My modern take on traditional roguelikes
I've been working on HexCrawler for about two years now. It's heavily inspired by games like Tales of Maj'Eyal and Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, but I've been trying to experiment with a few parts of the traditional roguelike formula.
The first big change is the hexagonal grid. Besides giving movement and positioning a richer sense of directionality (three axes instead of two) . Character orientation also matters in combat.
https://i.redd.it/r0hk3s74e2ih1.gif
The second is that you control a party of three characters rather than a single character. To make that work without turning combat into a standard "everyone takes one turn" system, actions use Time Units (TU). Every action has a base TU cost, but that cost can be modified by character stats, equipment and other effects.
So a fast character might attack or move several times while a slower character is still recovering from a heavy action. You're effectively managing three independent timelines rather than cycling through three fixed turns.
The last major difference is presentation. I'm trying to keep the systems and decision-making of traditional roguelikes while using fully animated pixel-art characters, enemies and abilities.
https://i.redd.it/438cdwh6g2ih1.gif
I'm curious to know what you think, do you think this game bring fresh enough features that you might be interested?