Graphics!

CvRL2 is a traditional, top-down, turn-based roguelike, with fixed overworld and procedurally generated dungeons. It’s a retelling of the classic Castlevania 2 for the NES, in a format heavily inspired by ADoM. You can play online at https://slash.itch.io/cvrl2

Roam the countryside traveling between the towns, finding clues to destroy Dracula, and the mansions, where the relics of Dracula are found.

This version adds Graphics.

One random thought of the day was that I need to create stuff that is more visually appealing. I think my baseline, pure ASCII graphics, is just too limiting… I am aware of say, Cogmind and Brogue, which are masterpieces of design that manage to tangle people deep into them in spite of their “limited” visuals (although both have gone past “pure” 80×25 ascii exclusive modes, with rich 1bit tilesets and beautiful special effects). I believe it’s just that: 80×25 pure ASCII-only just won’t cut it. There is people that will love it, myself included, but we are not many.

Anyways, last week I decided to push things a bit and improve the entire Rainy Day roguelike branch with some of the latest JSRL developments; this meant their build stack changed from browserify to webpack, support to make native Electron packages, and the possibility of using the PIXI.js based tile-based display.

This is just a first graphical version of the game; there’s a LOT of room for improvement visually which I am aware of. I just wanted to put it out there so that more people could experience the game, as I’m aware the ASCII might be too much. If more people is interested I will continue improving the visuals.

I still have not decided if I will continue using this tileset (which was made for the original CastlevaniaRL, years ago). I already had to add several tiles to it. I’m also using the Ultimate Fantasy tileset, from Oryx as well, for the overworld.

However, in order to use the CvRL tileset, I already had to improve quite a bit over the simple GFX display provided by JSRL; I added support for multiple overlaid tilesets of different sizes, based on the developments done on Emerald Woods, and also allowed different tile sizes based on the level (so that, in the overworld, I can use smaller tiles)

Downloadable packages are already a possibility, but I decided to wait a version for that just so I can include the update checker, and fix any critical glitches since it’s the first graphics version, before shipping a downloadable and have people stuck on it.

I must also note there was a version prior to 0.0.6; fellow roguelike developer Kyzrati was kind to play the game and provide very valuable feedback; this resulted on version 0.0.5 which fixed a critical issue with audio track loading, and included some other small but important usability improvements (including a low HP alert)