Lots more progress has been made on the game. One notable improvement is the start page. Until now, starting a new game required manually clearing cookies to get a new session and therefore a new seed.

I also wanted the player to be able to enter a seed. I also thought making the seed obvious would be useful for testing and debugging later.

It started simple:

Seed Generator

In an attempt to make the whole game feel as dynamic and unique as possible, I added a seed randomiser. It was also an excellent opportunity for some humour 😆

The generator is very simple. It randomly picks an adjective and a noun from hardcoded lists and bungs them together. This gives seeds like "wheezing-drivel", "lumpy-blotch", "decrepit-buttocks", "frantic-marmalade", "bloated-codpiece", and on and on.

There are currently 1,734 possible combinations. I strongly suspect we will add more words, I also might expand it to three words.

Initially, the fields' default value was populated with a random seed. To get a new one, you had to refresh the page, this was good enough for testing, but I wanted to do something better.

I added a button to the right of the field which would fetch a new seed and drop it in the field. I wanted to use an icon for the button label and initially had the classic refresh arrow-in-a-circle. This stuck out like a sore thumb, curves have no place in the pixel-art style. I tried creating a square version, but it was janky at best. I had a better idea.

Dice! Specifically, ASCII dice: ⚀⚁⚂⚃⚄⚅

When the button is clicked the icon randomly shuffles through the different dice faces, as though it was being rolled. Give it a go:

I also created an image for the title which uses a pixel style font where each pixel is on of the floor tiles from the game.