BugByte - Vertical Slice Demo v1.3

Credits

Arda Turkvan - Art, Programming, Design

Damian Winters - a MASSIVE thank you for creating the music! Please check them out on Spotify!

Welcome!

To a very early look at my game, BugByte! To put it as simply as I can, this game is like a cross between Pokémon Mystery Dungeon, Crypt of the Necrodancer, and Shotgun King: The Final Checkmate.

BugByte is a 2D grid-based roguelike creature catching dungeon crawler game with an early 90s art style! However, this demo isn't technically roguelike, as it's meant to be a demonstration of the idea - so it's predetermined (procgen is hard turns out!).

Yes, it's a lot of genres. No, I don't regret my decision to include this many genres at once for my first solo developed game ever...

Take control of many goofy creatures as you literally defeat the bugs in your game! These creatures are called Bytes, and their designs are inspired by software and hardware concepts, like Stacks or old-school computer mice. If they die, they're gone for good - keep a healthy and full party to be able to make it to the end!

Mechanics

Action Queue

The game runs on a queue-based system, which I call the Action Queue.

Essentially, each time your either input an attack or perform a move, that counts as "ending your turn". Once your turn ends, then the enemies do their turns, in a sequenced order. Hover over enemies to see what order they attack in.

The Execution Order is as follows:

1. Player: most recently input action
2. Player: Any lingering actions that haven't fully finished yet (i.e. a bomb with a fuse, attacks with cast times)
3. Enemies are then done after, analogously.

Attacks - Cost, Cooldown, Cast time

While this isn't a unique mechanic, cast time can be confusing at first.

Cast time describes how many turns until the attack actually fires. Inputting the attack will not have it fire right away - you'll have to spend however many turns in order for it to actually fire! (You can abuse this to set up some cool combos!)

Energy (or RAM)  describes how much an attack costs to use. You gain 1 RAM each time you move.

Cooldown  describes how many turns have to pass before the attack can be input again. Cooldowns for all moves go down by 1 each time the player ends their turn.

The rest, I'll leave up to you to figure out! I hope it's fun :)

Controls

• WASD - 8-directional movement (you can move diagonally - just hold both directions and then lift & press one of the two... working on making this better)
  • In-game menu navigation (i.e. inventory)
• 1/2/3 - Issue an Attack with Lead Byte 
  • 1 - 1st attack
  • 2 - 2nd attack
  • 3 - 3rd attack
• F - Open Inventory
• Q/E - Switch Lead Byte
• Mouse - hover over Bytes and items to get a better idea of what's going on!
• Spacebar - Use/Interact (for the inventory)
  • Pass Turn (not sure if this will stay, let me know what you think!)
• Escape - Pause Menu

Feedback

If you have any feedback, particularly for balancing, bugs, or any information that you feel like is lacking as to what you can do, what's going on, etc, please message me on Discord! I want to make this the best that I can before I present!

BugByte is part of my thesis project for the Game Design postgraduate program at George Brown College. All art assets were drawn by Arda Turkvan.

Special thanks to CodeMonkey, Mina Pêcheux, and AdamCYounis for the excellent code tutorials and helpful guides.