Demo Ambience: a dungeon-crawling, weather-warping, story-driven roguelite

[rhombus]

Ambience is a weather-warping, dungeon-crawling rogue-lite currently in development by indie game developer Rhombus Ragmuffin. Storyline, gameplay and mechanics all revolve around the concept of "Ambience" - which manifests itself as the weather of every Environment and the personality of every Being. In Ambience, you're fleeing from a prison established by the brilliant scientist Foss and guarded by his Henchmen. As you progress, you'll make new allies, find out more about Foss's true aims... and more often than not, simply focus on survival.

Features:

• Strategic, turn-based gameplay in procedurally-generated dungeons.
• A host of items, weapons, and customizable stat distributions.
• Two game modes, Story Mode and Survival Mode, enable a wide variety of gameplay.
• A compelling story, memorable characters, and an original soundtrack.
• An automatic saving system adds the roguelike touch by ensuring every decision matters.

Download the Demo:
http://rhombus-ragmuffin.com/ambience-demo

• Platform: PC
• Size: 14 MB

Screenshots:

Trailer:

For more information, be sure to check out my devblog and Twitter.
Feel free to leave comments, feedback, bug reports, and the like!

 

[alexde5th]

This is seriously reminding me of the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon series.
I'll try it out if I happen to bump into this again (which might be highly likely)

 

[rhombus]

This is seriously reminding me of the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon series.
I'll try it out if I happen to bump into this again (which might be highly likely)

It does play a little like a Mystery Dungeon game, however the roguelike elements are a lot more prominent here than in MD, which has more of an RPG feel. Nonetheless I'd be interested to know what you think of it

 

[alexde5th]

So I finally played your game, and I have to say. I really enjoyed it. Like, I was expecting like a rip off of Pokemon Mystery Dungeon, but its like PMD, but smaller I guess.
Pros.
• The plot (in my opinion) is pretty straight forward. Really good!
• The character designs are quite simplistic. But I'm good with that.
• I like how the text-boxes work. (Just gonna throw this out there, I was going to do something like this with my game's text-boxes, but I couldn't figure out how to :v)
• The opening is quite neat.
• "Rhombus"? Why is your company/studio/other name "Rhombus"? Oh well. I've heard worse. Like Digital Homocide!!!
• The attack system is like PMD's attack system, but aimed towards computers more.
• I like how I can either use the mouse or the keyboard in the game. I apparently just used the keyboard for the entirety of the time I played.
• I almost died. Had 2 HP left.
Cons.
• The music is pretty good, but in some area's its lower quality (By production, not how I can hear it)
• That siren at the beginning made my ears hurt a little.
• The way how the game started off was hugely familiar to PMD
• Damn you FRAPS for taking up storage space and causing the game to lag randomly.
• The graphics are decent in this market, but I like them.
• THIS GAME CONSTANTLY REMINDED ME OF PMD!!!
• That was a girl?
• The main character design feels lazy, them being circles. But I guess it could be explained/or you simply just chose them to be that way.
• Ok I'm done here.

 

[rhombus]

Thanks for the feedback!

• Of course, this version is just a demo, so I'll be changing up a lot of stuff between now and the final release. I've already started changing up a few things to make it feel less like PMD and more like a roguelite like Crawl - for example, by adding stairs to take you to both the previous and next floors.
  
• Thanks for the heads up about the siren sound, I'll go turn down the volume a little. Regarding the music, there were one or two places where the music was deliberately a bit "off" (for example, the very first scene when you're sedated) to make it feel like something isn't quite right. In any case though, I'll definitely be redoing many of the tracks for the final release.
  
• The reason why the main characters look like circles is because this is actually a remake of a game I made nearly 10 years ago, where the protagonist was also circular - however the Ambience characters are obviously more polished. Also I'll change Zephyr's mugshots to make her look a bit more distinct from the other, male characters.