Controls
â—€ â–² â–¼ â–¶: move cursor with arrow keys
z key: open shop/confirm
x key: open map/close menu
About
Idle Dungeon is an idle clicker/auto battler where you are a new dungeon keeper slowly amassing an army to destroy the four regions of humans. The heroes of the realm will not allow you to go unchallenged and will regularly raid your dungeon in progressively tougher waves. Losing two hero raids will cause a gameover.
In the game you will construct resource buildings to boost your economy and minion buildings to house a unit for combat. A tunnel is required before you can start attacking hero regions. As always, let me know if you find any bugs :).
Region Bonuses
+1 mining for defeating Nice Cottage
+1 food production for defeating Joyous Lookout
minions upgraded for defeating Friendly Duchy (Demons now require an additional food to heal)
+1 mana/scrap creation for defeating City of Beauty
Achievements
Defeat the four regions lets you use the golden hand as a cursor.
Survive five end raids lets you use the emerald hand as a cursor.
Inspirations
The two big inspirations for the game are Dungeon Keeper one and two for the overall aesthetic, and Avianos from the UFO 50 collection for the auto battler portion. I also was playing Wratch's Den, and Dungeon 3 while developing this game which helped with fleshing out some of the ideas like bringing the fight to the heroes. I even snuck in a reference to Orbs of Aeternum.
Thanks
Thank you as always to my wife for being supportive of my little projects and the cool Pico 8 community!
Changelog
Nicely done, thanks! I saw your post on Reddit and came here to play. Got past the first kingdom and had a lot of fun. Maybe consider having a save state? I don't know how long the game is but the first kingdom is about as far as I'd like to go at one sitting.
@SaltySalticid Thanks for checking it out! I didn't consider saving dungeon progress. I think there is enough space in savable memory to maybe implement something like that. I'll look into it!
I thoroughly enjoyed this. Brought me back to dungeon keeper days! This was really well executed from my perspective! Really like the auto combat mechanic. My only difficulty was figuring out how to support health regen. The mobs seemed to regen so slowly it was difficult to raid and fend off attacks because I was always low on health. Maybe I missed a mechanic, too.
@furious I'm glad you liked it! Dungeon Keeper is a classic for sure! There is a mechanic to health regen, that is a great point! I'll add better descriptions in the next update. Basically, each unit needs food and their specific resource to regain health (gold, mana, scrap respectively). If they don't have what they need, their hp will slowly deplete.
Health regen is definitely one of the difficulties of the game; do you go for a siege knowing a raid is coming up, or do you wait? I like the tension with that, but I do think I need to explain the basics of how minions heal, so thank you for that. And thank you for playing!
@SaltySalticid I added save functionality for version 2! The cart is updated above. It was a lot more intricate than I thought it would be and ate up the rest of the tokens haha. Let me know if you give it a go and if you find any bugs
@furious I updated the descriptions in game to hopefully make the health regen mechanic clearer. Thanks again for the feedback!
Wow thanks, talk about great customer service! My only programming experience is outside game dev, so I don't really understand the obstacles to saving but I will say that I really love when pico-8 games implement some sort of saving, it's a sort of quality of life feature that makes them feel much more full and modern, even if they are low-res and minimal :)
@SaltySalticid haha I do my best. I agree, saving is a nice feature. Especially for longer games.
Implementing saving is not that complicated when it comes down to it; you name the file you want to save/load data to with cartdata("name_of_game"). Pico 8 has 64 slots you can store/get a number from. For example dget(0) gets whatever number you stored at the 0 location and dset(0,45) sets the location 0 spot with the number 45. It turns out just saving a bunch of numbers is enough to handle most games.
As an example, in my game I store if the user has beat the game in the 0 slot.
if beat_game==true then dset(0,1) --save a 1 at location 0 in the save file. end |
I can then check that spot whenever I want to see if they beat the game.
victory=dget(0)--get the value from save slot 0 if victory==1 then --let them see the golden cursor in the menu and select it end |
sometimes you have to do logic like that, but most things you would want to save are just numbers: Room types, minion hp, levels defeated, etc. So you don't need to do any logic with those except loading/saving the values.
I hope this helps! You should give creating a game a go! I started by following The Lazy Dev Academy's amazing Roguelike tutorials and then branched off when I felt comfortable. Start writing down cool Pico 8 ideas you have. You may surprise yourself on what you can create!
This is a lot of fun! I ended up playing way longer than I expected, lol. Very nice job on the controls and UI...especially the little dots that indicate which room and color codes for what type it is.
I noticed the little "smiles" that units generate ever so often...is that when they are regaining their health? I'm not sure how to suggest to add yet another piece of UI for some sort of regen clock but I did feel like it took a long time for regen compared to the raid clock without it.
I had to quit when I got to the second map but I'll be pushing this one more.
@morningtoast thanks for checking it out! The smiles are when they are regaining health after you pay them. Paydays happen around every 12 seconds and raids every 72 seconds. It would be cool to add a payday timer of some kind, but I'm not sure what that would look like. Thanks again for playing!
I can't seem to get scrap! The forge requires scrap to build and also makes scrap? And I don't start with any.
Edit: Nvm, I had thought mana was scrap.
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