EXISTENCE

Narrow Ways was created for two reasons:

Firstly, to actually put out a game this year!

Muffle's short event happened to hit as I was being inspired by something, already. I'd already been thinking of creating a game akin to this at the time, due to the second reason, so it was really a case of great timing!

Secondly, I was inspired.
I'd been introduced to Dungeon Encounters, a recent Square title that claimed to be similar to DnD, being more 'theatre of the mind' and focussing on exploring a 100-floor dungeon. I liked the idea, checked it out, and was sorely disappointed by how lacking it was in anything but battles.

"I can do better than this," I thought and decided to give it a shot.

So, here we are. The event is over and the game got played on stream. I'd managed to get it 'done' within the last few hours of the event, and thus it was found to be full of... issues.


FIXIN'S

The stream really highlighted a bunch of problems that, due to it being added last minute (and after a night of gammak into the early hours with little-to-no testing), really needed fixing.

The biggest issue was that of healing being horribly skewed against the player. Not only had I somehow messed with the healing so that it only gave you a paltry amount, but there was no way to restore yourself back to life if you died - which you could do quite easily if you got unlucky thanks to the balance being harder with some characters than with others.

I've since changed the healing to not only be useful but also added an auto-heal for death after battles. I chose not to give items that will restore death in battle, though there will be some latter-level skills that will do so, mainly to force players to pay attention and use their items or skills both in and out of battle.

I've also added restoration points around the maps, which will enable you to heal your party. They will be sparse and can only be used once per floor, but should come in handy for those who need a quick pick-me-up.

There were also text issues when gaining characters or declining party members which I have now fixed so that if you decide you want a lizard-only party you can deny that pesky fawn and not have a reminder of that denial pop up in unexpected places. XD

Graphics-wise, I have changed the glyphs a little, adding more colours, making them darken more when you've completed a glyph and changing some of the colours around.

Teleport points are now invisible, so you'll have to go to every dead-end to figure what's a teleport and what's not. This is mainly to free up the green glyph for healing tiles.

I also changed the starter map so that you are forced to interact with at least one of each tile (bar monsters) in order to understand what they do.

This means that I've moved the character join event to the first dungeon map so that there's room for some other events instead.



MISSINGS

There were some aspects of the game that I didn't manage to include in the event version that will be in future versions. These include more randomisation for events and treasures, and an actual story/plot/setting, which will be found on purple tiles. These will not be randomised and can be found on each floor.

A plan for the future is to make my own tiles so that I don't have to rely on RTP. That one's a bit far off, but it's there. Same with music.

For the moment, I have a bunch of other possible plans in the mix and I've already finished mapping out a new dungeon (and edited the event one a bit, too!) so look forward to that.



DEMO

A demo will be added to the page once I'm sure that all the basic aspects of the event version are fixed, balance the battles a little more and finish adding some of the extras that were always intended to be in that version.

Keep an eye out!