Content Warning Pixelated gore, mild language, some religious imagery, & a flickering sprite that could pose problems for people with photosensitive seizures.
Changelog
- New weapon - Chaingun
- New enemies - Nightmare Imp, Hell Knight, Arachnotron
- Minor sprite changes
- Minor UI updates
- New SFX added
- Fixed a bug that would incorrectly place decorative lights
- Fixed a bug that didn't change the player's visor color when moving to a new level
Hopefully this is the final version, but if any new bugs crop up, or the game has balancing issues, please let me know.
Thank you very much @Krystman for your Lazy Devs Academy rougelike tutorial. I had an absolute blast following along and learning from your videos. I hope you like what I've done with your engine. lol
Thank you also to Gruber @gruber_music on socials. The background music is track #9 Evil from Pico-8 Tunes Vol.1 (Update: track #6 Eyes in the Dark from Pico Tunes Vol 2). I am a terrible musician, and even worse with the Pico-8 editor. Boomguy's adventures would be awfully silent without Gruber's generosity.
BOOM is a rougelike built using the Porklike engine from the Lazy Devs Academy tutorial series with a DOOM flavor. Descend through 10 levels of a military base overrun by zombies and demons from "somewhere else." Equip yourself with armor and your shotgun, chainsaw, or if you're lucky, the BSG 9.5. Can you stop the demon invasion?
Basic Controls
Arrow keys - Move up, down, left, and right
x - Open Inventory, Confirm Selection, Confirm Shot
z - Close inventory, Cancel Selection, Open Aim for Shot, Cancel Shot
Tips
Your basic attack is still a bump into an enemy. An equipped weapon will increase your base attack (except for the Pistol, 1 DMG period), with a ranged shot dealing more damage. But beware, each weapon has it's own ammo cost needed to fire a shot. Use your shots wisely to kill enemies and position yourself.
Some enemies will also attack at range. Any enemy with a ranged attack will attack EITHER adjacent OR at their specified range. I felt like this was better for game balance, let me know if you disagree. Some enemies are also faster, moving more than one space per turn if they can. In contrast, some enemies are slow, moving only every other turn.
Keep an eye out for healing items, upgrades to your health and ammo, and other items to help in your quest to become the Boomslayer.
I hope you all enjoy the game.
Always nice to see the unlimited amount of ideas of theming Roguelikes.
Really an atmospheric fresh take/mod of Porklike.
Thank you for creating this little beauty, it's joy playing!
Thank you so much. I was inspired by the original DOOM RL, and quickly discovered that translating a shooter's mechanics to a rougelike is harder than expected, but so much fun. I'm glad you enjoyed it. :)
I spent way too long trying to beat this game. It is a punishing roguelike that will kill you if you make one mistake or don't get good drops. But in the end I managed to beat it and for my efforts I was rewarded with...
I don't know what I was expecting. Actually, I had to beat it twice because the first time I went straight for the computer and it just ended like this, and I thought "Oh, I should have tried the portal" so I had to beat it a second time to see what happens if you try to jump into the portal (like the doom slayer no doubt would) only to discover that's not an option. Pitty. A wall of text explaining that he took the fight to the demons would not have been amiss IMHO.
As a rogulike, it's fine. But as a Doom tribute it's lacking. Doom is all about the shooting. But the extremely limited ammo capacity, and relatively high rates you go through it, and the limited drops mean you don't actually end up using whatever gun you have much, if at all. In fact usually the best weapon you can have is the chainsaw (which the game is happy to remind you can't be fired) and a good understanding of how to hit the enemy before they can hit you. Heck, get the mega or praetor armor and you can often just tank the hit and heal up later.
Also, can someone explain the appeal of the chaingun to me. Because it seems like it never drops until after you have the double barreled shotgun, but does the same amount of damage for more ammo than the double barreled shotgun. In terms of why I'd ever want to use this weapon, the math ain't mathin'.
Overall, congrats on making a game. I look forward to what you'll do next.
@joealarson I appreciate your feedback. I do feel the ending is a bit underwhelming, but the token limit is my enemy in this case, and there isn't room for more. As far as the gameplay goes, I feel like you are looking for a different game. BOOM was never intended to replicate DOOM, only pay homage. By it's very nature, a turn-based rougelike like BOOM does require you to know how to hit the enemy before they hit you. That's the challenge. Letting the player shoot their way through the game easily wouldn't be much of a challenge. And to address the Chaingun, you're right, it's pretty uselss as it's the only weapon that applies Weakened to an enemy, and therefore only useful against tougher mobs. I'll probably rebalance that.
@Tw1zTeD616 My thought about rebalancing the chaingun would be to have it use all available ammo until the enemy is dead. However, it would also have to do 2 damage per ammo or something or you're gonna run out of ammo on the first imp you shoot.
I think the idea of a shooter roguelike would be possible, but I agree with you that the nature of this game as-is maybe doesn't lend to that. But that's fixable, maybe with a higher concentration of enemies to mow down. I don't think I've seen one of the pork-likes with a whole room full of low tier mooks to mow down. that would be pretty novel. Maybe enemy density could be tied to enemy level. So imps might fill up a room, but put a baron in a room and there'll only be enough enemy points to have a few low tier enemies in there with them.
Another thing that disappointed me about this game is Doomguy could always carry all the weapons and switch between them at will. This enabled considerable strategy about which weapon you used against which enemy. But in this game you had to carry one, maybe 2 weapons at a time to save room for the shared inventory space of everything else. This is why the tazer is kind of worthless too.
You talked about running against the token limit. There's lots of ways and places to save token space. That wall of text at the beginning could probably be halved to make room for some ending text. Weapons that no one uses might as well be taken out and save the space. Running against the token limit doesn't mean you can't add anything new. It just means you need to trim some fat.
I'm not trying to be critical of you. I'm a teacher at heart so it's in my nature to look at things with a critical eye. Plus I'm a fan of Doom so I'd love a little more Rip and Tear in this Rip and Tear roguelike. You've done good stuff, though, so I'm sure you can do it.
@joealarson Those are all great ideas. You've definitely given me some things to mull over. The Chaingun should pretty easy to fix in that manner, and you're 100% right about the Tazer. It was a dumb idea because I felt I didn't have enough rare items. Getting rid of it might give me the tokens to do the call for a text ending (length of the text doesn't really matter the way it's setup.) As for the other gameplay stuff, that is going to take me a bit more work. Maybe restructuring into a sequel. BOOM - Heck on Earth?
Thank you so much for your feedback. I'm sorry if my previous post came off a bit strong. It isn't an excuse, but this week hasn't been the greatest and I felt a little hurt. This is only my 3rd game ever, after 30 years of dreaming about making games. I had never touched LUA or Pico-8 before a year ago, and I was pretty proud of how this one turned out. Thank you for the encouragement, and keep an eye out for a new version.
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