I'm trying to make E/W variants that I will then animate with a walk, but the single pixel legs are making it tough and making the body on the right 'thicker' makes it look blocky or weird, any tips?
I know its not great I'm only just starting out.
Sent here from Roguelike because my game doesn't strictly adhere to the classic defs.
So I embarked on this first time solo dev thing because I couldn't find the game I really wanted - something RL (ofc) but narrative heavy and with some unusual mechanics. Got distracted by the likes of BoI and Balatro along the way, par for the course haha.
So in Remember to Die its essentially a dice combat game with RPG elements but the kicker is that each fight gives the option for a fragment of memory across a full lifetime. Every fragment you collect costs you three years. Every chapter transition costs ten. Run out before the end(s?) and you don't die in combat, you just quietly shuffle off this mortal coil. The way most lives end really.
I wanted the threat to feel different from typical roguelike attrition. Health and gold are legible and gameable. Time (in the scale of a full life) is something people don't usually think of as a resource until they're out of it.
The memory system ties into this: after each battle you pick a fragment which could be TRUE or FALSE (you have to piece this together yourself), and those choices shape your core memories and what buffs or costs they carry. Pure memories, corrupt ones, tainted ones, each has a different mechanical identity.
Built in Godot, 32 dice, 112 mementos, over a billion possible run combinations. Took 18 months solo.
I'd genuinely like to know: does "time as the primary resource" land as a design idea to people who play a lot of this genre? Or does it feel gimmicky?
Find it on Steam if you wan or you can see some of the levels/dice/items/enemies on the website.
The central mechanic is memory collection. After each battle you pick a fragment (true or false, you have to piece that together) and those build into core memories that carry buffs, costs, or both. This came to me while (somewhat depresingly) reflecting on my life and the memories I had changed to deal with events, sometimes they were painted rosey, other times darkened for more weight, but it was a realisation that neither was right or wrong, just my story.
The design question I kept coming back to while making it was should the true/false split have a clean mechanical payoff? Should truth always reward and lies always punish? That would be legible (possibly more satisfying), but also probably what players would expect. So I landed on ambiguity instead, there's no reliable moral arithmetic, and that was a very deliberate choice.
The counter argument I guess is that clear consequences would teach players to actually engage with the choice rather than just optimise it, and I did take that seriously but ultimately rejected. My reasoning was that the ambiguity says something more honest about how memory actually works: the false version of something isn't always worse for you than the true one.
Curious whether this reads as meaningful design or a missed opportunity to make the choice matter more clearly. I'd genuinely rather hear the pushback first before I explain the thinking further.
Intentionally omitting the name of the game and links as per the self-promotion rules here - genuinely curious about your thoughts.