Dance With Death

Welcome to this earlyish prototype of my game!

There are many, many balance changes and features to come. 

Apologies if you are colorblind, it should still be somewhat playable but definitely is not colorblind friendly yet.

If you encounter a bug please let me know. I believe there might be a rare bug where a tile will just stop moving, if you encounter this please send a screenshot of it and if you can remember the last few directions you moved before you took that screenshot. I've only encountered it once and have been unable to replicate it, but I suspect it still could happen.

Roguelikes are generally games about exploring and discovering the mechanics for yourself. However, if you're struggling/don't care about spoiling this part of the experience for yourself, or if the onscreen instructions truly aren't enough, here is an overly detailed rundown of the game's mechanics:

The goal of the game is to get as much gold as possible. That's all gold does. It's your score.

The blue helmet in the middle of the grid is you. If you press an arrow key, that helmet moves in that direction. With each move you will consume 1 food, or take 1 damage if you are starving. New tiles will appear in the direction you move towards, while tiles behind you fade away.

Positive tiles (green, light blue, and purple) will increase their respective stats - gold is treated as one of these as well. Negative tiles (red, pink, and orange) will decrease their respective stats. When they are picked up, on the left a pop-up will tell you how much your stats changed, and by the player a number will pop up with a new total of whatever stat was changed.

As you move around, you will inevitable force two similar tiles next to each other. When that happens, they merge into a stronger version. Other tiles will slide in to fill the gaps this leaves. Once a tile leaves the board, it will never return - an identical one can spawn later, though.

The border of your screen is colored based on your aura - green means more positive things will spawn, black means it's a 50/50 chance and enemies have the chance to spawn, and red means more negative things will spawn. You increase your aura temporarily by killing enemies. The presence of an enemy will decrease your aura until you kill one.

If an enemy spawns, it will take a turn after you, where it'll choose to either move towards you, do nothing, or, most often, take the strongest positive tile near it. Every step an enemy takes, they leave behind a negative tile. When you kill an enemy, it'll drop the strongest tile it's managed to collect that isn't a potion (needs to be fixed to include potions). 

Combat happens by moving into an enemy. If you move next to an enemy they have a chance to attack you. It's pretty straightforward - you do damage based on your attack (sword) value, but the enemy's armor (shield) reduces it.  As you fight, a green number will pop up showing how much damage you did to your enemy, and a red number will show your remaining health.

The only other type of tile not yet explained are Potions. When the game spawns, it chooses 12 random potions from a large list (currently there are about 70) and assigns them each a name and a potion color. If you see a yellow potion, for instance, it will always do the same thing for that game. But the next game it might be a completely different one. When you pick up a potion, text will pop up telling you its name, and the change in stats can be seen on the left. Typically there will be about 6-7 good potions and 5-6 bad potions, but be wary. Some potions are poisons, and those are particularly deadly. Pick up an Antidote potion to get rid of your poisons.

Don't worry if you die! it's meant to happen, just play again and see if you can do better. If you need help remember Food gets consumed with every step, and Health can drop very fast, so you might want to prioritize those two stats. Try to merge as many tiles as you can, they're over twice as good as getting two individual tiles. Imps (the purple enemies) are relatively easy to beat and you're best off trying to chase them down. Ogres (the brown enemies) are pretty tough to manage early on, so you might need to run away or even just die and try again. Difficulty is not fully tuned yet.

Oh yeah, and the "quit" button doesn't work, and for some reason the game is using the wrong font, but neither should ruin your experience.

Have fun and let me know what you think!