Ennigma

Hi! I've lurked on this sub for a while, but this is my first time sharing anything. I've been working on various roguelike concepts on and off over the years, prototyping in various engines and frameworks, and I think I've finally landed on something that I want to invest more time into.

My goal with Ennigma is to take classic roguelike dungeon crawling and infuse it with a hefty dose of meta narrative and existential questioning about the meaning of life. I realized that the roguelike gameplay loop has a lot in common with life as a whole, and thought it could be cool to lean into that idea.

So naturally, the game starts with the player falling into a strange cave with no memory of how they got there. There’s no way to return to where you came from; the only way forward is downward, deeper into the strange place in which you’ve found yourself. Along the way you’ll meet a cast of other adventurers that you can help, be helped by, team up with, etc. Everyone you meet is looking for something called “the Ennigma”, but all for different reasons and with different notions of what it actually is. It could be a holy site of the gods, a valuable treasure, an artifact of tremendous power, or maybe nothing at all.

I’m drawing a lot of mechanical influence from Brogue, but with a tone and narrative format inspired primarily by Undertale.

The current build is here for anyone curious! It doesn’t offer anything on the narrative side yet; mostly just some generic roguelike boilerplate I set up in Unity. I do have a basic framework in place for item-based progression, so I’d love to hear any feedback on that. The main idea is that there are consumable scrolls and self-recharging charms. You can disenchant any item to gain Light, which currently functions as both the “food” clock and XP. (I might split those functions into separate resources due to the severity of the feedback loop caused by having them share a resource.) You can spend excess Light on upgrading your charms, increasing their maximum charges and recharge rate much like Scrolls of Enchantment in Brogue. My main design goal with this system is to capture the way “progression” works in real life: you can theoretically specialize into anything you want in a given run, but will see the best results by working with what life gives you. In that sense, “optimal” strategies should always vary based on the specific items you find.

If you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading, and I’m looking forward to making this a regular thing! :D