Hey all, wanted to share my Linux native game inspired by Lufia 2's Ancient Cave, it's called Depths of Providence!
Hey everyone, bit of shameless self-promotion here. My game is coming out on 8/11 and I wanted to share it with this community. It's a JRPG with 100 procedurally generated floors where you start at floor 1 level 1 with no items or skills and have to fight your way down to the bottom. There are red chests which contain items, gear, and skills that you can only use on that run and then there are blue chests which contain powerful gear you can bring out of the cave and back in with you on subsequent runs (probably sounds very familiar to those familiar with Lufia 2's Ancient Cave).
There's basically this tension between "should I push deeper for more loot or should I bank what I have and get out?" The main game is basically balanced such that it should be nearly impossible to beat on the first run, so there's a meta-progression in terms of blue chest items.
There's also a seeded daily run with a leaderboard that's re-tuned to be possible to beat in a single run with incredibly skilled play and a little bit of luck. There's server side replay validation so players can be assured no one is cheating, and the difficulty is such that if you can manage a deep run it'll definitely be something to be proud of. Basically every person in the world will face an identical cave on any given day and the goal is to push as deep as possible.
Full disclosure, I'm not really a video game dev. I do write software for a living but I made this game not because I'm hoping to get early retirement money, but mostly because it's a game I wish existed but didn't. I really enjoy classic JRPG's, but outside of speed running them (something I never got into), my biggest complaint is that they just aren't that challenging. Some of them may start difficult, but eventually you reach a point where you just stat check everything and it's a total snooze.
Depths of Providence is designed to be an incredibly challenging JRPG with a competitive twist. A daily run is genuinely challenging and I expect most players to die around floor 25-30. Again, outside of speed running there's really never been (as far as I'm aware) a JRPG that has a way to compete with other people, so that's something I set out to create.
It's of course natively supported on Linux (I've been running Linux since 2004, Knoppix if anyone remembers that. Basically Knoppix -> Fedora -> Ubuntu -> Mint -> Manjaro -> CachyOS has been my journey) and it plays amazingly on the Steam Deck as well (it's still my go to before bed game on my Deck). It also runs on Windows and Mac which is probably slightly less relevant to this community.
Anyway, again, I'm not really trying to get rich off this game. Mostly I'm just hoping people will enjoy it as much as I do and maybe offer feedback on how they think the game could be made even better.
It releases on August 11, and you can find the Steam store page here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4996340/Depths_of_Providence/
Let me know what you think! I genuinely hope you enjoy it as much as I do, but totally get that this is a somewhat niche sort of game. Anyway, thanks for checking it out!