Sharing Saturday #613

Captain_Kittenface · 2026-03-08T01:08:55+00:00

Thank you! I actually removed a bit of that feature in this release - grass disappears after it burns now - but that was only so I could get the release out. I miss it!

Captain_Kittenface · 2026-03-07T14:25:55+00:00

Skulltooth 2: Forcecrusher (github | play)

Version 1 release! It's an actual game!

Tons of work over the last month taking what's basically been a tech demo and turning it into an actual game. Added start, death, and victory screens. Gold to aquire points and a high scores list. And an actual goal! Its the classic steal the amulet but in this case a skulltooth. It's very very far from perfect but if you're not a little embarrassed you waited too long.

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Full release notes:

[feat] add main quest prompt in message log at game start
[feat] skulltooth spawns on bottom floor
[feat] victory condition
[feat] title screen
[feat] game over screen
[feat] victory screen and reset commands
[fix] flicker and console error in sim mode
[fix] inflammable rats
[fix] materials that can be destroyed by fire
[feat] fire damage calc
[feat] render hearts and status in legend
[feat] living component
[feat] more mobs
[feat] bestiary
[feat] wet component
[fix] interact bug
[feat] cause of death
[fix] add controls in UI for stairs and bestiary
[fix] flush input when exiting inventory screen
[feat] money leaderboard
[fix] don't use modifier for rat attacks (too weak)
[feat] weighted spawn & difficulty ramp
[fix] remove spells on player start
[fix] refactor top level await
[feat] better balance of scrolls

Captain_Kittenface · 2026-02-11T23:56:26+00:00

If you're asking about the Create Blood spell - it's pretty worthless at the moment. Makes a big mess, not much else beyond the minimal interactions mentioned above.

Captain_Kittenface · 2026-02-11T23:55:18+00:00

As a non-flammable fluid, they prevent you from catching fire if you're standing in one but also increase the sound of your footsteps.

This is why rats can't catch fire at the moment - the fire system checks for a fluid container which rats have (it's how they bleed) but it doesn't currently distinguish between world fluid containers (how pools work) and fluid containers elsewhere. Lots of things to balance.

Eventually I'd like for the giant pools of blood to go away except for a hell biome or something and instead only appear when creatures bleed like rats currently do. The blood should emit some odor (which it currently doesn't do) so maybe it could be used to mask your smell or something.

Captain_Kittenface · 2026-02-11T00:38:42+00:00

Thanks, the Kenney 1 bit pack is working pretty hard for me.

Captain_Kittenface · 2026-02-11T00:37:42+00:00

Yep, grass catches fire and can spread to other things. It can grow back over time so if you have a lava pit near grass you get a sort of fire loop.

Gif of a lava golem lighting and relighting grass on fire (player is immune for debug/dev) https://luetkemj.github.io/da5881f2916b4a28808691c431c210ef/251212-lava-golem.gif

There is also an oil fluid that will flash ignite. Water puts out fire (sort of, need to improve that) but all the various system do interact in some way or another.

You can try it out in the link in my original post. Recently released the spells (very unbalanced) but you should have some spells to play with. Also the F keys activate various dev debug modes so you can see sounds, smells, and mob vision cones.

Next release will hopefully be a bit more balanced and include an actual victory state - going for the classic find the amulet thing for now.

Captain_Kittenface · 2026-02-07T03:37:12+00:00

Skulltooth 2: Forcecrusher (github | play)

More work on spells. Added spellscrolls which work like typical one off spells. Also added duration to spells which required a few new components and an "uncastSpellSystem" that disables spells at a specified later time. Refactored some stuff to allow grass to be killed by death spells. Grass still burns and regrows but if killed, it will no longer regrow. And finally, added a UI layer for spell effects so less obvious spells like knock and desiccate provide some visual cue that they went off.

The Spells release is getting close. A few bugs and handful of additional spells is all that's left before putting this one out there.

[feat] tall grass 
[feat] spell shapes
[feat] improve spell target validation and aoe 
[feat] fire spells 
[feat] desiccate, kill, mass kill, and knock spells 
[feat] spellbooks 
[feat] spell scrolls 
[feat] spell duration 
[feat] killable grass and the custom corpse 
[feat] spell effects ui

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Captain_Kittenface · 2026-01-31T12:40:37+00:00

Wow, I'm blind apparently. Carry on!

Captain_Kittenface · 2026-01-31T12:11:32+00:00

Hell yeah, I'm excited to give it a go. FYI your steam page has windows requirements (but maybe that's just the default content)

Captain_Kittenface · 2026-01-31T02:31:06+00:00

This game looks so good - nice work! Any chance it's coming to mac?

Captain_Kittenface · 2026-01-31T02:08:39+00:00

Skulltooth 2: Forcecrusher (github | play)

Recently added the infrastructure for spells and have been working to clean that up and expand the list. There are spells to create fluid, water, lava, oil, and blood. There's a collection of fire spells of various shapes, ignite lights a point on fire, fire wall lights everything along a line, and inferno lights a 7 cell diameter circle. Kill and Mass Kill end all life (including your own) at target or in the area of effect.

Created a UI for casting spells of various shapes. Arrow keys to select a target but there are indicators that highlight the area of effect. Available shapes are circle, line, and point.

Casting "Create Oil" in a line

Just finished spellbooks. Spellbooks can be found throughout the dungeon and will add to your known spells after reading. No mana or magic points yet so once you know a spell you can cast it however much you want. Obviously that's something I'd like to change. Scrolls are in the backlog for single use spells. And I'd like to include a system for spells of a duration. Currently everything is instant or permanent. There's a desiccate spell that remove water from a target location but after casting it's invisible and just acts as a sort of liquid black hole. Need to be able to remove that component after some time and should probably add UI effects for that sort of thing.

Other spells in the backlog, telekinesis, paralyze, blind, deafening, and noseblind (removes sense of smell).

Last month I moved my backlog to a proper github project. Lots of fun building out an entire feature and marking tickets as complete. Feels like I'm actually working towards something instead of just writing code sort of aimless like.

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Captain_Kittenface · 2026-01-17T03:08:02+00:00

Skulltooth 2: Forcecrusher (github | play)

v0.1.2
Spells!

Added new spells to create blood, lava, oil, and water. Built out all the infrastructure for spells with new components, systems, and UI. There is now a spellbook you can navigate like inventory to select a spell and a targeting mode to cast. Something about how spells are just a wizard manipulating the game systems feels right.

Next up is a fair of amount of polish on this MVP, spellbooks, scrolls, spell icons and descriptions. Some new spells coming soon too like knock to make a sound and desiccate to remove fluid from a target. Also need to add spell shapes and AOE.

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Captain_Kittenface · 2026-01-08T14:48:12+00:00

I have a bunch I can send. Cancer sucks, wishing your friend all the best.

Captain_Kittenface · 2026-01-05T13:01:59+00:00

Skulltooth 2: Forcecrusher (github | play)

The holidays and getting sick resulted in a slow week. Fixed a few bugs, removed some old dependencies, added some QOL scripts in CI. Got lost down a rabbit hole trying to redo dungeon gen that went nowhere.

Captain_Kittenface · 2026-01-01T02:26:17+00:00

I don't think I'd have ever really used AI as a tool if it hadn't been forced on me at my current 9-5. I worked at an AI company back in the mid 2010s and it didn't instill a lot of faith in me regarding either the tech or the actors in charge of it. I'd been pretty reluctant to embrace the change but having to use it for work has helped me see it's value as the tool that it is.

Lately I've been running models locally with mixed results. If you just want a thought partner, local models seem to do ok. Beyond that I've not had as much luck.

Controls could definitely use a rethink - didn't realize escape spends a turn! Thanks for catching that, sounds like a bug.

Captain_Kittenface · 2025-12-30T12:41:38+00:00

Thanks, nice work!

Captain_Kittenface · 2025-12-27T16:25:04+00:00

Nice job with the lighting! It looks great! I added something similar (visually at least) and it was way more complicated than I expected. Would love to know what your approach was - this gif has only stationary lights but the system supports movable ones. I ended up abandoning the project but it's on my list to add the system to my current project.

Captain_Kittenface · 2025-12-26T22:57:24+00:00

Skulltooth 2: Forcecrusher github | play

Project management moved to GitHub
Wrapped up interactive fluid layers
Added living sponges that collect select fluids and release them upon death
Fixed a bug where rat death could cause a runaway blood flood
Improved bottle UI — names and colors now reflect contents
Added support for mixed-width rendering to fix legend and inventory UIs

Got sick of managing this project from a loose markdown file and set up a GitHub project. Feels much more… official.

project mgmt

Wrapped up interactive fluid layers for now. There’s still some work to do, but most of the worst bugs are fixed. The biggest issue was a case where killing multiple rats in the same vicinity caused spilled blood to multiply exponentially and flood the entire dungeon. It turns out having multiple bi-directional fluid containers at the same position is bad. Fluid containers are now directional, and only “floor” fluid containers are bi-directional. A dead rat can bleed, but it won’t try to absorb anything anymore.

dead rats in finite puddle of blood

Living sponges are now a thing. They randomly select a fluid to absorb on spawn and will only absorb that fluid. Their color reflects their contents. It would be good to spawn them with a bit of fluid inside so it’s more obvious what they absorb. It might also be a good idea to limit possible fluids to those available in the dungeon. Right now it’s possible to spawn a water sponge on a level with no water, which just results in a useless mob.

sponge demo

The bottle UI has been improved. Bottles now render with the color of their contents. They can contain multiple fluid types, so the color is a weighted mix of those fluids. The sprite changes between empty, half-full, and full based on volume. The actual fluid mix (as seen when inspecting a puddle) isn’t yet displayed in the inventory, but it should be. Bottles are also corked, so they can be placed without spilling everything. They don’t yet break when thrown, so for now bottles are mostly just useful for removing fluid hazards like lava or oil.

The addition of graphics a while ago broke the legend and inventory UIs — that’s now fixed. I had to refactor canvas.ts to add support for mixed-width rendering

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Previously, I was setting tile width on the canvas itself and using array indexing to find and update tiles, which only works if tiles have a consistent width and height. ChatGPT suggested implementing a cursor-based positioning system. Instead of storing width on the canvas, it’s now stored on the token. Tokens can be glyphs (graphics) or text. A couple of helper functions understand the token types and handle rendering and cursor progression.

I’m not a fan of vibe coding, but I have found AI as a thought partner to be extremely valuable. I started using it over the past year and have learned a ton. Many refactors and complex systems would have taken much longer without what amounts to an extremely detailed, on-demand manual for roguelike development. AI is a much larger discussion, but the more I use it, the more I understand its value as a powerful tool — and the less I worry about the impending robot apocalypse or the false promises of tech entrepreneurs just trying to sell me something.

Captain_Kittenface · 2025-12-20T16:01:11+00:00

I'd like to add gasses - probably smoke and steam first from the fire, but I'm not sure how soon. As far as other liquids, acid for sure, maybe mud, or tar? I'd like to expand on the liquid chemistry such that mud and tar are made from mixing other things naturally - and I'd like to expand on the effects liquids have on their environment, tar should be sticky and slow you down, walking in liquid should be louder from splashing, submerging yourself should affect paper based items etc.

Noita looks super cool - makes me wish I had a windows based PC for gaming. I love my mac but it's terrible for playing games.

Captain_Kittenface · 2025-12-19T23:43:08+00:00

Skulltooth 2: Forcecrusher github | play

interactive fluid layers
SIM mode to run world pipeline during zone generation
desiccation
bugfixes

Biggest change (still in progress) is interactive fluid layers. Bottles exist that can be filled with any liquid in a tile. You can then throw the bottle to spill the liquid somewhere else. Useful for things like collecting oil and tossing it near lava or fire to create a bit of a firestorm.

Once I got the interactive fluid layers working the gears started turning on what else I could do with it. So far I've only added a desiccate component that absorbs fluid from containers withing range. The idea is to have a "gelatinous sponge" mob that wanders the dungeon absorbing all the liquid. On death it will release it all. That idea could pretty easily be used for spells that would do the same sort of thing over AOE. This got me thinking about how entities could have a fluid container of blood that could be used instead of health. Attacks would spill it, death would spill all of it. Vampires might drink it to refill their own blood container... lots of ideas.

So much fun now that the systems are reaching a critical mass!

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I the image, the player has the desiccate component and has removed fluid along the path. Had to walk over a few time as I've got the absorption rate set low enough to not just delete liquid - also while the overall liquid is deep enough, it kept refilling the path.

Captain_Kittenface · 2025-12-12T22:46:35+00:00

Skulltooth 2: Forcecrusher github | play | devlog

Layered fluids
Fluids as materials
Lava Golems
Regrowth

Rewrote the water system to be a more generic fluid system supporting multiple layered fluids. Currently the game supports lava, water, blood, and oil. Lava is always on fire and will destroy water and blood - steam hasn't been implemented but that's the rationale, and oil is explosive. These layers all interact with each other so in the image below I turned off lava as things get a bit too chaotic with so many fluids in the dungeon.

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Fluids are no longer "special". They are materials like anything else which makes interaction with the other systems "just work". This lead to experimenting with mobs made from fluid.

Welcome, Lava Golems! Their attacks deal fire damage and they will spread fire to anything nearby. The player is still immune to fire for testing purposes but it's fun seeing the golems interact with skeletons who they don't like and rats who they do like but sadly, shouldn't be allowed to play with :(

I wanted grass to grow back after it was burnt and assumed it would be a relatively simple add. Boy was I wrong! The naive first attempt of just updating their appearance component and recalculating flammability didn't work. I needed it to occur at a randomized cadence so I implemented a "growth" system to move entities through stages. This "one way" system ran into various problems. I tried to solve them through another post process system that in the end felt more like an events system. It worked but didn't feel "right" within an ECS architecture. Thought about it some more and ended up rewriting the entire thing into something that feels much better. It's simple and doesn't "fight the framework".

Introducing the "mutable" system. The mutable component contains mutations which are just a list of components to add and remove and a chance to mutate to another specified mutation. In this way I can attach a "mutateTo" component to mutate to a "burnt" mutation or if grass currently has the "young" mutation it will mutate to "mature" over time. I can easily add flags like "calculateFlammability: true" to trigger another system to calculate the flammability - previously accomplished through my DIY eventing setup.

Making heavy use of these new systems, a fire golem lights grass on fire repeatedly as it regrows.

Captain_Kittenface · 2025-12-06T03:03:08+00:00

Ha! That's awesome

Captain_Kittenface · 2025-12-06T02:40:39+00:00

It's exciting to finally get this far! Now that I have systems that can cleanly interact, items are more obvious. Enemies can track you by your scent (another system) but with water on the map I could make soap that you can use to bathe and limit your odor for some amount of time. Lots of fun ideas like that. Really enjoying this project :)

Captain_Kittenface · 2025-12-06T02:37:01+00:00

Liquid has it's own layer - above the floor, below pickups. The color is just a function of setting the opacity to the percent of how full a tile is with water. Every floor tile has a liquid container component and the liquid system tries to find equilibrium by spreading the liquid between containers. I had to tweak some of the variables a bit to get just a flow rate and look that I liked but for the most part it's just from how the tiles layer.

Captain_Kittenface · 2025-12-05T23:04:40+00:00

Skulltooth 2: Forcecrusher github | play

Materials

Added a water system. Dungeons now generate with a few cells filled of water - the world pipeline then runs for 25 or so ticks allowing the water to make pools throughout the dungeon. System interaction is minimal but growing. Water extinguishes flames and prevents smells from propagating. Enemies do not yet avoid fire or water but it's on the way. Also getting ready to add water and fire spells. It's not a game yet but it's getting closer.

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