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AsciiRush

The idea

I always loved ascii games like DwarfFortress and Cataclysm DDA, so I wanted to try make an Ascii game too, but with a twist.

This game was made with a friend of mine and we gave ourselves only a couple of weeks of development before finish it.

AsciiRush core idea was pretty simple: I wanted to build something fast paced and graphically rich with an ascii art style.

In the cave the player will even find gold and waterfalls.

The game

To make a fast paced gameplay we structured the game to be a time attack where you had to climb out from a cave, but to do so you had to first dig down to gather some materials to craft a couple of object to help you out to get up and reach the goal.

We used a mix of perlin noise and a lot of custom generation rules to create randomly generated levels that could be playable.

The graphics was limited to only ascii character and shaders to juice them up, but this didn't stopped us to add a lot of animations and little things to make the environment interesting.

The crafting

Each run spawns the player in the middle of an old mine. He need to dig down to be able to collect materials which can then be used to craft one of these items:

• A jetpack to be able to hover on empty gaps.
• A grappling hook that leave a rope behind that can be climbed.
• A pair of gloves to help him to climb vertical walls.
• A pickaxe to break block quickly.
• A radar to find quicker rare materials.

Each run require the player to at least build a grappling hook to be able to pass the spawning point, then the player has to decide if he wants to craft more tools to help him out or to start to climb up without loosing more time.