Totems of the Yonder
A procedurally-generated Mini-Metroidvania For MetroidVania Month 20
By KKairos and 909crime
NB: This is definitely more on the "Prototype" side of the MetroidVania Month Jam compared to previous entries I've done, and more on the experimental side. Besides the possible weirdness of procedural generation there is one way you can break reality: Fair warning that I didn't implement any hard saves and while I'm pretty sure you can't do this too easily without trying, going "out of bounds" will probably crash or at least softlock the game.
General thanks go out to:
ZZT/MegaZeux People
Especially, but not only: Zephyr, WiL, and Lancer-X
MetroidVania Month People
zlago who tried a build at the 11th hour
Otherwise too many "especiallys" here, I'd miss some people out. If there's any doubt, the answer is yes, this shout-out includes you.
Mixed Media People
And too many other especially awesome people to name.
For seed names, the author should probably acknowledge:
Gave general suggestions or permission:
anna anthropy
Kaselord
Verdagon
21 - GrammaticalAss
42 - Nathan Nestor
616 - Snorb
722 - Nathan Nestor
777 - Tesker
909 - 909crime
Anyway, thanks for giving this weird little game a shot. Hope you enjoy it!
- KKairos
Download
Comments
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I got softlocked on the second level...
thanks for taking the time to play and report this.
that said: oh no! we do have a softlock report or two to account for, so we'll be taking some steps to hopefully alleviate this, but:
a. was it a level with a lot of diamonds and did you try hitting them? (this wasn't well-conveyed, but if the answers are 'yes', and 'no', you probably can get out of the level by hitting the diamonds)
b. if that wasn't it, so that we could see what seed it was, do you remember the seed number and whether it was on web, windows, or desktop?
Unfortunately I didn't get the seed number but it was on web. The level it generated just had a couple saws and it seemed like there should have been an exit on the right, but it was blocked by ground/wall tiles. It almost looked like two levels were generated on top of each other.
Yeah that sounds horrifying! Sorry that happened to you.
It does sound like a thing that I've sort of seen but also I thought had been eliminated. My guess is (if you want, no pressure, I stress) you'd have a better time on desktop. The number of reports happening only on web is almost making me question whether to keep doing a web version after the jam has passed. We'll see how much time we have for that QA, haha.
Thanks for playing and thanks again for responding!
I came across a similar issue on the Windows build, seed #649... there's just a dead end. May I ask how the areas are generated?
Maze-level map, five mazes which are then linked together and filled out with rooms. This devlog series didn't get a third installment yet because I was lazy and my unlaziness was put towards the game itself, but it'll give some clarity on the process: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLvccjxfjJs1StJsQBnYxw-gp32J80Q4mO
I don't know for sure if that's what happened here, but to be clear, what you describe does match a known issue. Based on playing and completing seed #649 now on desktop, but right after loading the game, I think this was some shenanigans I've seen happening on successive generations after a single play, where sometimes the game will fail to generate the proper items on subsequent plays. Obviously nobody wants the generator to punish players for playing more, so that's going to be a thing to hunt down for the next release. (Regarding fresh generations, there is still a small danger in my mind and probably by the numbers of those going haywire, and there are some plans to quash that danger as well.)
(BTW, if you're interested in taking on beta testing capacity officially for the Super version, once I have builds that hopefully fix some of these more egregious generator issues, you can find me as kkairos@gmail.com or as 'kaikairos' on Discord.)
Thanks again for testing and reporting!
An excellent metroidvania. The gist and uniqueness of this is of course given by the procgen levels I did not find them samey at all, many screens have unique flavours and the maps are easy to navigate. Music is top-notch, graphics cute and readable, some mechanics ("hit and jump") interesting and devilish.
There are some bugs that slipped through:
- sometimes you can jump out of the level, getting stuck and having to press 1+2+3 to respawn (keep that in mind)
- sometimes it seems you have "permafire" on and despite not actually attacking you can e.g. break blocks at mere contact
The action develops in a Prince-of-Persia way, which means you are timed and deaths/respawns incour in a time malus.
Good production, I have played the Linux build which should be available soon, ran smoothly!
i think this is a neat (and somewhat weird) concept, but it suffers from crunch (not much content, the game lasts 10-5 minutes, would benefit from more polish, and no real incentive to play all 1000 seeds)