A downloadable game for Windows and Linux

Instructions:

You, a prisoner in a goblin city, must dive through 5 floors into the deep caves in order to return the Amulet of Woe to where it belongs, a journey that will necessarily involve a certain degree of violence.

Although you cannot normally attack (you'll push past enemies instead), if you find yourself surrounded by >3 enemies, you enter a martial trance, and will then receive special commands ("Move up! Attack left!") from your spirit guide that will increase/decrease your rage if obeyed/disobeyed.

  • You exit a martial trance when there are no more foes directly adjacent.
  • At 5 rage, you regenerate health each time you deal damage to a living foe.
  • At 15 rage, you must activate one ability, if you possess any.
  • At 20 rage, your spirit guide will summon one angel to assist you, and your rage will reset to 5. The angel will become hostile if you stop raging.
  • Each time you obey a command, your rage goes up by 1; each time you ignore a command, it goes down by 2.
  • You are granted a single (random) ability after slaying 10 foes, and then granted more after slaying 15-20 more.

Controls:

  • Movement: qweasdzxc, or hjklyubn if you prefer that.
  • Attacking: bump into enemies (only while in martial trance).
  • "M" to show messages.
  • Escape to view keybindings and quit.

Some tips:

  • Corners and walls are highly useful to ensure you only have 3-5 foes attacking you at once.
  • You won't stop raging if there are fewer than 4 foes adjacent to you, so beginning a rage while surrounded and then immediately moving into a corner is a great tactic.
  • Treat all ranged attackers (arbalists and hostile angels) as an emergency.
  • Remember that you can push past enemies while not in a rage.
  • Because always following commands will result in a quick death (from getting surrounded and not regenerating health rapidly enough from your attacks), you should creatively balance out both stats to ensure you end fights with net positive health.
  • Once you've reached the Armory, find the stairs to the deeper caves which a group of very dangerous enemies will guard. There you will find the fiery chasm, which you can bump into to throw the Amulet in.

Download

Download
ancient-rage-linux-x86_64-SDL-0.1.0.tar.xz 1 MB
Download
ancient-rage-windows-x86_64-SDL-0.1.0.zip 3 MB

Comments

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Video of your game here:

Thanks for the playthrough :)


Some thoughts:


1. The reason you're not taking a lot of damage in certain cases is due to the blood on the ground increasing your armor value. In hindsight this mechanic is rather unintuitive and could be cut out without missing anything. (It's the "blood" bar on the HUD, with the provided armor resistance next to it.)

2. The first few floors are just way, way too easy -- you can easily march through hordes of enemies without needing to turn your brain on due to the relative lack of threats to be found. At the Workshop level, where the game unfortunately crashed, you would've begun finding ranged attackers which would have significantly upped the difficulty level.

3. HP is actually regenerated each time you or an ally deal damage, not when an enemy dies. I wonder how I could have made this more clear in the UI? Hm.

4. Cutting out diagonal movements is an interesting idea, one which I'll certainly be visiting if I start working on this again.