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    <title>hi, it&#39;s mike</title>
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      <title>tinycrawl - a rogue-y crawler based on Cairn</title>
      <link>https://mike.puddingtime.org/posts/2026-05-03-tinycrawl-a-rogue-y-crawler-based-on-cairn/</link>
      <pubDate>Sun, 03 May 2026 02:00:50 +0000</pubDate><author>mike@puddingtime.org (mike)</author>
      <guid>https://mike.puddingtime.org/posts/2026-05-03-tinycrawl-a-rogue-y-crawler-based-on-cairn/</guid>
      <description>There&amp;rsquo;s more stuff to do, but I got to a sort of MVP on tinycrawl.
It&amp;rsquo;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&amp;rsquo;s still pretty hard to win and there&amp;rsquo;s still not a lot of room for skill.</description>
      <content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>There are two things about it that are a little novel:</p>
<ol>
<li>
<p>You can make &ldquo;dungeon packs&rdquo; 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.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>It has an AI GM for when you&rsquo;re in combat and want to try something silly,  stupid, or resourceful.</p>
</li>
</ol>
<p>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 <code>Do Something Creative</code> in combat will be adjudicated straight down the middle; or you can make one with theater kid energy who&rsquo;s forgiving of just about any gambit.</p>
<p>During an encounter where you decide to <code>Do Something Creative</code> you get 500 characters to describe it, and the GM makes a ruling.</p>
<p>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 <code>Do Something Creative</code> to work against the monster&rsquo;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.</p>
<p>When you first visit the game, you get assigned a passphrase — something like <code>dark-meadow-jagged-39</code> — and that&rsquo;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.</p>
<p>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 &ldquo;playroom gone wrong,&rdquo; an ice-age barbarian survival thing, and a haunted spaceship. If you click &ldquo;Dungeons&rdquo; in the bottom nav you can pick which ones to install and use.</p>
<p>I just added darkness system: Borrowing the idea from <a href="https://www.thearcanelibrary.com/pages/shadowdark">Shadowdark</a>, light slowly ticks down, replenishable by torches and lanterns as you find them. As the light decreases, you&rsquo;ll be more susceptible to traps, you&rsquo;ll know less about your enemies, and it&rsquo;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.</p>
<p><img src="https://photos.smugmug.com/photos/i-fFbLTkL/0/MjzT7Wg33dptpMFV4z5R8XM2CrwwXBxSzjZ4jrBXx/L/i-fFbLTkL-L.jpg" alt="Light is running low in tiny crawl"></p>
<p>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.</p>
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