Hey everyone! How's your Post-Ludum Dare been going? We decided since this was our first game project we got somewhat off the ground to continue iterating upon it and add some features many of which were suggested by people from this community!

Cacophony is a roguelike dungeon crawler and you can find it here

Our First Update

Content / Features

Boss Fight #1

Are you ready to challenge the Skeleton King?

The first boss fight is something I really wanted to get done in the Ludum Dare period of the game but unfortunately did not have enough time to do so.

But now he has been added and he has some challenging mechanics as well as our first dive into making a small “cinematic” for revealing him. This part of the update was a ton of fun to work on.

Scaling Difficulty

Previously, you could delve into the depths of our dungeon with little to no increase in challenge. In fact, the game would seemingly get easier as you would be acquiring gear while the monsters power level remained static.

This has now changed.

We have made it so that as you go deeper into our infinite dungeon the monsters will become more powerful until eventually you succumb to death. This mechanic will be the subject of ongoing iteration and balancing for the rest of Cacophony’s development.

Mini-map

We have also added a mini-map feature to the game! This is pretty self explanatory. The mini-map will be revealed as you explore it and marks points of interest you have discovered as well as your current location.

In the future we plan to make the map expandable for a more detailed view and we will continue to upgrade the visual design of it.

In this screenshot you can also see we’ve added an indicator for what floor you’re currently on! Let us know how far into the dungeon you can get! The current record is floor 63, though this was before the scaling difficulty.

QoL and General Improvements

Animations and Player Feedback

We’ve now added rotation animations to every sprite in our game. This should help to make the game feel more alive and visually polished. You can also see when a character takes damage they flash red for a brief moment to indicate this is happening.

Animations and feedback are another sections of the game where we will be continuously working to improve the look and feel of Cacophony.

Selling / Removing Items

You can now sell items at shops or destroy items from your inventory. When selling items you will receive 50% of the items purchase price as gold.

Future iteration for this feature will include better visual design, as well as confirmation messages so you don’t accidentally sell anything you planned on keeping.

Our Own Item Sprites

We’ve added our own unique item sprites now as well. Previously the Item sprites were one of the few assets that we did not create ourselves and now we have removed everything that was not made by us with the exception of the gold coin icon.

Bug Fixes

• Lots of path-finding bug fixes included. Enemies can now round corners, and will get stuck less often

• Enemies will no longer attempt to occupy the same tile as another enemy

• Map changing now works better and more smoothly, including transitions from randomly generated maps to hand-drawn maps.

• Fixed Armor/Weapons not applying stats properly in some cases

• Shops now refresh their stock every time a new map is generated

Conclusion

That’s about what we have been working on the past two weeks! It feels like a lot has been added or generally made better for Cacophony during this time and we’re still having a ton of fun working on this project. Up next we will decide what direction to take v.03 and where Cacophony will go in the future!

Thank you for playing Cacophony and for reading this. A lot of these changes were inspired by feedback given to use here on the Ludum Dare site so thank you to everyone who took the time to contribute and play our game.

Play Cacophony in browser now!