hard starts you off naked and the depth pattern is random after the first floor. So you may face a hard guardian on depth 2. Good luck!
 

During the game, you can bring up the menu by pressing B. From there, you can pick Check Bag or Status. Check bag, you can pick an item, and pick whether to use them or drop them. You can use this oppuntity to remove or use item to make room to pick up another item that may be better than the one you had. You can only hold 6 items at a time. Chose wisely. If you attempt to put an item into your full bag, the item in your hand will be destroyed.

There are 5 different food items, herb, bread, meat, potion and MaxPie. Herb heals the least, while the MaxPie heal you the most. Most food item comes in bags. All food item will cure poison status. Occasionally, the bag will contain gold pieces. Also bags can contain seeds that boost your stat randomly when consumed. 
 

Picking up meat will allow you to either eat it or put it in your bag, if it isn't full that is.

Chest only gives you random amount of gold.
 

Traps, they are random. There are traps that rain gold upon the victim, Ouch. And other can poison you, which a skull symbol will appear on the upper left corner. Sometimes, the enemy screwed up and put a trap that heals you.

There are 6 scrolls and it is recommend to save them for hard enemies.

Fire Scroll - Does half the enemies' HP, with minimum 20 HP of damage.
Ice Scroll - Does 10 damage, but freeze your enemy until it thaw itself out.

Acid Scroll - Does 5 HP of damage but destroy your enemies' defense.
Life Scroll - Heals you completely. It'll be used automatically when your HP reach 0 in battle(Not in traps).
Pow Scroll - Greatly increase your attack and defense power by 40.
Toxic Scroll - Does 10 damage and poison your enemy
 

Shops - You trade in your equipment along with the gold to cover the cost for a new equipment. If you only have 100 gold and the equipment you wanted is 140 gold. You have on a equipment that's worth 50 gold, then you can trade that in and buy that equipment with 10 gold left over. The gold total +Weapon or +Armor, so might need to do some math in your head to buy equipment in this game. The shopkeeper spray the equipment with cleaning product for the next victim to buy. Um, forget that last sentence.
 

INN - Stay once and then the shop disappear.

Keys - There should be enough keys to complete a floor. You could collect more keys from ? box to unlock the treasure room, if you're lucky.

Blob symbol are the easy enemies. So I recommend defeating them to tackle the harder enemies.

You have the standing monster symbol, which are the harder enemies.

Then the one that holds an axe are the Staircase Guardian. They are assigned to a specific map.

A new monster for the easy and hard is introduced per floor you go down. By depth 9, you'll seen them all.

Hopefully you all enjoy this game.

Keep in mind it is almost a direct port of my Arduboy version of this game.  Few different is the full 16x16 tile of the 12x16 Arduboy version so they both have 5 tiles vertically.  Tilesets have been altered to cram into 55 cards, so I have space for the poison symbol and the hero.  Camera starts at the top of the map when going to a new floor instead of player previous position.  No smooth scrolling.  No keypad support since I used 195 out of 200 RAM.  I didn't have sound effects.  I preferred the music to be play full instead of play simple. There's 6 music track produced by Nyuundere, I produced 3.  Good news, the game runs in colorstack mode, so I have access to lower case letter.  Bad news, no colors.  Great news for people who hasn't upgraded from black and white tv for a color ones. 

Control:
Overworld: disc move character. Bottom buttons brings up a small menu to check Inventory or access the status screen.
Menus:Use disc to move >. Pressing the top button will confirm your choice. Pressing bottom buttons will cancel your selection in most menu .

Current version:nitemarev102.rom
-lower rank requirement for end screen, was #score/256.  Now #score/128.

-added HP display for map and inventory screen. Added gold to the screen. The counter max at 9999, but can collect more than 9999.

-Added brief item description feature to inventory screen. 


Old version:nitemarev101.rom
-added title to window's header
-fixed spelling
-added cont.b2 to menu and to cancel menu.
-minor adjustments

Older version:nitemare.rom

Gif:


Enjoy. 

Edited December 11, 2020 by Kiwi

[+Steve Jones]

I just tried this, fun game, I would have done better if I read the instructions more thoroughly first, this BadDrako guy got me, will try again,

it's kind of addictive, thanks!

 

 

 

[+Steve Jones]

One suggestion, the bottom left button which accesses the inventory and status screens, could that also be mapped to the bottom right button too.

A bit easier to access depending on how you hold the controller.

[Kiwi]

9 hours ago, Steve Jones said:

One suggestion, the bottom left button which accesses the inventory and status screens, could that also be mapped to the bottom right button too.

A bit easier to access depending on how you hold the controller.

I've added 'OR cont.b2' to the next build.  I playtested it a few days ago.  I wanted it to be on the right button.

[Kiwi]

Added updated ROM.

-added title to window's header
-fixed spelling
-added cont.b2 to menu and to cancel menu.
-minor adjustments

[+Steve Jones]

I just played again, I think I might have made it to a boss on easy level, he's pretty tough,

he had like 5 times more h.p. than anything else I had encountered up to that point.

Needless to say he killed me.

G.N.? Is that a boss?

 

I was playing the first version of the rom, I'll try the new one in a minute.

 

2 things:

 

1) what is the point of the inns? do you recover health? maybe more useful on tougher settings? 

 

2) is it possible to map either inventory screen and/or status screen to one of the keypad buttons,

after a while I found it tedious having to push a button, select with disc and push another button to access these screens.

If these could be a single key press that would be better in my opinion.

Also would it be possible to show your h.p. on the inventory screen?

that way you could decide whether you should eat something or not, without having to flip back to the status screen.

Or be able to flip from one to the other without exiting out first?

 

I should say I am playing in jzintv on my laptop but using an actual intellivision controller.

 

Even with these things I am really enjoying the game, thanks.

 

 

[Kiwi]

6 hours ago, Steve Jones said:

1) what is the point of the inns? do you recover health? maybe more useful on tougher settings? 

 

2) is it possible to map either inventory screen and/or status screen to one of the keypad buttons,

after a while I found it tedious having to push a button, select with disc and push another button to access these screens.

If these could be a single key press that would be better in my opinion.

Also would it be possible to show your h.p. on the inventory screen?

that way you could decide whether you should eat something or not, without having to flip back to the status screen.

Or be able to flip from one to the other without exiting out first?

1)INN's only purpose to recover your health to the maximum, and then disappear.

2a)I'm 1 8-bit byte short using keypad for both controller. And it has a tendency to move your character when pressing the keypad. I'm using 160 bytes to hold the floor information, 28 bytes for the music. I have 5 bytes unused.

2b)I should display the HP for the overworld and the inventory screen for the right side of the screen for the next build.

Thank you for playing.

[+Steve Jones]

Same guy got me again, using newest rom, I really have to stock up on healing stuff before I tackle him next time.

Using B2 is much better thanks. And I used the inn to heal a few times

 

 

[Kiwi]

1 hour ago, Steve Jones said:

Same guy got me again

Hint: 2 of the 6 scrolls are effective against high HP floor guardians.

[+Steve Jones]

The fire scrolls helped a lot, I made it further, on the last level when I was near the south end some text popped up for a bit then went away,

"Recycling depth"

 

 

As I headed north on that level another text popped up, "Facing Nitemare" I think?  

But the giant blob killed me so I didn't see Nitemare yet.

 

 

 

[Kiwi]

Yeah, there's 2 choices of what staircase you want to go down on that floor. Going down to recycling depth go to a random map if you want to get additional items and gold before facing the final boss. After completing that map will return to the 2 choice map.  Going up, facing Nitemare.  Going down the staircase is a no point of return.  You'll have to defeat the final boss to complete the game.

[+cmadruga]

I guess not bad for a first try? 

I like the names of some enemies, like "Chicken?".

 

[Kiwi]

I posted a new ROM in first post. 

-lower rank requirement for end screen, was #score/256.  Now #score/128.

-added HP display for map and inventory screen. Added gold to the screen. The counter max at 9999, but can collect more than 9999.
-Added brief item description feature to inventory screen. 

[+cmadruga]

Quality of life suggestion:

Do you think you could add an "auto attack" functionality to the game?

Reason is that for weaker enemies I'm positive I can defeat, I just want the combat to cycle through fast without having to keep the button pressed to keep attacking.

 

For more difficult enemies, I will still want to play it round by round.

[+Steve Jones]

Finally won, version 102, on Normal level too, seemed to be a lot less fire scrolls around compared to Easy mode, but fortunately more life scrolls.

 

I really like seeing your hp and gold on the main screen, helps you decide what to do with food you find without going into other menus.

 

Thanks for that.

 

Is the last weapon in the store real? I didn't get enough gold to buy it but I wanted to tackle the Nitemare.

 

[+cmadruga]

Lightsaber??? Cool!

[Sinjinhawke]

Just played my first game when I should have been working.   Made it to level 13 and was killed by a chicken.  A very powerful chicken.  This is a fun game and I will play this game again.  Nice work.

[+Steve Jones]

My advice, stock up on life scrolls, they automatically heal you when you are about to die so you don't have to manage your HP as much.

[+cmadruga]

27 minutes ago, Steve Jones said:

My advice, stock up on life scrolls, they automatically heal you when you are about to die so you don't have to manage your HP as much.

Good to know!

Does that apply to other sources of HP, like food as well?

 

[+Steve Jones]

I don’t think so, I think them you have to decide when to eat.

When I beat the nitemare I was playing on normal difficulty and I think I had 6 life scrolls when I faced it, used up 3 in the battle but it was all automatic.

[+cmadruga]

In that case, an "auto eat" functionality could be an interesting upgrade.

[Kiwi]

9 hours ago, cmadruga said:

In that case, an "auto eat" functionality could be an interesting upgrade.

 

On 12/11/2020 at 10:43 AM, cmadruga said:

Do you think you could add an "auto attack" functionality to the game?

Nah, part of the game is to pay attention.  The LifeSc works automatically.  I added autolife to the in-game item description and it was in the instructions. Although, it doesn't save you from traps sadly for both games.  Arduboy version I only had 6 slots of inventory and the small device only had 28KB of flash memory for application and I had 1KB left.  So the scrolls are very valuable. This was almost direct port. So, I wanted the similar experience.  Arduboy resolution was 128x64, and I had the vertical tiles to be 16x12, so I can print 5 vertically and 8 horizontally. I didn't realize that the 64x64 was 64 cards, so I had to edit the sheet down to allow 8 cards towards the knight.  The floor map was copied and paste from the source code packed 4 tiles a word.  It get unpacked into 160 bytes of 8-bit RAM.

The idea does remind me of progress quest where the application is just progress bar filling up as your player automatically does the quest, selling items, level up, etc.  I was going to make a cookie clicker type of game for the Intellivision.  Not sure where to go with that type of game. 

[+cmadruga]

Well I was not suggesting the kind of extreme automation that you mentioned on the last paragraph. But I can see how my 2 suggestions when taken together could remind you of that.

 

Either way, obviously it’s your call on what to do with the feedback you receive.

The game is already great as is! Good job!

 

[+Steve Jones]

I did notice a couple of times when I was getting my butt kicked that when I tried to retreat I couldn't even though there was nothing physically blocking me. To be fair I only tried once each time then kept fighting. Is this something you have to try more than once before you can, in the words of Monty Python, "run away, run away, run away"? Or does your opponent keeping blocking you from chickening out?

 

[Kiwi]

16 minutes ago, Steve Jones said:

Or does your opponent keeping blocking you from chickening out?

It's coded to let you run away 1 out of 2 times.  If the tile that you are land on isn't the boss guardian, then it will give you a chance to run.

if x=226 then 

if whatis<>14 and frame%2=1 then print at 200 color 0,"You ran away.":gosub waitforpress:cls:goto runaway
print at 200 color 0,"It blocked your way."
gosub waitforpress
goto monsterattack
end if'running away

Alternative is to defend.  You have a chance to counter attack if the enemy choose to attack.  Small chance to pray for healing or a beam of red light to hurt the enemy.   Forgot to add that to the instruction.