Imbroglio

Imbroglio on iOS appstore

Yet another roguelike. It shares some recognisable elements with Zaga-33 and 868-HACK but I don't think it's very useful to think of it as a sequel, it has a pretty different philosophy.

It's on a 4x4 grid, as I continue to get steadily smaller (from Zaga's 9x9 and 868's 6x6). I first prototyped it at 5x5 but that was way too big. (See also Diego Cathilifaud's Amber Halls for 5x5, and I see now he's gone as low as 3x3 but I haven't checked that out yet.)

Compared to 868-HACK, individual plays are longer; it amused me to fit an epic-scale RPG leveling system into a tiny grid. But each play is self-contained, there's nothing like the streak scoring system tying multiple plays together. And there's less randomness in each game because you construct your build at the start of a game rather than assembling it from random pickups along the way. I've described this as "deck-building"; that might be slightly misleading but I think it's a useful analogy; the wall generation provides the "shuffle".

You can see I've used a different graphical style to some of my other games. Don't worry I haven't abandoned rainbow glitch pixel chaos for good, just the amount of stuff that needed to be communicated in terms of the card effects called for a higher resolution display. I'd been thinking for a while about using this kind of hand-sketched style for something and it fit here. Had fun drawing a bunch of wibbely monsters and stabby swords.

As usual, chances are a bunch of new bugs will show up now that it's released. Let me know and I'll get to work fixing them.

I hope you like it! It is always a bit anxious to release something new especially when it is hard to explain. I know for some people it will be too different and for some it will be not different enough, but it is its own thing and there you go.