Enigmata: Cursed Dungeon
Traverse the dungeon, find the ring, and regain your humanity.
Enigmata: Cursed Dungeon is a 1-bit turn-based roguelike dungeon crawler inspired by Shiren the Wanderer for Playdate.
The game is currently in early access and under active development!
Defeat enemies, use items, level up, and try to survive. Die and try again. The dungeon is always changing..
Objective
Survive! Reach the 6th floor and pick up the Ring.
Controls
Playdate console and controllers:
- Move: D-pad
- Attack: A
- Open Menu: B
- Change Facing Direction: B (hold) + D-pad
- Toggle sound effects: Playdate Menu
Keyboard:
- Move: Arrow keys / WASD
- Attack: X / J
- Open menu: Z / K
- Change facing direction: Z (hold) + Arrow keys / K (hold) + WASD
- Toggle sound effects: P or ESC
Support
Enigmata: Cursed Dungeon is free while in early access (maybe forever? I'm not sure yet). If you like the game, consider donating to support it. I've been writing a book on how to make games for Playdate, so checking that out would be a big help too!
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Scope & Roadmap
In early access and under active development! Expect everything to be unbalanced.
Latest release: v0.5.
My goal with Enigmata: Cursed Dungeon is to make a small, accessible, polished roguelike for Playdate and other platforms. I'm using it as a project to learn the C programming language as well. I am planning to make each run 10-15 minutes long, likely with 10 floors to reach the goal.
What's planned (subject to change!):
- equipment
- traps
- more spells
- more beans
- NPCs, shopkeeper, currency
- polish, settings, gameplay stats
- game balancing
Beyond: ports to other platforms (PC, PSP, and GBA of particular interest), open sourcing the game
View the changelog from past releases:
- v0.5 - sfx setting
- v0.4 - web build
- v0.3 - spells (fire, ice, curse)
- v0.2 - stamina and super bean
- v0.1 - initial release
Credits
- Made by Brett Chalupa
- Coded with C and the Playdate SDK
- Sprites by Kenney (1-Bit Pack, Creative Commons CC0 license)
- Sound effects made with Jsfxr Pro
- Font used is Asheville Sans, made by Panic and included in the Playdate SDK, available for use under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license
Download
Click download now to get access to the following files:
Development log
- v0.5 Changelog - Toggle SFX & Small Tweaks8 days ago
- v0.4 Changelog - Web Build20 days ago
- v0.3 Changelog - Spell Scrolls20 days ago
- v0.2 Changelog - Stamina & Super Bean22 days ago
- Introducing Enigmata: Cursed Dungeon, a roguelike for Playdate23 days ago
Comments
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I just tried the web build. Promising start! I was confused about the description of the ice spell, it wasn't clear that an ice attack hit every square. Wasn't sure if ice did something else, like create walls around you, or increase your defense, or something. On that note, would be nice to see spells differentiated more. I assume that's in the works. different tilesets for different areas is a must. I never encountered the curse spell in my playthrough.
After basic mechanics worked out, looking forward to more complex gameplay that will allow for more strategy, i.e. more choice over how to level up the character to differentiate different runs. (i.e. something like the Shape That Waits stat allocation, or Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup with species and class).
DRL, as a fast-based roguelike, comes readily to mind when thinking about the playdate's style of game. Looking forward to seeing that influence here, maybe?
Thanks for playing and the feedback! I’ll work on refining. I haven’t played DRL but am aware of it, I’ll do some research.
I got the ring! It was pretty fun for what it is (a very early build.)
The biggest issue I found was that tapping B gives you the menu and holding B changes your facing, but tapping B requires a very quick tap and could be hard to do. If it does menu vs facing, it should not be based on how long you hold it, but instead if you press the dpad or not; that would fix this easily.
I noticed that if an enemy is walking from being diagonal from me to being orthogonal from me, I cannot attack them: if I attack where they are, they move first and then I attack where they were; if I attack where they are going, my attack goes first :(
A lot of games like this make attacks happen automatically when you walk into them. You could do that to free up the A button for some other feature. That would make attacking diagonally difficult, but moving diagonally is already difficult so maybe there should be some other solution for diagonalness?
Going down the stairs was jarring because it just happens automatically and instantly. Perhaps standing on stairs should just add an option to your menu to activate them?
Anyways, I really liked it and I'm excited to see what you add next!
Thanks so much for playing the game and sharing the thoughtful and detailed feedback! I’ll work on making some revisions to improve the control scheme and dig into what could be going on with the combat ordering.
I started with combat being bump-based, but I intentionally made it so that you can choose to attack. This is important in the gameplay as it allows you to pass a turn without moving, which is a key strategy to surviving and luring enemies.
Oh yeah, I was using the attack to pass a round so the enemies could come to me. I didn't think that was on purpose, but now that you say it, it make sense that since you want a pass button that you might as well use it as an attack button as well. Looking forward to more