Dungeon Of Rogule is a mashup of everyone's favorite daily word guessing game and a roguelike. When I thought of this I didn't have much of a concept beyond "Wordle is played in a grid, and so are roguelikes" but I went and ran with it.

Controls

On Desktop: You can just type in Wordle mode (or click the keys if you really want). In roguelike mode use WASD to navigate and attack adjacent enemies, press H to use a Heal Spell (I think you can also click that area).

On Mobile: Use the keyboard as you normally word in Wordle mode. In roguelike mode swipe to move around or attack enemies, and tap the healing spell area to use one. Note that the mobile controls are experimental and might behave weirdly.

Word Guessing

Gameplay is simple. First you guess a word, as you do. Once you guess a valid word, the game will swap over to roguelike mode.

Guessing the correct word is the only way to win. Rules are the same as Wordle, so green means you've positioned correctly, orange means it's in the word but in the wrong position, and gray means it's not in the word.

Unlike Wordle you can play as many times as you want every day.

Roguelike

The roguelike portion is an 868-HACK-like, so you can only move around and attack adjacent enemies. You also have three Heal Spells that you can use to heal yourself at any time.

Correctly guessed letters yield a treasure, which is usually just health but can be stat raising items. Missed guesses will cause a monster that looks like that letter to spawn. You have to defeat all of the monsters in order to get back to the word guessing portion.

Enemies don't move (Desktop Dungeons style; as you can see I have attempted to steal ideas from as many games as possible) so you have to engage with them. Enemies will always attack you back.

There's experience and leveling and stats and some amount of resource management. It's also very possible that it's not well balanced (for instance if you make a very bad guess) and sometimes you will just lose very badly. Also if you lose in roguelike mode you won't ever know what the word was, which is kind of sad.

Other Things

As this is a jam game, it has limited testing. I tested it on Safari and Firefox on my Macbook Air and in Safari on my iPhone, so there might be weird issues on other browser/OS combos. Mobile support is pretty rudimentary and might be a little finicky. If you find any really bad bugs let me know and I'll try to fix them!

Thanks for reading, let me know what you think!

StatusReleased
PlatformsHTML5
Rating
Rated 4.0 out of 5 stars
(2 total ratings)
AuthorMantis-Eye Labs
GenreRole Playing
TagsSeven Day Roguelike Challenge, Roguelike, Word game

Comments

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(I played your game for judging. But the reviews were lost => here’s what I remember of mine. )

Nice original entry. UI is readable and visually pleasing. I really liked the idea of two modes, with my actions in one having consequences in the other. On the other hand, the gameplay fell short in my opinion:

  1. The game is easier and easier the more letters I found. The only real time I can die is after a couple of tries if I fail to find enough right letters. If I managed to survive the beginning, then it is impossible to die.
  2. There is no choice apart from the Wordle gameplay. Notably, the dungeon mode is very easy to analyse and find the optimal play.

=> What if the spawning was inverted? The more found letters, the more monsters. But keeping the 6 tries limit. The difficulty would increase instead of decreasing and this could bring some interesting choices. => Another idea: having consumables that can be used in both mode. For example: a hint (Wordle) or healing (dungeon) My intent here is again to add interesting choices: When to use it? A hint is always hepful but maybe I will need it later to heal.

That are only some ideas. I hope this review is constructive and that it will be useful to you :)

(+1)

This is a cool addition to the Wordle trend. It’s clever how the strength of the guess informs the difficulty of the roguelike portion.

I would like some more gameplay to the roguelike part: right now can either kill the enemies or not (I think?). Maybe the possibility to skip enemies by going to the exit, however you must include enemies you don’t kill in your guesses – meaning your next guess will also be wrong. Or something?

Nice job in any case!

(+1)

very cool concept, I like that the game indirectly forcing me to use the correct letters to guess since it will provide heals with correct letters and monsters with wrong letters. However I would want to see the monster stats before the fight and other buffs other than heal as well. Also the only option to fight all in roguelike mode, and not much decision can be made from the player other than guessing the letters.

(2 edits) (+2)

Thanks! There are buffs for your attack power (which is hidden from you because I didn't know where to display it) and max HP but they're pretty rare and don't have a major impact (since leveling also raises them). Health just became the most important currency so I hyper focused  on it (which is also why the heal spells exist).

The UI could definitely use some work, and I agree it's a pain to not know anything about monsters before you attack. I also kind of struggled with the transition from roguelike back to wordle, and killing every enemy was the best I could come up with. The main problem is I couldn't think of a way to have the roguelike portion influence the wordle portion because I basically just copied wordle, which doesn't require any outside influence since it's already a fully functional game.

A decent iteration would be to not straight up rip off worlde and come up with something that would benefit from some action in roguelike mode, but that's a lot of work! In the current version something like having the maze have an exit as an alternate to killing every enemy would probably be satisfying enough?

(+1)

perhaps you can provide a hint after killing an enemy or remove a random wrong letter? of course the better bonus will be on a harder path, so player can choose to fight easy or hard boss depend on their current hp - as long as they got to the end point they can turn back to guess word mode, I feel like bonus should be dropped from monster instead of lying around.