Runemaster is roguelike heavly focused on spellcrafting. You're a runemaster that craft his own spells using runes, combining them for results beyond your immagination.

There's a prophecy and victory is achieved by fulfilling it [NO SPOILER!]. Also, the games has multiple endings depending on the elemental rune you choose at the start, have fun chasing them all!

The game can be played with the keyboard, but based on the feedback I may try to come up with a mobile interface ... we'll see how it goes. The most important key to remember is '?' which open a context aware screen listing all keys you can use based on the screen you're in.

The code, as I'm Italian and had way less time then needed during the 7drl 2021, is a VERY BIG PLATE OF CARBONARA! Don't even try to find logic behind some of the decision I made ... it's working and for a ~50 hours game is all I care about. I've so many more rune, so many monster and so many items to add that if people like the game I may rewrite it from scratch and have something more stable to work with and expand on.

As always, the 7drl 2021 was A BLAST! I had so much fun! Thanks all the organizers, Slashie, jmlait, Darren Grey and thanks to all participants! HAVE FUN and remember: PERMADEATH IS WAITING JUST AROUND THE CORNER! 8ppp

For any problem, feature request, bug or just to say hello, use the comments section. I'll try to answer as fast as i can.

FOR THE JUDGES; I've uploaded a new version with minor fixes related to itch.io:

- fixed arrow moving the hosting page

- fixed two targeting issue

The 7drl challenge version is still avvaible as a download, you don't need a webserver to run it, just download the zip and open index.html in you preferred browser. Downloading and running the game this way prevents the itch.io problems anyway.

More information

Status	Released
Platforms	HTML5
Release date	Mar 12, 2021
Rating	Rated 3.0 out of 5 stars (1 total ratings)
Author	Luca Giacometti
Genre	Strategy, Role Playing
Tags	Seven Day Roguelike Challenge, 7drl2021, Crafting, gdr, Magic, Roguelike, Roguelite, spell, spellcrafting
Average session	About a half-hour
Languages	English
Inputs	Keyboard

Download

runemaster.zip 95 kB

Comments

spoike3 years ago

Loving the game concept, not loving that it constantly runs on 100% CPU/GPU utilisation and dropping frames. I'd love to see you take the idea further but preferably with some performance fixes. ;-)

Luca Giacometti3 years ago

Yeah, i know that in Chrome the game seems quite unoptimized. In Firefox it seems it runs way better. Also on my macbook air it struggle a lot while on my gameing pc [from 4/5 years ago] runs way better.

I'll keep it in mind if and when i'm going to turn it in a finished game [i'd like to also re-implement the spellcrafting way better because there are a lot of other runes i didn't have time to add and some i could not add]. Let's say that this version has been made in 7 days so i'm not worrying too much about optimization, but you're definitly right!

Thanks for the feedback!

Wildfire OSR3 years ago

Very cool! I like the idea of combining using different runes to make spells. Also the layout the forest/jungle/desert gave a true sense of danger, I think. Just one suggestion: try using different fonts for the tiles vs. the text. Trying to read the square text was a bit difficult.

Luca Giacometti3 years ago

Thanks, i'm glad you liked it!

I'll try to pay more attention to the text for my next entries, but i can't modify the engine for this.

Lone Spelunker3 years ago

This game is fantastic. I love the spell creation mechanic. Unfortunately, my awesome run was cut short when I accidentally targeted myself with an Earth/Hit/Hit/Hit/Hit...

Some suggestions for future improvements:

I can't seem to play it on the main itch.io display without the up and down arrow keys scrolling the web page - are you perhaps missing a preventDefault() in there or something? (Opening the game's frame in its own window fixes this issue, thankfully.)
Also, the Escape key breaks you out of fullscreen mode, so it would be nice to have a consistent key for closing the menus other than escape so the game could be played fullscreen.
Seems like most "choose an option" windows have an "X to inspect" aspect to them. It would save some going-in-and-out to be able to select from the list and just always have the info displayed on the right.
If you target yourself, maybe an "are you sure?" window should pop up.
The minotaur level feels a little tedious. The cramped spaces are an interesting change of pace, but maybe make the total labyrinth size a little smaller...?
I got a rune of proliferation, but it didn't seem like I could incorporate it into a spell. If that's by design, and we need to do something in order to use it, like be a cerain level or combine it with a particular rune, it's not clear; currently, it just looks like a bug.
Spell hotkeys would be nice!
It would be fun to be able to combine the base runes, like making a spell that does both fire and ice!

Overall, a great little game. I hope you develop it further.

Luca Giacometti3 years ago

Thanks for review! As per your points they seems all quick and quite easy to implement so i think i'll publish a new version soon.

The Rune of Proliferation proliferate an elemental ailment, the only base runes that apply an ailment are fire [ignite enemies] and ice [freeze eneies], i'll add it in the rune description. All other runes have different special effect that cant be proliferated [like ealing, recouping mana, teleport, ...]

The only point i can not implement is the last one, combining base rune, because ... that's part of the game [NO SPOILER]. That could be a nice addition for a full game where the main quest is different.

sunil.3 years ago (1 edit)

I loved picking a “starting rune” in the first room. (Reminiscent of picking a starting pokémon back in the day…)

Kirill Diduk3 years ago

I like the game! The spirit of a traditional roguelike and beautiful ASCII art. In-game help is very informative, so it's easy to find out how to play. Simple, but very interesting game.