Caverns of Dark Adventure is a traditional roguelike for PICO-8. You've become lost in an unknown cave system while collecting luma crystals for your village elder. Gather more luma crystals to light your way and escape the dangerous caverns!
Use the directional buttons to move. To ascend a passage or pick up an item, press X. To attack a creature or harvest luma crystals, move in their direction. To wait a turn, press X. To wait until fully healed, hold O and press X. To view your inventory, hold O and press up. On the inventory screen: To select an item, press up/down. To equip, unequip, or use an item, press X. To drop an item (if unequipped), press right. To return to the main screen, press O. For more information see the manual:
Thanks to the following for code used in the cart:
kittenm4ster (Fisher-Yates shuffle)
AdamJ and kjaegers (keyboard handler)
cheepicus and st33d (recursive shadowcasting)
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This is very very cool and I just adore the manual. Maybe I'll print it and give it another go
Whoops!
Made it to F21 with my +9 plate armor and +5 mace, but then troops of gargants (orange mages that slow you down) had always drained most mf my runes and got in my way:
I was looking for a game for this week's episode and found this nice roguelike. The gameplay is pretty solid and the manual definitely helps. I'll be playing some more for sure.
It would be great to get some basic sound effects at some point, so this adventure wouldn't be a completely silent one. Also, having to press an action button to skip through long combat log text lines is a bit annoying. I wish you could just continue pushing in the enemy direction instead of switching between two different buttons.
i like how not everything is revealed in the manual, like the retribution modifier
@thePixelXb_ - Yeah, becoming surrounded is dangerous, and if your agility is low it's difficult to avoid. Making it to level 21 is pretty good, though.
@lastofavari - I certainly wasn't expecting a gameplay video. Thank you for making it. It's very cool to see someone else play the game, and I appreciate the constructive critique and suggestions. Unfortunately, the cart is at 8190 tokens, so I can't easily make additions or changes at this point. While I agree adding sound would improve the experience as a PICO-8 game, my goal was to mimic old terminal-based roguelikes (which typically didn't have sound except an occasional beep at low health), so it doesn't really fit the aesthetic I was going for. I agree that allowing any input to advance the message log should be an option for those that want it. I'll see if I can free up some tokens to do that. Regarding the comment about level size, non-scrolling levels that fit the screen was again a design choice to mimic old roguelikes. The level generation is based on this constraint and wouldn't easily scale up to larger levels. Also, without a save function, I feel the game is already long enough as is, and larger levels would exacerbate that issue. I'm sorry you didn't find a weapon after four levels. The player originally started with a dagger, which then changed to a guaranteed weapon on the first level, which then changed to nothing as a way to add some tension and unpredictability to the early game. In my many playtests, not finding a weapon by the third or fourth level was pretty rare, but I'll look into the probability and maybe adjust it.
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