The Idea

I've always liked roguelite games. I think of them as a board game merged with a standard video game. And as a lover of board games, they have this cute charm on me. But I find them quite grindy since it requires you to master the game to truly enjoy it. Ain't nobody got time for that. That's why I liked Slay The Spire. It was an easy to learn hard to master roguelite deck building game with great design thinking behind. So I wanted to make a roguelike (not roguelite) deck building game that rewarded exploration and cool deck builds.

Me and my team started brainstorming ideas during the jam. We came up with this grid based system where we played cards to do actions. It felt good at first, but I felt it was a bit underwhelming and boring. After weeks, while rewriting the mess we made during the jam, we also started re-designing the game. We came up with a few original ideas. Now our game is slowly shaping itself into a resource management rogue like deck builder which I am a big fan of. It's probably a bridge too far, but we are ambitious.

The Loop

The gameplay loop consists of going through each level with few card draws from your deck, doing actions on the map (moving, attacking, interacting), trying to get to the next level. There are obstacles and enemies to slow you down and card and artifact rewards to boost you up. You can do artifact + card builds to scale up. You also have stats that gives you attack damage, health, etc. Cards are usually actions or temporary buffs. You can rest to remove cards from your deck and collect gold to spend in shop. There are also bosses to beat and unlockable characters to unlock (5 planned total right now). All of these are subject to change except the genre.

We are heavily inspired by Pixel Dungeon (by watabou), Slay The Spire (by caseyyano and SneakySly), Crypt of the Necrodancer and somewhat inspired by Rogue, Spelunky (by mossmouth) and Dicey Dungeons (by Terry Cavanagh). While I absolutely love all of these games, I'm trying my best not to 'steal' anything from them. I try to 'remix' this game as original as I can do.

The Look

The graphics are all hand-drawn 2D by our talented member İrem Badazlı. She is doing a tremendous work and it's hard to believe that this game is her first game project! We are trying to achieve that vintage, old school expedition in egypt look. Our biggest graphical influences are Spelunky, Lara Croft series and the Mummy movies. Even the baddie in our game is literally a pharaoh. And since the jam was about cats, our graphics are all "cat-like" :)

The Lore

The story is about an archaeologist and her expedition team getting in trouble in a cursed pyramid. The story is currently unfinished and we absolutely will need to find a way to tie our weird mechanics with the story :)

As with everything, as much as I want to say everything is set in stone, they are not. A game this early in development has a lot of things that are subject to change and we will at some point need to cut out some stuff that doesn't work.

Anyway that's all I want to say. Thanks for reading and I hope you'll stick around for what's to come.

Here's a bonus screenshot of our latest build: