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Introducing Asciiroids
I’ve spent most of this month whipping up a mechanics playtest I call “asciiroids”. I’m very excited to see people discover it’s secrets. It’s a rougelite/arena game, and it’s only greyboxed for now. Hardly any sounds, no music, and certainly not particularly interesting visuals. It’s mostly rendered with Ascii text (hence the name of the playtest) and some glow, rectangles, and particles. The goal is to make sure the game is fun and playable before I enter into the next stage of development.
So what’s Asciiroids…?
A crude title card I made in google slides
Asciiroids
Your goal is to survive the “diagrams”, arenas of ever-changing enemies attempting to end your run in any way you can. Defeating enemies gives you skill points and weapon pieces, and you can turn those into upgrades and new powers between runs. The further you get, the more dangerous the enemies become. They’re stronger, healthier, but most importantly the enemies gain new behaviors. Each enemy is made of tons of pieces, and each piece effects the final AI. Does it chase the player, regenerate health… perhaps some pieces can even make them teleport.
Yes, that title-card/header image is terrible, but it’s not meant to be well done at this time in development.
If you squint you might be able to see what’s going on here
Gameplay
Attach weapons to yourself and battle these conglomerate “creatures” and survive as long as possible. In this particular screenshot, you can see various enemies attacking the player in different ways.
Some Features
Emergent gameplay from enemies
Adding both active and passive weapons to player
Several ways to upgrade the player
Lots of visual feedback
The game (hopefully) is performant enough to play
What’s Next?
Custom hand-built enemy battles (check out the enemy builder we already have)
Bullet-hell adjacent mechanics, potentially player has health instead of one-shot death
More types of weapons
Watching the playtest and getting as much feedback as possible
Play it now!
I always try and have something new for you guys to try out or mess around with every month or so. So here it is! As I said, it’s an early playtest so it’s not much. In all honesty, I’d be baffled if it was any fun to play at all. Let me know what your least favorite part of the game is, and I’ll do my best to improve it from there! Additionally, if you have any ideas about what to add or how to theme it, check out the community discord.
Asciiroids Playtest on Itch io!
Here’s a screenshot of the gameplay, I don’t have a fancy artistic image of any sort yet so this will have to do ;D
That’s all for this month
I’m still working hard on Torven, the dice game, and I’ve got some more prototypes in the works as well. Next month I hope to have some even more exciting news on the state of the new board game, more prototypes, and hopefully lots of improvements for Asciiriods (because I’m sure more bugs will be discovered, and I doubt it’s anywhere near perfect as of this release). Until we meet again!
