Ancient Digipts

Explore a mysterious maze from an era where zero didn't exist.

Mini devlog

  • 04/01 My goal is to develop a small raycaster in Rust. No idea what the gameplay will be, it depends on how quick the engine development goes
  • 13/01 The rendering of primitive shapes and images plus a basic raycaster are done. I have a vague idea on how the game will play out, it should be puzzle-oriented with tile-based movement. I'll need to improve the raycasting though, at least to support a floor and textures on walls.
  • 14/01 Player movement done, albeit without collisions. The map and even the color palette are also conveniently loaded from a PNG file.
  • 31/01 The rest of the game :)

Comments (6)

ratrogue
 • 3 years ago • 

Adorable style thanks to the colored walls, and a cute puzzle idea! I find the movement the most interesting, as it is grid-based but still feels fluid. Sometimes the collision feels a bit glitchy though.

voxel
 • 3 years ago • 

Maybe I'm imagining it but I feel like you wanted to do something in the vein of Crypt of the Necrodancer? I really liked the puzzles and interpreting the floor tiles, a clever way to get some simple gameplay in. Interesting movement system too, somewhat grid aligned somewhat free roaming, I like it

Wan
  • 3 years ago • 

Thanks guys for playing!

@voxel I've played Necrodancer a bit but didn't really have it in mind. Initially I was looking for an almost Twister-like kind of maze where you have to plan movement carefully in a grid of colorful tiles. Now if I had explored the "timing" aspect of walking on tiles more (eg. "trigger this tile twice, turn, dash over that one etc.") it could have ended with a similar feel as Necrodancer. Could have been cool.

@ratrogue Yeah collisions are a bit rough. Thinking about movement, I could have probably used mouse look instead of keyboard-based rotations, I suspect collisions would have gotten in the way less. Also being able to look easily at doors while walking another direction could have helped.

toasty
 • 3 years ago • 

I love the lit-up floor tile at the bottom: it's very much like a dancefloor (on that note, the original title reminds me of a time I spent over an hour trying to get out of a nightclub…). I can also see how the puzzles might be useful for teaching numeracy: very nice multi-tasking B-)

As mentioned above the movement and camera can cause a bit of difficulty. I find it very hard to mix continuous and grid-based movement without it feeling janky so this is quite an achievement. I quite like the minimalist texturing, it's simple but effective.

yozy
 • 3 years ago • 

I like the concept, but found the puzzles a bit too easy. I was expecting to have to use the timing more, like you have mentioned having to time passage through a number of tiles would give it more of a rhythm game feel. In that case maybe also make the distinction of the tiles a bit more memorable,

The passages where floor is the same color as the walls feel artistic, but a little bit confusing :)

remco
 • 3 years ago • 

Is see the folder is named 'dancefloor-escape' … well I'd want to escpae a dancefloor without any music or sound, so that's a story right there ;-p

Snark aside, I liked this entry. The gentle tutorialization is nicely done, though (no matter how easy it is) I think you could improve it a little by making the tiles slightly more distinguishable. (I know the patterns are a bit different already…)

The 'cold open' beginning is also good. Such a simple trick technically (just put the flat shading at the same color as the background), but very effective for those first 'what's this' moments :-)

I could see this evolving in a 'learn to math' for kids. Maybe add some explicit operations as well. Like make a floor tile that switches the operation from adding to multiplying for instance. Or a tile that only works once, then dissapears (then every room would need a reset tile as well or something).

More and more people are trying out Rust. I have it installed on my system somewhere and I really want to try out something with it some day.

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