u/zerojs

So I'm old and I love ASCII art, and I love playing as wizards in MMORPGS so I wanted to combine them.. in a puzzle game. Curious to see if people like the ASCII art style for puzzle games?

You place elemental runes on the board, when you put 3 next to each other they cause a match, you get some gold and it casts a spell that fires off at the enemies that are trying to attack your "Nexus".

The higher the amount of matches you do the bigger the spell is that triggers and also has effect effects. E.g a 6 fire rune match casts a big meteor that leaves a burning area on the floor, or a 7 fire rune match summons 3 smaller meteors that hit different targets and leave 3 burning areas.
Enemies have elemental weakness as well and also can resist stun/slow.

After each wave you can spend your gold earned to buy temporary run based buffs.
When you lose you gain crystals which you can use to by permanent buffs.

I love the immediate chaos of Geometry Wars, but I also like roguelites where each run feeds into a bigger upgrade loop.

So Null root is basically me trying to combine those ideas: short arcade shooter runs, swarms of different enemies, elites, bosses, caches to defend,run mutations, and upgrades that gradually let you push deeper.

The demo run cap is 90 seconds, then the full game expands toward 5-minute runs with multiple bosses.

Curious if people here like the idea of roguelite runs being much shorter but more progression-dense. The demo is on steam now and will be in the June Steam Next fest: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4512830/Null_Root/
There is a windows and steamOs native version.

So I know its a bit wierd to see skill telegraphs in a top down shooter but because of the dual control system in my game I had to put them in.
Some skills fire off from the main character and some from the mouse cursor, kind of like a twin stick but its just mouse controlled and you hold down spacebar to disconnect the cursor from the main body and your skills are on the left and right mouse button. so you can hold space down to free the cursor, move the cursor across the screen fire off a attack there and at the same time fire off a AOE explosion around the body.. or set traps, healing bubble, firewalls, blackholes n stuff.
Anyone else seen stuff like that in a top down shooter? most of my inspiration for my games come from mmorpgs because I've played so many of them.

If any ones curious the demo is here https://store.steampowered.com/app/4512830/Null_Root/

The full release will be on steam in a few months, just after the Steam Next fest in June. Oh there is also a native steam deck version as well so no need for emulation.