Incendian Falls

A time-traveling roguelike, where you cooperate with your past selves to overcome all odds!

Story

When a terrible beast attacked your village, your brother cast the Ultimate Stasis to freeze time for the beast... and himself. You can free him only with the power of a timeless artifact. After years of searching, you think you've located one: Volcaetus, the legendary flaming spear, in the heart of the Incendian Falls. Terrors await, but you must go forward, to have any hope of saving your brother.

Controls

• a: Place time anchor. You can later revert to this time and place.
• r: Revert to latest time anchor. Cost is 2 + Turns/4 .
• i: Interact; enter a cave, use stairs, pick up item.
• d: Defend, to reduce incoming damage by 2/3.
• c: Counter, ready a powerful counterattack when attacked. Cost 1mp up front, 2mp more if executed.
• f: Fire a fireball at a specified enemy for 23 damage. Cost 18mp.

What is Reverting?

Reverting is when you send your current player into the past. You can then see your "old self" move exactly as you did back then, and you are free to move your "new self" at the same time.

To revert, one must:

1. Place a "time anchor" via button or 'a' key. This is where/when your future self will come back to.)
2. Do some things, such as moving a few tiles away. These actions will be repeated after you've reverted.
3. Revert via button or 'r' key. You will see time rewind, and then you will see two players: your old self and your new self.
4. Do some things with your new self, and watch as your old self does the same things you did in step 2, and your new self who you now control.

If your old self fails to do the things that you did back then, it will disappear. For example, if tries to attack an enemy that is not next to it this time around, or if the enemy it would have attacked is dead now, it will disappear.

Some examples of good uses of reverting:

• If you want to run from a particularly powerful enemy, your old self can lure it away while your new self escapes.
• If you want to fight a powerful enemy, your old self can defend (via button or 'd' key) while your new self attacks. You can even have multiple "old self" players, one to defend and the rest to attack!
• If you want to survive an ambush of multiple enemies, you can make multiple "old self" players, one to fight each enemy!

About the Game

This game was made with:

• Domino, my Unity-based roguelike graphics engine.
• Chronobase, my time-traveling journaling database.
• Glift, the font extrusion utility by Solstice333, which turns .ttf symbols into 3D meshes (with outlines!).
• Music by Gravity Sound

The Journey

I started with demo project which showed basic graphics and basic rewinding. Over the course of the week, the major tasks were:

• Turning the rewinding into true time-traveling; at the end of the rewind, a new player is now spawned and the old player becomes the time clone, which does what you previously did.
• Added 8 enemy types and a final boss.
• Harvested and improved the demo's "defend" ability, and added "fireball" and "counter" abilities.
• Writing the cliff+waterfall terrain generator. Much harder than expected, and took two entire days! Had to abandon my first approach and instead use distance fields to place more landings.
• Designing (well, tracing!) all of the symbols. Major thanks to Solstice333's Glift!

Fixed Bugs

• When switching level and switching back while an enemy was charging up an attack, an internal error would lock up the program.
• A x-vs-y mixup in the square dungeon generator would cause an error when trying to put staircases on nonexistant tiles in a taller-than-wide room.
• Depending on the timing of the final battle, sometimes the victory message would not show.
• Could ascend the first level's entry staircase (it didn't crash, but did send you to a random spot on the second cliff level).
• Time clones couldn't handle navigating more than one space at a time; they would evaporate.
• The sword doubled the fireball's damage.

Post-7DRL, these were fixed, and Linux and Windows builds were added.