#ascii rpg

[dimalink]

Treasure Saga - text intro

Retro role-playing game about to walk in dungeons. With simple automatic level up. And a big part of storytelling, in a form of text screens between levels.

Become a searcher for adventures. And collect all useful items as gold, sapphires, and all other valuable stuff from dungeons. And also receive lots of experience.

Basic Pascal pack - whole pack of games and programes, written with basic and pascal. It is retro. With each game and program there is a page at author`s website. There are aditional information, descriptions, pictures, arts.

Basic Pascal: http://www.dimalink.tv-games.ru/packs/basicpascal/index_eng.html

Itchio: https://dimalink.itch.io/basic-pascal GameJolt: https://gamejolt.com/games/BasicPascal/773385

[daily-ynfg-worlds]

ASCII Symbol Zone

[bruoche]

The new Ruby Dungeon update is here, and you can now talk with the merchant!

Really proud of how that system work, and now offering over 50 different dialogs for y'all to find while doing your errands!

(there's also some bugfixes, ortho corrections and a small nerf of the boss so it's more fun, full devlog on my itch!)

[geophreyrnd]

The blade of stone

My first weapon, upgraded to the umpteenth degree.

[bleetusmcyeetus]

I’ve known this funky little thing for like 10 seconds and I’m already obsessed

[conparkforever]

Conpark Archive Upload!

Longtime, no see. Many things were happening, so I had to turn my attention elsewhere. However I was playing the game CLOCK by Ichiro Sogabe and when trying to find additional information, I discovered the downloads no longer worked. That wouldn't do. So I've compiled all the webpages + games/cgs/sprites/music/whatever else on ia in case something occurs and the files end up lost.

👇🏽👇🏽👇🏽 https://archive.org/details/conpark-archives

These games are quaint but they capture the spirit of the devs at a certain time in the culture. Even if they are small and crusty, I hope you'll take the time to give them a look.

[mitzirockerextendeduniverse]

[Game 2 on my massive JRPG Spreadsheet! Previous entries - well, the previous entry - can be found in my #tales from the retro jrpg Spreadsheet tag.]

What it is: Bokosuka Wars (ボコスカウォーズ) for Famicom, released on the 14th of December, 1985, developed and published by ASCII. Based on the home computer game of the same name from March 1984, also published by ASCII and developed by one Kōji Sumī, currently an avant-garde artiste working under the name Rasho but then a lucky bedroom coder who happened to win a programming contest. Got a sequel/reimagining thirty-five years after the fact, making this technically the first in a series of unique vaguely board-game-y strategy games about the heroic kingdom of Suren's fight against the tyrannical Basam Empire's oppression.

What's it about: Pretty much what I just said, yeah! Even by the standards of early 80s quasi-RPGs, Bokosuka Wars' plot is thin. The Famicom version adds a few extra details to account for some gameplay changes - Ogereth, Emperor of the Basam Empire, has turned the Suren Kingdom's soldiers into rocks and trees, but King Suren (or possibly just the King of Suren, the Japanese is a little unclear) has learned how to undo that spell and rebuild his army - but the various home computer versions keep it short and sweet. You don't have the manpower to fight off the invading army the traditional way, so you're spearheading a lightning-quick assault on Basam Castle to take out Ogreth, and that's all the setup you need.

How it plays: Bokosuka Wars' box calls it 'a very different type of RPG!' but by modern standards it's more of an abstract chess-ish strategy game. King Suren starts at the right side of the map, 600 metres/tiles away from Ogreth. To win the game, all you have to do is get from there to him and defeat him in single combat. Of course, it's not as simple as it sounds; the forces surrounding Basam Castle outnumber your largest possible force four to one, and there's no way the King can fight his way through them on his own, and if he dies, you lose the game.

Fortunately, he doesn't have to do it alone. While in the home computer versions the King starts with a small force of his own, due to hardware limitations on Famicom he must free his troops by pushing against trees and rocks and other obstacles to turn them into soldiers. There are two types: pawns, who are fairly weak but fairly numerous, and knights, who are relatively strong but relatively rare. The player can move either the army as a whole, just the king, just the knights, or just the pawns, making manoeuvring around scenery and enemies alike trickier than in most strategy games.

Manoeuvring is an important part of Bokosuka Wars for another reason. Moving one of your units onto a spot occupied by an enemy will start a battle, and though units do have an attack stat that can be increased in almost every battle there's a decent chance the weaker combatant will win and the stronger destroyed. This applies equally to a freshly-recruited pawn and a fully-powered-up knight and the King, so winning the Bokosuka Wars is as much about avoiding battles as it is about winning them, carefully positioning your soldiers to keep enemies away from the King and only risking a fight when you have no other options. Even so, sometimes you just have to barrel your army forward into the enemy and pray to the random number gods your King makes it through.

What I thought: I... wanted to like Bokosuka Wars. I really did! It's got this experimental DIY bedroom-coder charm that really appeals to me (I think because I spent my childhood playing Flash games.) Its gameplay is unlike anything else I've ever seen, and I mean that in a good way - the fact that enemies can't attack you, but can block your way, puts a unique twist on the tactics you need to make your way through, and the game is very good at using that concept to challenge the player, from enemies that swarm the King unless you can block their path, to tight corridors you have to carefully move your army through while baiting enemies into dead ends. Sumī even wrote some lyrics to the background music and put them in the manual! How can you not love that?

But, as they say, the devil's in the details. A full playthrough of Bokosuka Wars can take easily over an hour, and since we're still before the standardisation of - even password saves, you're going to have to pull that off in one sitting. That wouldn't necessarily be the worst thing in the world, but coupled with how easily and suddenly a run can end it makes every attempt to reach Ogreth a long, grinding slog that's only ever one bad decision - or one bad dice roll! - away from a WOW, YOU LOSE! This time around I could at least break up the sessions with save states, but the first time I played this, on original hardware, I was sitting in front of my little CRT, mechanically going through the same steps of my ideal strategy, again and again, for days on end. And this is one of those games that restarts with a higher difficulty when you beat it! I can't even imagine having the patience.

I think a lot of the blame for this falls on the Famicom port. I've heard it said that the problem is it breaking up the army so you're collecting it as you go rather than starting with most of it already, but I don't think it's that much of a downgrade - it can even give you a chance to rebuild your forces after barely surviving a tough battle. No, what's really wrong with this port is its speed. I've only messed around with the computer versions of Bokosuka Wars, but in those everything is so much faster than on Famicom. Units zip across the map, battles take a fraction of the time to resolve, and everything's just a lot more responsive than on Famicom, where sometimes it feels like your soldiers will only move in the direction you're pressing half the time. The almost-random outcomes of battles could even work in this version - sudden, unpredictable death would be a much easier pill to swallow if getting back to where you were was a relatively quick dash rather than an endless death march. I can imagine a version of this game that's legitimately fun, but unfortunately, it's not the one I played.

[babyspacebatclone]

I’m in trouble.

Like, seriously, I was up until morning last night partially because of this game.

@stonestoryrpg

I just… I can’t.

This is gorgeous.

The amount of detail in the animation is just…. 😭😭

The way the story and the experience evolves, always challenging the player, offering new variables to consider.

Up until - it literally lets you program your idle AI.

Which is the “stay up all night” bit, I haven’t programmed in anything but HTML and associated since high school (20+ years now…) but it’s all coming back to me.

Oh, and here’s your character…

(image cropped because of hud spoilers from leveling)

I repeat - the animation in this game is gorgeous!!!

For example, the reveal of the second boss is just….

My only description right now is:

Edit: The Discord helped me!!!!! Ah, this feels so good!!!!!

My one, one issue right now is all I have access to is my phone, and not being able to copy-paste in the iOS scripting interface is killing me with order of operations being so impossibly vital….

Do not misunderstand me, Dev, I am persevering as best I can…

And reading how versatile the import script system is for non-mobile devices, I know it’s something you recognize and will address to the absolute best of abilities!!

But getting the Skeleton Arm quest finished without breaking everything else I had worked out took a bit.

[virtualmentalitydeer]

This will be my...

Stone Story

[nicolefirekitty]

big ass snails

[1o1percentmilk]

hm ive been playing a game called Stone Story on my phone and let me tell u the old-school ASCII graphics are incredible

[leveretngsfavs]

Eternal Degrade: Bizarre Strategy-Based RPG Inspired By MSDOS

While kicking around on a decently sized Discord Server, I came across a very odd video displaying a WIP for a portion of something the author referred to as "Eternal Degrade", which was unlike anything I'd ever seen. Maybe Scott Cawthon's old psudeo-RPGs, but besides that, it was all completely new to me. ASCII and MSDOS-text-based-graphics galore, with a neat ass soundtrack to boot. Went as far as to look up what exactly it was, and found that it is a Strategic RPG created by the wonderful folks who make the antics over on Vinny Vinesauce's Twitch possible, Redscientist Labs, creators of the Real-Time-Corruptor. The inspiration for this project according to them was VRun, a game designed around the aesthetics of breaking old games and the like, with some light platforming and puzzle mechanics. It's neat, and I'd recommend you all check it out! As far as I know, Eternal Degrade is yet to release, but the folks over at RL seem like productive fellows. They even have said to expect something by this fall! I greatly look forward to the myriad of releases coming later this year. If you're gonna check out any single one however, try Eternal Degrade first. I'm confident it'll be unlike anything the gaming landscape has seen up until now.

[the-great-gay-gobinski]

is- is that

the ginat ene-

the ginat enmy sp-

big spider big problem

Bolesh, the Cunning! a boss monster from our ASCII game Stone Story RPG

[bruoche]

The last OST of my game Ruby Dungeon is out now on Youtube!

It's without hesitation my favorite of the bunch, being the theme for the demo's boss with some heavy 8-bit bass and rythms!

The chord progression used here was originally meant to be for the shop theme, but as I was making it I was like "Nah that's way too dark for the shop, I'll use it for the boss theme". And so I did!

I think that chord progression has the perfect mix of grandiose and discomfort for that boss, and the rest of the song around was mostly trying to build-up the tension with the intense rythms building on the sort of heavy breathing sound I made echo through most of the track.

I also really liked the idea of the melody having a slide, adding to the the tension by being pretty off-putting melody-wise and also making the melody slide between octaves, building even more on the tension.

Hope y'all liked my little songs, a playlist on my youtube channel have all the demo's ost up in order, and I'll also upload a full album as one continuous video soon!

Don't hesitate to check out my game on my itch.io too, as it'd mean a lot to me! With that said, Merry Christmas everyone :3

[alpha-beta-gamer]

Effulgence is an ASCII-styled RPG adventure set in a digital world decoded from an alien signal millions of lightyears away!

Read More & Sign Up For The Beta (Steam)

[bombermanga]

Bomberman Jetters: Densetsu no Bomberman (The Legendary Bomberman) / Saturn Bomberman Fight!! ENG Patches

Not our work by any means, but this is definitely worth sharing. English patches have been completed for two Japan-only games and are available for download!

💣 Saturn Bomberman Fight!! Released in 1997, Saturn Bomberman Fight!! was one of Hudson Soft's many (maaaaany) attempts at messing with the bomberformula. The game's Story Mode features up to 14(!) playable characters, all with their own routes and unique dialogue. Also there was a commercial featuring Segata Sanshiro judo throwing someone so hard they explode, which I don't know why that wasn't reason enough to localize this thing.

(Sure, there's no explosive judo throwing in the game as far as I know/remember, but localization should have been done just to give kudos. Obvi.)

🔗 On BombermanBoard 🔗 On Sega Saturn, Shiro!

💣 Bomberman Jetters: Densetsu no Bomberman (The Legendary Bomberman) This little RPG dropped a couple of months after the original debut of the anime in 2002, telling the story of Mighty's final mission on Nonbiri. If you've played Bomberman Tournament, this game will slap your face with extreme deja vu, right down to the Pokeboms. I mean, Charamons. I mean...yeah, no, I meant every word of that overplayed joke because I am volcanically uncool.

(I played a ROM of this back in college using an ASCII walkthrough I printed out and never thought anyone would care enough to even provide a translated script, let alone make a playable translation. This is a dark timeline with tiny little explosions of joy and hope.)

🔗 On BombermanBoard (with some key info to get things working) 🔗 On GitHub (patch only)

PLEASE NOTE that I am woefully unfamiliar with modern emulation, so if something goes bork bork with one of these things I'm entirely useless. I'm just here to spread some obscure bomberlove. ❤️💥