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You are a h4xx3n. To claim full membership in your metacoven, you have to steal Circuitbent_Grimmoire.txt from an Infernal Virtual Machine. If you can pull off this run, no one will call you a scroll kiddie ever again. Compile your ritual and get to work.

h3k4t3 is a pen-and-paper roguelike. This means that every time you finish a run on the Hex Flower without winning, you keep your move uses and any artifacts you may have collected and can start a new run. The goal is to get the Circuitbent_Grimmoire.txt and exit the run via port 666. Move on the Hex Flower using the navigation key and see the effect of your move using the hex key.

This is a prototype of a pen-and-paper roguelike. I'm releasing it for free and under a CC0 license. In exchange, I would like you tell me if you had fun playing it and what you think would make it more fun to play. If enough people do this, I might consider developing it further or something.

The game is in the form of a threefold pamphlet, print it and play, hopefully the rules make sense (if they don't, let me know). You can also hack it to your heart's content and make something new.

Bosses hang.

More information

Status	Prototype
Category	Physical game
Rating	Rated 5.0 out of 5 stars (4 total ratings)
Author	abbax
Tags	Cyberpunk, Fantasy, Roguelike, Roguelite, Singleplayer, Tabletop

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h3k4t3.pdf 835 kB

Comments

Mozai263 days ago(+1)

Reduce the visual noise behind the text -- white smears + white text = trying to read white smears.
I was going to say something about most moves will be E or SE but the hexflower has wraparound edges so it's fine; maybe better than fine since it feels like you're being pushed towards the finish line.
There's an obvious "if you don't do this on your first turn you failed" which makes me wonder why even have a first turn.
There's enough space on the hexes to use room names instead of numbers.

abbax263 days ago

Hey! thanks for taking the time to play this and giving me feedback. I agree with pretty much everything and will take it into account when redesigning this (or the next thing). I must admit I don't understand the third point. By turn, do you mean the first run through the hex-flower? Because by design you're meant to run through this multiple times, it's meant to start hard and get easier as you play through it again.

Mozai263 days ago(+1)

I made a copy of the map to show names can fit in the hexes; I used the same font and size as you use for instructions. but! This is also a spoiler map because I added colours to show artifacts and run-ending hexes to illustrate my next point. (ugh, itch.io auto-embeds, I have to post a corrupt url. https //i.imgur.com/sH65R7J.jpg
There's only three possible first moves, and the "obvious" first move is 19->17 because the artifact on 17 is the only way deal with "obstacles", and encountering an obstacle (ie 19->15) promptly ends the run AND incurs a penalty on your next run, sending you back to 19 where 19->17 is one of the choices.
The only L3 move worth getting is Bitcrush, because there are no "traps" nor "barriers" on the map, just "obstacles" and "enemies".
When I use Daemonware, are Datafiend and Sourcespawn considered "adjacent" to Dreadcode (because I can move from Dreadcode to those hexes in one move), even though they're on the far edges of the hexflower?

I hope I don't come across as harsh. I'm being critical because I think this idea really has legs so I'm putting in the energy to scrutinize it. The theme is great, hexflower as a dungeon-crawl feels like it has a lot of meat on these bones. Hell, perfect optimization becomes a milquetoast experience, don't try to smooth out every wrinkle.

abbax262 days ago

Oh wow! You did a lot of work! Don't worry, I'm not taking this as harsh, I love the feedback and it's exactly what I was hoping for. I didn't have enough time to playtest this so I knew there would be issues with it. I also attempted to code a "playtester-AI" but it became very complicated, very fast (it might be an even bigger project than the game itself).

So, again, thank you very much for taking the time to play this and take serious notes. I really appreciate it and will try to incorporate these either in its next iteration or future hex-flower games.