Your salvage vessel was drained of fuel while you were investigating a signal from a mysterious installation on a low gravity planet. Escape the installation by navigating the rooms and corridors, avoiding or fighting off enemies, and collecting enough green power cells scattered about to fuel your ride home. To help you on your quest, purchase and upgrade items at the kiosk and gain ammo and recharge items at the locker or from blue cells.

The game features two modes of play:

  • Escape Run: survive 30 levels to win in a solo or local co-op game. Collect green cells to score points and give yourself more options at the next levels kiosk. Collect blue cells to increase your ammo/fuel for the active inventory item. 
  • Competitive Run: Local multiplayer deathmatch where the objective is to score the most points. Score 1 point for each green cells and every 5 blue cells. Blue cells grant you more fuel/ammo as normal.

In both modes every level has 

  • an exit door -- press up to use it to move to the next level
  • a kiosk -- press down to toggle available items, up to choose one to add to your inventory (choosing an item you already have will upgrade it and replenish ammo/fuel)
  • a locker -- press up to open and replenish ammo/fuel for all items
  • a variety of enemies and other tiles to interact with

Controls (these are controls for the dev/browser version not the 7DRL)

Action Key Touch (position on screen) Gamepad
Left A or Arrow Left Left virtual thumbstick LThumbstick left
Right D or Arrow Right Left virtual thumbstick LThumbstick right
Interact Up W or Arrow Up Left virtual thumbstick LThumbstick up
Interact Down S or Arrow Down Left virtual thumbstick LThumbstick down
Run I or C Left virtual thumbstick (i.e., drag further) R Bumper
Use Exit Up arrow Left virtual thumbstick LThumbstick up
Equip Next Item L or XRight thumb Top 1/3 L trigger or Button 2
Use Item K or Z
Right thumb Middle 1/3 R trigger or Button 3
Jump J or SPACE Right thumb Lower 1/3 Button 1

Release notes 

This scifi-themed rogue-inspired platformer has evolved significantly from its 2022 7DRL Game Jam origins. 

Note that there are two versions available:

* RunLikeMAD-dev.zip is the current development version and is the same version that runs in the browser window above. It supports co-op mode, mobile phones, some consoles, gamepads, fixes lots of bugs, and will eventually feature many more powerups, items, tiles types, monster AIs, keyboard customization, and more. 

* RunLikeMAD-7DRL-Challenge-Entry.zip is the official 7DRL entry version. *Judges please use this one when evaluating the game for the challenge. * Just download the zip file, extract the contents to a folder, and open the extracted index.html file in your browser.  Gameplay overview: each level is generated randomly with an entrance, exit, platforms and power cells. You are placed at the start of the level and must navigate to the exit. Robots are spawned in randomly and will hurt you if you collide with them. Press up at an exit to move to the next level but don't waste too much time or you will get trapped by a horde of spawning monsters. You have 4 items to help you navigate the levels -- a gun to shoot bots, wrench to remove walls, jetpack to fly around, and grenades to blow up things. Survive 30 levels to win the game. **NOTE** the keyboard shortcut for cycling the inventory items is Q not TAB as listed on the player hud. 

Bear in mind for both versions: This is currently more of a tech or concept demo than a game. Placeholder levels, placeholder art, placeholder sound effects, placeholder enemy AI, etc. 

Roadmap

Features to be implemented include

Inventory Items

  • Boots?? (this is where the jump lives with the dedicated jump key)
  • Punch (no damage but knock back)
  • Grapple (shoot target and pulled rapidly towards it)
  • Rechargeable Shield
  • Gloves (hold ledges and climbing walls)
  • Tweak jetpack -- more fun to control, momentum
  • Tweak gun -- firing at angles
  • Hint above player when switching items (eventually fully animated)
  • Color code upgrades to items

Tiles

  • Non-destructable walls
  • Doors (key/keypad to open)
  • Moving platforms (entity??)
  • Disappearing platforms
  • Traps
  • Climbable wall (requires gloves)
  • Tweak Kiosk -- two tiles instead of one so it's easier to see what's on screen

Entities

  • Traps: Spike/saw/exploding
  • Wall mounted guns/turrets
  • Vehicles

Map Gen

  • Navigable maps -- main route to exit should always exist and be navigable without using inventory items but not be trivial
  • Monster spawns in smarter places
  • Enclosed rooms with doors
  • Don't be afraid of empty areas
  • Map objectives
  • Scrollable maps (don't really want this but may have to)
  • "Biomes" <-- science, factory, sleeping quarters, mess hall, war/training room, control center, Trash, flight deck etc.

Monsters

  • oneeye explodes when it falls more than 4 spaces (or reaches speed of X)
  • twoeye falls further, chases player if attacked
  • tank moves to player if possible
  • eater?? rifle, burns through walls
  • jester?? throws bombs, explodes when it dies
  • flying enemies / jet pack users?
  • patrol routes and guards
  • monsters interact with one another
  • friendlies/neutrals

Look and feel

  • Control customization/remap
  • Sound
  • Sprites
  • Animation
  • Juice

Dev notes

This is my first entry into the 7DRL contest and first ever game jam. I have previously designed half a dozen or so games, mostly in Python and more for fun than anything else. Developing a playable game in a week while also working full time was a somewhat harrowing experience. For this challenge, I worked in JavaScript, whose chief advantage is that it allows deployment to the browser but it is also surprisingly performant. I used the final game code for the Broughlike tutorial developed by  Jeremiah Reid as my base (see https://nluqo.github.io/broughlike-tutorial/). I highly recommend this tutorial to anyone looking to get started with Rogue-style games for the web but a fully fleshed out gaming dev kit this is not and it was never designed to be. Not using an engine (or code from a previous Jam) slowed me down because I had to spend time handrolling infrastructure instead of making a game. But I learned a bunch along the way, have code I can use for next year, and plan to keep working on the game to turn it into something much more fully fleshed out. 

Thanks to KlinkOS for the main tileset and other itchers for various additional tiles!

Download

Download
RunLikeMAD-7DRL-Challenge-Entry.zip 126 kB
Download
RunLikeMAD-dev.zip 2 MB

Leave a comment

Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.