Mosaic, a roguelike about creativity
March 17th, 2013
I present to you, Mosaic:
- Windows Download
- OSX Download
- Linux 64-bit Download
- Linux 32-bit Download
- Module file download (to be added to T-Engine 1.04 separately)
Mosaic is a roguelike in which your movements change the map, laying down colourful mosaic tiles wherever you go, and producing dynamic music based on your play. If you trace out an outline then it fills in the whole area with tiles. This is the only way to kill enemies. It’s also rather pretty!
Pretty colours!
Some notable features of the game:
- 4-way movement is the only input
- Chained sequences of moves can trigger special moves
- 1HP system, but actually not easy to die unless playing very sloppily
- Map altering as you play
- Procedural music generated based on the map layout and tile positions
- Enemies all have individual movement patterns, with some being more threatening than others
Try it out! Have fun! This is honestly the best thing I’ve ever made (IMHO :P)
Edit: And here’s a Youtube video showing some gameplay and the music – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIcCF6vNq6s
Edit2: And UberHunter has covered it on the start of his epic journey to Let’s Play all 7DRLs: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-CV45LrqJ4
@Konstantin ‘Xecutor’ Stupnik
A rather cool thing I’ve found is that the game sounds different based on how you play it. The music plays based on which bits of the map you fill in, but some rows play less often than others. How you go about filling in the map will alter how the music sounds. I noticed whilst watching others play that it sounded completely different to how I was used to hearing it.
Though if you’re seriously not hearing many sounds even when the map is largely filled in then there may be some specific issue with how it runs on your computer :-/
@SRD
The corner combo doesn’t activate when it would result in it stretching off the screen, as they’re fairly useless then and they can annoyingly interrupt you from doing 4-step leaps. I may fiddle with this to make them more permissive though.
Enemies never interrupt combos – or they shouldn’t anyway. Combos are only interrupted by bumping into enemies or creating slate on top of void. It could be you’re accidentally bumping into the enemies or bumping into the empty squares they make.
The Rs are being a bit buggy sometimes, I’ll get them sorted soon!
Ouch on the memory leak! I’ll have to speak to DarkGod about that, as it’s kinda out of my control. It’s almost certainly to do with loading so many sounds – it has to load a lot of files into RAM to get them playing smoothly together. I’ve got some ideas for optimising a few things though.
As for whether it’s a roguelike or not, it very deliberately messes about with the definition. I love making games that that defy the traditional definitions :)
Thanks for all the feedback!
Very inventive game. Rather fun.
I’m a little bit confused about some of the rules. The corner movement combo (>>^^) often fails to activate, for instance when I’m close to the edge, or sometimes when the game just seems to think I’m out of step. It also seems to be a bit random whether an attack from an enemy “interrupts” a movement combo or not… and the ‘R’s sometimes unpaint squares that they haven’t moved over? There’s a pretty nasty memory leak – I managed to get up to 1GB of memory consumption when I played the same level for too long without dying or winning.
Good work, anyway. Let’s hope next year’s is more like this than last year’s :D
(Are you absolutely sure it’s a rougelike? Seems to me there are too many colours other than red ;)
I think that main question that is bothering everyone – where did you bought that stuff? :)
For some reason the game doesn’t sound like in video.
There are instruments sounds, but they are very rare and do not repeat.
I made it to level 7, so I know what to do to win, but still don’t know what to do to make music :)
Good stuff… Kinda like a turn based Qix… with a hitchcock theme!
The game is quite interesting. Great job tying the music player in with the actual mosaic.
Time for some new ink! Congratulations!
But is it a roguelike? :-)