I've added a new seasonal game to my Mystic Dungeon: Haunted Halloween.
A text-mode twin-stick shooter (well, except it's an emulated Atari 800 "text mode", and the sticks are WASD and IJKL, I haven't written joystick support yet).
Five different levels:
- Pumpkin Patch: Collect pumpkins for ammo.
- Dark Forest: Find the path through.
- Graveyard: Easy, just dodge gravestones and monsters.
- Corn Maze: Unless you're Ted Forth you won't have a problem with this maze.
- Haunted House: Just run thru the spooky house full of ghosts, and other monsters crawling in from the woods, get candy, get out!
Three difficulty levels:
- Treat is turn-based, but there's so few monsters & candies you won't get a high score.
- Trick is real-time, but you can generally outrun monsters.
- Nightmare has twice as many monsters & candies, so it's the best way to get a high score… or die quickly, completely overwhelmed.
You can also play it like a stealth game, H hides you from non-adjacent monsters, so you can just run in, hide, wait for them to move off.
You collect candies for score (and banishing monsters earns candy), but every time you move to the next level you eat 10 candy to recover a hit and get some free pumpkins. So it's usually better to stay and clear all monsters, pick up all candies, then move on. But if you have a bunch of witches and ghosts, might be worth running away early.
The interesting thing from development is how little code is required for this kind of game. Halloween is under 1000 LOC, and that includes some long text blobs! Portal Worlds was 3000 LOC, Dungeon's over 3200 LOC and not even close to "done".
I'm still working on Public Caves, moving from BASIC to web-tech requires a lot more infrastructure!