The Elusive Isle
Description
A pirate fantasy rpg roguelike where you search an ever-changing island for elusive treasures. Explore a dangerous landscape, combat foes, and decipher clues to unearth the island's mysteries.
Genre Elements
Party-based RPG
Roguelike
Dungeon Crawler
Risk Management
Puzzle
The Demo
My goal for the demo is to find out if there's interest in this game, so I know to continue working on it or not. Let me know! The demo contains 1 main quest, to find The Thirsty Chalice. Through journals you find, you will learn more about its history and piece all of those clues together to figure out where it is and how to get it. The idea is that I add quests over time, and that each run has a main quest to give context to an otherwise procedural run.
Why Play?
There are a few ways that I want the game to stand out:
1. Accessible. A lot of roguelikes are overly complex, difficult, and/or unfair rng-wise. My goal is to find a better balance of those things and still have a lot of depth in certain areas. For instance, the combat system aims to be simple, but also very dynamic. Every skill has a combo effect that impacts the next skill used by the crew, creating the potential for millions of possible combos, scaling with the number of classes and skills.
2. Immersive. I want to use interesting lore, sound, and design to create an immersive tabletop-esque adventure. I want players to see the large island map and feel eager to explore, knowing there are all kinds of new things for them to encounter. Of course, content will come with time. I also want the game to have a distinct vibe to it - the show Lost and the game Myst are a couple of my favorite mystery island examples and, like those, I want the story elements to be surprising, unsettling, and have a more serious tone than you might expect from a pirate fantasy game.
3. Moddable. The simple presentation of the game allows me to create content very quickly, and its design lends itself to a modular system. The codebase for the demo isn't set up for modding yet, but if I get support for continued work on the game, I want to do a clean rework of the code with that in mind, specifically to make it easy for anyone to add their own items, journals, quests, etc…
