tinycrawl - a rogue-y crawler based on Cairn

There’s more stuff to do, but I got to a sort of MVP on tinycrawl. It’s a text-based rogue-like where you just try to get to the 13th room of a dungeon. There are creatures, loot, and limited options. It’s still pretty hard to win and there’s still not a lot of room for skill.

There are two things about it that are a little novel:

You can make “dungeon packs” with a Claude Skill that asks a few questions about setting/tone/forgivingness before generating all the loot, creatures, and settings. The dungeon packs are saveable to your device storage.
It has an AI GM for when you’re in combat and want to try something silly, stupid, or resourceful.

The GM is user-tunable as part of dungeon pack creation, so if you want a real stickler for the rules, you can have that, and your attempts to Do Something Creative in combat will be adjudicated straight down the middle; or you can make one with theater kid energy who’s forgiving of just about any gambit.

During an encounter where you decide to Do Something Creative you get 500 characters to describe it, and the GM makes a ruling.

I extended the Cairn system a little bit to give each piece of loot a characteristic, and each monster a weakness. So if you encounter some undead thing, and have a holy item, you can use the holy item when you Do Something Creative to work against the monster’s weakness. If you encounter a hooded thief, you can try to bribe it or convince it a piece of junk is actually a treasure to distract it.

When you first visit the game, you get assigned a passphrase — something like dark-meadow-jagged-39 — and that’s it for the user account system. You can drag that passphrase around from devisaveablece to device if you want to keep a common ledge of runs.

I need to improve the directions on the dungeon pack system: They get stored on your device and can be loaded from a URL (e.g. a gist) or uploaded from disk. The game comes with several: A classical dark fantasy dungeon crawl, a sort of silly “playroom gone wrong,” an ice-age barbarian survival thing, and a haunted spaceship. If you click “Dungeons” in the bottom nav you can pick which ones to install and use.

I just added darkness system: Borrowing the idea from Shadowdark, light slowly ticks down, replenishable by torches and lanterns as you find them. As the light decreases, you’ll be more susceptible to traps, you’ll know less about your enemies, and it’ll be harder to do stuff. Using the medium itself, the visual treatment of the game dims and details leave the UI as you lose light.

Light is running low in tiny crawl

Next up? Not sure. Maybe make it less linear. Right now it is doing what I wanted to do, which is give me a simple little game to play in idle moments.