Rogue Wave

It may take 10 or so seconds for the game to load when run for the first time.

This is a 7DRL Roguelike centred around ocean adventure and tactical movement. It is intended to be challenging so that victory requires experience with the enemies and mechanics and a strong amount of luck.

Back story: A Rogue Wave has knocked your booty off the ship. Recover it while dealing with hoards of pirates and sea monsters.

The controls:

• WSAD or Arrow Keys to sail (the lack of diagonal movement is intentional)
• SPACE to fire cannons

Your ship has 10 hp. Pirates will ram you doing 1hp damage. So you have some leeway. You can also pick up the odd floating bottle o' rum to restore 5 hp.

Clicking on objects and enemies on the map will bring up information about them.

Reused level/tile system, animation system & algorithms from previous 7DRL and other RL projects. All the art, sound, music and mechanics are made for this game.

Mechanics / Ideas (Spoilers)

The spawn rate of the pirates ships increases over time but can be reduced by destroying pirate ships. The idea is to present the player with a dilemma over whether it's worth rushing for the chests, or whether it's important to reduce the rate of build up of pirates, although I'm not sure I have the balance right.

The Giant Sea Horse monster actively avoids landing on any tile that the player can target with cannons during the player's turn. It also factors in the player getting a free turn from sailing into the wind, so effectively looks two moves ahead. It turns out this makes a Giant Sea Horse almost* impossible to kill. So I ended up sabotaging it's AI, so it has an 15% or so chance of not bothering to calculate danger tiles on a turn, leaving it susceptible to moving to a bad tile.

*there is still a way of defeating such a Giant Sea Horse - if the wind happens to change at the beginning of the player's move then the Sea Horse will have calculated it's move using the wrong wind direction.

If I had more time I planned to add

• A storm cloud entity that moves across the map and damages anything beneath it
• A whirlpool that drags adjacent entities in. Easy to avoid for the player but they could use it to take out hostiles.
• A larger/more serious pirate ship which acts exactly like your own, where you have to avoid it's cannons.
• A creature that moves along long diagonals or row/columns.

I was tempted to change the Pirate Ships to giant prawns, to go with the chess theme of the sea horse. The pirate ships follow a downhill heat map with origin on the player's position, choosing randomly between adjacent tiles with equal minimal cost to the origin. When they bump into the player they do 1hp damage.

The player can die by sailing off the edge of the map / world. Perhaps the sea horse could be made to not check the condition so that one way of defeating it is to lure it off the edge.

It took me a while to realize that firing the cannons can be used to a skip turn. Now the difficulty is balanced to take this into account, so I suspect realizing it is now required to win.

Tools

• Sound effects: jsfxr - 8 bit sound maker and online sfx generator & audacity
• Music: www.beepbox.co
  
• Sprites: aseprite
• Engine (UI,  audio, sprite renderer, webgl build): Unity