Monster Tamer 7DRL
Game created in 7 days for 7DRL 2024
Roguelike where you can tame monsters, and your starting monster levels up with combat. The entire world is made out of the monster parties of past players.
Mouse controls are very much intended, but it supports several sets of arrow keys if you prefer that. You can also customize your monster's lair by clicking around on the start screen; this becomes part of the world when you finish.
Reach the edge of the world to win, but this will expand the world and make it harder for everyone next time!
Tiles from: https://sethbb.itch.io/32rogues
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Video of the game here:
FYI, when I try to run this right now, your API server is returning a 502 error for monsters/api/dungeon/? and the game just hangs at a black screen.
Feature suggestion: detect a bad or non-responding server and provide a friendly error message.
Thanks for letting me know! The server is just an raspberry pi in my house and I forgot to restart it after a power outage. It should be back now.
Love the concept.
One long-term problem is the range upgrade, and the fact that players are always defenseless and at 10 hp, meaning you can be one-hit from out of sight, without even getting close enough to replace the killing monsters liar. You could principally surround the starting area with 4 such ranged monsters and make the game unwinnable.
Also, are wizards and druids really just plain worse than morcs?
Glad you liked it!
Griefing the spawn area with long range monsters is something I've thought of too. It's really hard to actually pull off though; the final step is dying to something near spawn, which you can't even pull off with bad play when you have a ranged monster. You'd need to bootstrap it with several successive layers of leaving more and more dangerous monsters close to spawn, so it's a ton of work. It's also easy for me to undo with admin cheats, if it ever does come up.
It does look like wizards and druids ended up worse than morcs! That's an accident. Compared to a basic ranged attack, wizards have +1 range and druids have +1 damage. But morcs also have +1 damage so, uh, whoops.
I improved the druid/wizard stats for whenever I update this, but the nature of the persistent dungeon makes it so I don't want to do updates before 7DRL is over.
I see, it’s good to know you could prevent that griefing. But I also think it’s kind of a long-term balance issue, where you eventually need a long-range unit to be able to attack other long-range units, and then you still might get unlucky and be one-shot while approaching them.
Maybe I should also point out that Cassowaries and fencers have stats worth 22 upgrades, while most have 21. Barbarians and centaurs have only 20. Skullchers and banshees seem to have 21, like morcs, while elves might also just have 20. Llama and naga have 21 plus their spit attacks.
Snakes have 20 plus venom bite, while centipedes have 21. These make me wonder if it’s a downgrade to have multiple different melee attacks whose damage you need to upgrade separately.
Oh, and another small thing I noticed is that resisted attacks use the verb “undefined”.
Sorry for the slow response!
I really appreciate the detailed checking of my math on all the monster stats. I'll go through and update them whenever the 7DRL judging finishes.
Also I saw the "undefined" bug once, couldn't reproduce it, and thought I hallucinated it. I'll go fix that too after the compo.
No worries.
You’re welcome, I had already made a list with these numbers, anyway. Some stats are more valuable than others, for example I’d pick a lion over a fencer because it has more defense and the same damage, even though it has less stats overall.
I think there’s another bug where a resisted vampiric lighting attack seems to attack multiple times instead of (not) draining health.