Hi y’all, we just pushed our first major update to the main branch earlier today and decided to reintroduce the demo alongside it. This time around the demo is catered to first time players of the series. It is the first five stages of the game with a much smaller spellbook and equipment list. Wanted to say thanks to those of you have been playing the game and leaving us feedback. It’s much appreciated.

Hello again,

it's a-me, Alexander, the developer of The Ruins of Calaworm, a turn-based Dungeon Crawler with some inherent Roguelike DNA (grid-based navigation, single char, consequences for death, no meta-progression). I already made a post some half-year ago, when the game was still in development, but now it has finally released. The Demo is still available, though, and has been updated as well, to reflect the latest state of polish.

Its base-mechanics stem from an obscure, early 90s German Dungeon Crawler called Die Gemäuer von Kalawaum, which kind of had a cult-following back in the days (I was there, I know, lol), with an ATARI ST port, that for some reason was more popular than the DOS-Version.

However, I'm proud to finally present the fruits of my labor. The game has been in development for roughly 6 years (my main job is in healthcare, so I've been working on this in my spare time on and off), it started as a pastime during Covid lockdown, then the Feature Creep gradually escalated, and in the end I even commissioned a composer and while all the ingame tileArt is by humble me, I also commissioned a PixelArtist for the big screen/intermission/menu/key art.

You are a Plague Doctor investigating an ancient stronghold. The Ruins are rumored to be the source of a corruption, that is spreading throughout the woods, killing animals and infecting the soil. There's Witches, some Steampunk tropes, and the overall design is heavily inspired by Lovecraftian lore - albeit in a dark fantasy setting with emphasis on athmosphere, but without overly explicit world-building (no fancy geography/character names to remember).

While there's combat, the main challenge stems from navigating the layouts. Some of them are handcrafted with an editor (included in the retail version), some of them procedurally generated. Item- and Enemy-distribution is mostly random (but with some parameters fixed for as long as you don't reroll the seed). Very few stats to keep track of, and you don't build a character like in an RPG (you level up automatically after defeating stronger enemies), instead you'll collect weapons, shields and various tools that'll help with overcoming the Dungeon's many challenges. There's no ranged attacking - every hit is technically a meleeBump - weapons have unique juicy animations, though. Combat's primary gimmick is, that damage output is dependent on how much health you have left (goes for you, as well as for enemies).
Think "Puzzlegame with emergent backstabbing". ;-)

Also two Minigames to seek out, Sanity mechanic, and a light survival-y appeal, due to finite resources and equipment durability.

DOWNLOAD (itch.io) --> https://erdbeerscherge.itch.io/ruins-of-calaworm

Tom Jensen (Soundtrack):
u/Some_Scar4621

Edjielyn Macasaet (PixelArt):
https://www.behance.net/edjiearts edjie

Thank you, and have a nice week! <3

A blend of Angband and ADOM would be great. Any recommendations along those lines? Open source (like Angband) would be grand. TIA.

I'm an old rogue/hack player from the dawn of time. Spent far too many hours playing on the unix machines at work. Haven't played in a few years though.

Sorry if this is against the rules since I am not talking about a game, but I have been trying something in my life that has brought some calmness and fun to the mundane. I have been trying to slow down and think about my next move before doing it, as I would with in a roguelike. Whether it be putting the dishes away or doing work at the computer. For example, as I am typing this message I am focused on accurately striking the keys and planning where I am going with the sentence, with the goal of never hitting backspace. When I click through my email or through dialogues I try to reduce the amount of actions I have to take. Maybe when I am cleaning up around the house I look for multiple things I can grab that go to the same place before making my first move. It may feel like it is taking longer, but it probably takes the same amount of time or maybe less due to mistake prevention.

Has anyone else tried doing this?

Steam Page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2143790/DeAnima

New features in 1.3 include:

• New intelligence stat which causes death by brainlessness if it reaches zero. 
• New Mind Flayer monster that can eat your brains and cause you to go temporarily insane. 
• New Banshee monster that has a deafening scream. 
• New Pestilence monster with a bite that gradually saps the life out of you.
• New Toad monster that looks innocent enough, but avoid it if you have any bags in your inventory, as it can steal them!
• 20 Achievements (trackable in-game and synced with Steam).
• Major UI improvements - ability to set custom key bindings, inventory icons, new Action Menu and new Manifest Overlay so you can see all items at a glance (including those in bags).
• Much more - check out the patch notes for a list of all features, enhancements and bug fixes. 

If you are unfamiliar with DeAnima, it is a first person roguelike dungeon crawler with deep, challenging mechanics you would usually only find in more traditional roguelikes, including:

• No meta progression.
• True Permadeath.
• Turn-based combat system.
• True identification system.
• Thrall (pet) system.
• Deity system.
• Beatitude system.
• Completion Marks.
• 15 conducts tracked in-game (Atheist, Bareknuckle, Carnivore, Dignified, Exposed, Faithless, Honorable, Miser, Pacifist, Righteous, Skeptic, Tenebrous, Unchanged, Vigilant, and Warden).
• 40 monsters, many of which have unique abilities you have to contend with. 
• 3 different paths through the dungeon (with 3 distinct endings):
  • Escape - for short runs that can be completed in a single session.
  • Ascension - for longer runs over multiple sessions.
  • Transcension - for very long runs over many sessions, intended for completionists.
• Over 100 items to discover including Potions, Scrolls, Wands, Rings and Bags, including fan-favourites like Scroll of Vorpalize Weapon, Wand of Polymorph and Ring of Slow Digestion. 
• 16 character roles with unique abilities and traits including Rogue, Priest, Valkyrie and Tourist.  
• 8 different game modes to unlock (called Torments), including Endless mode and Inner Hell mode (where you are limited to 5HP and all enemies are limited to 1HP!).
• 32 passive items to unlock (called Burdens) that add further variety to each run, including Lump of Coal, Lucky Penny, Rusted Ankh, Wooden Spoon and the coveted Angelic Feather!
• Over 80 discoveries to track down in the dungeon, including Fountains, Sokoban-based puzzle rooms, The Altar of Sacrifice, Lairs where high-level monsters guard rare loot, Stashes and a special NPC called Wishbone who grants you the ability to wish for any item in the game (providing you can remember what it’s called!).

Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoy your descent into the Dungeon of Dread! 🧌💀

The simple idea, make a roguelike which works like an infinite road game. No stairs, one screen tall, progress infinitely in a single direction through continuously generated random chunks.

You play a lineage of cousins searching for the last nightclub.

Influences include: Alphaman, The Long Drive, NetHack and Noita

Features:

- Polythematic chaos - this game has no theme. Each chunk is a different place from the last. The world is not right anymore.

- Animals, mechs, humans, weird celestial beings.

- Massive item library including comestibles, devices, weapons, armour, injectables, random junk and much more.

- Explosions and fully destructible buildings and objects.

- Roadside corporate and religious lore and factions.

- Different ways to play, traps, turrets, stealth, outright stupidity and dumb luck.

- Diseases and status effects - Be careful what you eat, some bites are nastier than others, try to stay well.

- Skills system - learn odd skills - they map to the hot bar, use them to survive a bit longer.

- Environmental effects and environmental pressure.

- Escalating linear difficulty system - Get as far as you can.

- Bosses in all shapes and sizes.

- Hats! - Hats are very important in Lateral Crawl. The right hat can make or break your day.

Steam page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/5127760/Lateral_Crawl/

Announcement trailer: https://youtu.be/gbiypn_CFgc?si=YzR2OgtRhfFJ_SPH

Thanks for your eyeball time 🙏

Hey guys!

After 17 weekly updates I am back to show you version 0.50 which marks the completion of the game's coastal region. For context, the game is set in a hand-made world and played along procedurally generated paths with gamepad or keyboard.

On a run you can now find dense forests, rugged hills, river gorges, sunken temples, steep canyons, desert plateaus, abandoned villages, palmed beaches, dusty crypts and much more. The game's world is now twice the size it was at launch and it is time to move on to the next planned region, a large mountain range in the north west.

But not only the game's world has grown and improved, also the game itself. After well over 250 additions and improvements over the last three months, the game has matured a lot. Sneaking, predictive combat, unique enemy abilities, attack patterns, weapon charms, offhand weapons, procedural enemy placements, new traps, monsters, terrain, and items all make for a more varied run.

Aside from gameplay and the world, there have been other improvements as well. A modified font makes text easier to read, the inventory is cleaner, button show their associated moves, a codex explains the items in the game, new music, sound effects and NPCs make the game more atmospheric.

To end this chapter of the game's development, you now encounter dark spherical Cores buried deep into the ground. Once revered, they are now manifestations of the Barrier that curses the land and need to be destroyed on your journey towards the ancient city.

Thank you to those who supported the game in it's earliest stages and to anyone who gave feedback and suggestions, it means a lot. I hope you like the progress the game has made! Let me know what you think!

Buy and support the game on Steam
Watch the latest Trailer
Follow it's development on Youtube

Hello everyone, I posted about my game being released a couple of months ago, and a lot of people here enjoyed it! Thank you very much for all your support.

Since the launch, I've been working hard on quality-of-life updates and highly requested community features, including the ability to swap weapon sets.

For those new to the game, Feywood Wanderers is a traditional roguelike set in a forest, focused on deeply customizable classes and builds, and lots of customizable loot. It has a main mode where you can keep items between runs and unlock upgrades, but since I know many players would rather not have any meta-progression there's also the option for a full old-school mode.

Today, I'm excited to release Version 1.1! To celebrate the milestone, Feywood Wanderers is currently 20% off on Steam.

I hope you have fun playing it, and thank you again to everyone who has supported the game so far!

I had been thinking of trying out Rift Wizard 2 for a while, but never got around to it. I was thinking of picking it up again recently and discovered that Rift Wizard 3 is in early access. Which one should I pick up? What are the main differences between these games?

I absolutely loved this game on mobile. After years of iOS updates, it finally quit working on my phone. Excited to get to play it again.

Ones that I know about are like Cogmind, CoQ, FTL, Into the breach, Jupiter hell, CDDA, approaching Infinity. Im just fabtasy'd out for a while lol.

Hey rogues,

Unreal World is one of my favorite roguelikes/games. I can't think of any games that try to simulate what surviving in the woods and building up to a homestead would be like, with a fully simulated world. I've been working on such a game and would love some feedback.

Full disclaimer: there's a save system and no ironman mode yet, but that's just during alpha for testing. I do plan on having characters be fully deleted upon death.

Frozen Ground is a hard, unforgiving 2D survival simulator set in the 1700s in deep in the boreal north. Heavily inspired by Unreal World and CDDA. Make fire, food and shelter from what the land gives you, or die.

Top-down turn-based roguelike in an infinite, procedurally generated living world of migrating herds of caribou, hunting wolves, bears, hares, squirrels and villages that you can interact with and will remember you and your actions.

Deep crafting, building and survival systems: firemaking, hide tanning, fur making, cooking, smoking, hunting, trapping, pottery.. much more.

Turn-based time, weather and seasons simulations, along with all that you'd expect (temperature, rain, snow, etc. Everything interacts with everything)

Would love some feedback.

Play here: https://frozenground.itch.io/frozen-ground

People have been enjoying my mobile port of Ivan, so I wanted to see what I could do with desktop as the UI is pretty outdated.

This is a full conversion of the gui, with both keyboard and mouse support. Everything should be laid out and easy to find.

Hopefully this gets some more eyes on this amazing game!

Ivan UI Enhanced Itch

At some point in the last year I started playing with permadeath or hardcore mode in basically any game that offers it, and it totally changed the feel of the games. I got this idea when I realized how much excitement permadeath adds to roguelikes I was playing (mostly Caves of Qud and some DCSS) and I was curious if I would get the same feeling from other games.

Permadeath gives your decisions real consequences, and that makes you play way more carefully and everything feels more exciting. When death is a minor inconvenience and you can just reload a save from five minutes ago, nothing you do really matters. You just do whatever and take silly risks because you can just take back your mistakes with no consequence, which can be fun for trying things out, but overall it makes games less exciting for me. 

Obviously it works best for games that have similar mechanics to roguelikes, like random generated levels and loot. I started out with Minecraft and basically played it like a RL, it was really fun. I did a few runs, died to lava and fall damage a few times of course. Then I tried it out in Last Epoch (my favorite ARPG) and it was so refreshing to play like that. Instead of just mindlessly running around blasting I had to play carefully. Sure the game isn’t hard at all but when the stakes are so high you just have to constantly pay attention, you don’t wanna die to something stupid and have to start over. It felt way different than any of my normal runs, it's so satisfying to get a good drop when it actually increases your odds of surviving.

Has anyone else experimented with this? Playing non-rl games as if they were roguelikes (well at least the permadeath part), It’s been really fun to revisit games I used to play and try them out like that to see how they feel.

Please fix it I use it to go to bed.

I dunno, it doesn’t work on the website nor on podcast apps.

Ok they fixed it

I keep wanting to play more complex roguelikes on my steam deck but most of them have keybinds for every single action for things that could easily be fit into a submenu. It's like the developers purposefully have dogshit unintuitive controls. It makes for a very unenjoyable experience. At least make the controls as approachable as Caves of Qud

Imagine the scenario where characters from different games are swapped so the Merlin from Rift Wizard is in ob10 complex and the titular Cogmind needs to kill Mordred. I am asking this question because in Rift Wizard 2 I was nuking the map while in the Cogmind I had a Scooby Doo like chase. I won both games just the feeling was completely different. Can you tell me your stories of the most insane feats your characters accomplished?

This is a tutorial for the most recent version of DCSS for a very straightforward melee character geared toward new players. I go over everything from keybindings, fundamentals, branch order and many basic tactics/strategies. The video has meticulous chapters so you can skip to any particular area or subject you're interested in without watching or searching the entire run.

If you're someone who has played other roguelikes but never pulled the trigger on DCSS this may be helpful to you.

https://youtu.be/udsTpDRo6Ik?si=TfVnwk6oEnIyGF22

after a long long time, we updated Threads of Tomot to 0.3.5!

you can check it out here (for free): https://bitware-interactive.itch.io/threads-of-tomot

and read our changelog here: https://bitware-interactive.itch.io/threads-of-tomot/devlog/1461851/threads-of-tomot-update-035

University has destroyed our time avalible to work on the game, but the update finally arrived with one new boss, 10 new levels, new enemies, impoved level generation, new sounds and items!

Hail roguelikers!

Pathos has been free to play for over 10 years. Coming soon, an enhanced edition will be available on Steam, finally giving players a way to support its continued development. Most importantly, the free editions aren’t going away. I want Pathos to remain accessible to everyone, regardless of whether they are able to purchase the Steam edition.

Wishlist on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/5062560/Pathos

Pathos has been due for a visual upgrade and this Steam edition takes inspiration from ‘old book illustrations’. The result is a fusion of retro aesthetics and modern usability.

The key art features Struth von Winkelried who is a legendary character of Swiss folklore, based on a real-life knight.

Struth attacked the dragon single-handedly, armed with a spear of which he had attached sharp barbs. The dragon, seeing that the attacker was alone, came from his hiding-place and attacked with open jaws.

Winkelried was able to transfix the monster with his spear, hacking at it with his sword until it died. Glad for his victory, Winkelried lifted his sword over his head, thanking God, and the dragon's blood dripped from his sword blade on his body, poisoning him so that he died a few days later. 

Seems that YASD is a story as old as time itself :D

I'm around if you have any questions!

Callan.