THE FORGED CURSE
Explore a long lost dwarven forge, plumb the depths of the surrounding caverns, and forge a path to the heart of the cursed halls of the big wizard.
Created for the Portland Indie Game Squad July Summer Slow Jam 2025
Themes: 'Party' and 'The Secret Ingredient'
Art and design by C. Andringa
Code, temporary music, and additional art and design by C. Wiggers
Music (pending) by EC
Archipelago features (pending) with credit and thanks to qwint, and Amazia for their work on other Pico-8 integrations.
Project status:
- Content of chests is completely shuffled so progress may be limited by what you find. In the short term we should be meeting the goal of setting chest contents for a 'vanilla' completable game,
- There are a variety of ways to softlock. Ideally this will be addressed in the short term as well by recovering the player's item collection state after the player selects 'RESET CART' from the menu,
- A good number of key features are still missing; bugs abound.
- Our ultimate aim and intent for this game is to release a downloadable version to be played using Archipelago multi-game randomizer. With Archipelago the key items of the game would be shuffled between the chests in multiple players' copies of the game in such a way that progress and completion of each player's game would be a cooperative effort. This version would include an HTML5 web player-based client and custom APWorld file.
Development log
- Update 7-21-20254 days ago
Comments
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Nice work creating a smooth and functional roguelike dungeon-crawler - doubly so given it sounds like the design involves randomisation! I thought it played well and I could see how progression could be implemented via gated methods, such as locked doors, barriers and traversing water. After a crack or two I think I was softlocked from moving forward, but saw enough to be really impressed. I wonder if there's a hybrid method to preserve the randomisation, whilst guaranteeing an order or conditions that the level design will have baked in to ensure players can keep on going? I hope you're able to continue with this idea!
Thank you!! Really glad you had a good experience even without any logic to it. Its really only the items that are shuffled so very little is actually random.
Ultimately, if/when we get the Archipelago integration completed, their system will shuffle the key items with logic for us and we will only have to create an outline of requirements. It would be cool if that sort of logic could be included in the on-page version, but even if I were up to the task of coding it I don't think we'll have enough tokens left for a function that complex haha.