Harmonist: Dayoriah Clan Infiltration - stealth roguelike

[anaseto]

Harmonist is a graphical coffee-break stealth roguelike game I've been working on for a few months. You play as a small and weak gawalt monkey that infiltrates Dayoriah Clan's domain to rescue a friend who was captured while trying to retrieve a stolen powerful artifact.



The code is based on a previous project of mine (Boohu), written in Go. I've made a first release today, under the BSD-like ISC license. Graphical tiles can be distributed either under ISC or CC-BY.

The game is short, but quite complete and stable for me. One thing that probably still needs some serious polish are the english texts (I try to do my best, but I'm not an english native speaker). I also mainly only test the game on OpenBSD, though some short tests seem to indicate the various flavors (graphical native Tk or WebAssembly in browser, and terminal ASCII) work fine on Linux too (tested only on Void Linux), but I'll be glad to know if it runs ok on other distros.

Links:

• Project Page
• Short introduction trailer

[drummyfish]

Thank you for sharing your game and also creating a LGW page :-) I've never been the roguelike kind of person, so I can't comment on the gameplay itself, but the graphics looks very nice within the minimalist style.

I'd like to ask why you have decided for that uncommon license. The FSF mentions it has some minor issues and recommends Apache 2.0 instead. I though this could be a good opportunity to suggest a new Blue Oak Model License, which tries to be modern and fixes issues of the old licenses.

[anaseto]

Hi, thanks for your comment. Yeah, one of the main design principles of the game is making a minimalistic roguelike with simple controls and UI.

I chose ISC license because it's the one used by the OS I use most days (OpenBSD), and similar to the one used by most Go projects (3-clauses BSD license) but shorter with one less clause. It does seem to work for quite big projects in practice, so I hope it will work well enough for such a small project :-) I actually would almost prefer CC0 (I don't like putting legal burden on others for such small things), but it's actually longer and more difficult to understand for me.

[anaseto]

Hi! It's been a while since the last time I shared about Harmonist here. The game is now at version 0.4.1. It's evolved quite a bit since the first release, almost two years ago.

The core gameplay hasn't changed much, it's still the same somewhat atypical pacifist stealth roguelike about a little monkey that has to save his friend Shaedra. Content-wise the game is quite finished, though new content may be added at some point.

The last big update (0.4.0) made an overhaul of the UI based on a new UI library for grid-based applications that I'm working on. The UI is more reactive, showing relevant information on the screen depending on context as appropriate. Animations can now be interrumpted, allowing fast play. Replay functionality has been provided with new navigation facilities (going forward and backward 1 minute).

Moreover, the Tk version was replaced with an SDL version: the new version supports zooming as well as fullscreen. It's also much faster drawing, though that should rarely be noticeable (the Tk version was fast enough, except maybe for fast replay, auto-exploration and some animations).

There was also a significant amount of minor bug fixes since the first release, and the last release (0.4.1) fixed a few regressions reported by players after the UI overhaul, in particular relative to the new SDL version.