It's another Game Jam!
Hyperspace Roll is a soup of nouns (roguelike dice builder) for the Game Boy Advance. It was made because it’s Game Jam time again, the Game Maker’s Toolkit Game Jam specifically. This is my third game jam overall and so it’s my third Game Boy Advance game (should make games outside of Game Jams but oh well).
As is so far always the case, this game was made with my brother, Gwilym, and joining us for the second time is Sam Williams with the music. I love the music in this one as it flows between the combat and the relaxed states.
Going in we had one requirement for the game before the theme was announced, no platformers. The previous two games where both platformers and we didn’t want to make another. When the theme was announced I had no ideas at all but Gwilym had a bunch one of which being dice customisation. This instantly caught my interest and we quickly decided that deckbuilding roguelikes would be a great inspiration in making a dice building roguelike. Thematically we take from FTL with how the music was structured and of course SPACE.
Implementation wise the game is written using our Rust Game Boy Advance library, agb which this time was an absolute breeze to use. We always have to make some modifications but this time the modifications were small, some convenient functions, a bug fix, and constification of a function. All minor stuff. Overall I’m happy with where agb is right now, but there are still more hardware features to support!
The itch page for this game contains a lot of detail on how to play, but leaves out the exact way in which things are calculated apart from saying it scales with the number of dice you roll. Generally we use triangle numbers, which follows
We liked triangle numbers as getting more shoots greatly increases damage which gives some tradeoff between accepting rolls now verses waiting for a bigger combo. Rerolling is quite important to get damaging combos to get through to later levels.
Overall, I am happy with this one. I think it plays well and as a run based game it has kept my attention. Check out the source code for the game.
The results are now in, and Hyperspace Roll came 348th which is in the top 6%. This is much better than our previous games which both came in at top 20%.