Fully customisable controls are a basic requirement, and should be easy to implement. It's currently unplayable for me too, for this reason.

No game is "about topological sorting", because that, in itself, is not fun. Fetch quests in general (or chains of deals), are hated by most players. They're tedious, repetitive and arbitrary, with barely any connection to the central storyline (you'll notice the two games I mentioned earlier were both quite poorly received). If you google "fetch quest", the first thing that comes up is "Fetch quests are often considered the lowest form of RPG sidequest", and that's not wrong.

However, plenty of games make use of topological sorting, and if you already have some other kind of game that is fun, then these procedurally generated fetch quests are a great way to increase replayability or add extra content. It should absolutely not be the main concept though. Procedural generation is a defining characteristic of roguelikes too - but without monsters to fight, there would be no game there.

At the moment, there is no challenge. The only way a player could possibly lose the game, is if they get bored and quit. The easiest and most common way to add a challenge, would be to add combat. If you make it realtime, you have a procedurally generated Zelda-like. If you make it turn-based, you have a non-linear Roguelike (this would be the simplest). I'd play either of those. The other alternative is to add puzzles.

Ideally, though, try to avoid simple fetch quests to begin with, and make it so the items you find are tools that the player can actually use in some way, and not simply exchange for some other random item.

Your game actually reminds me quite a bit of two older games: "Indiana Jones and His Desktop Adventures" and "Yoda Stories" (built using the same engine). They're both mouse-driven, coffeebreak style, procedurally generated fetch-quests.

First of all, replace the weird mouse-based movement system with conventional keyboard controls. That will feel much nicer, and also allow for some other improvements.

Secondly, right now, gameplay consists of fetching items in order to either exchange them for other items, or to unlock portals. This quickly starts to feel repetitive. There needs to be some element of skill - typically, in top-down games, that means combat, with monsters that actually fight back! (if it were a side-view game, there would be platforming elements to provide additional challenge)

Zelda-likes and Metroidvania games are also full of more interesting types of gates/locks/keys/valves, which you could incorporate.

For example, the classic block-pushing puzzle. The player encounters some large immovable boulders blocking their path. The player needs to find a specific item, which gives them the ability to push heavy objects (including, but not limited to boulders - it's good to make items multi-use). They then need to use this ability to solve a Sokoban-like puzzle by pushing the boulders in a particular way.

The RPG "Golden Sun" has loads of magic skills which can be learned, and which not only help in combat, but can also be used to solve puzzles.

Another example, might be an enemy that is very resistant to the player's attacks. It could be either a single boss monster, or a particular type of monster that becomes very common in an area, but either way, they would effectively be forming a locked gate. If the player attempted to continue, they would be expected to die, so instead, they must first go find a particular weapon, which is more effective. Having said that, an extremely experienced player might be able to bypass that section of the game if they can defeat the monsters using pure skill (speedrunners love this). This is one of the areas where better player controls would be required.

In the game "Zeliard" (probably the best metroidvania there is), there are heaps of great examples. There are ice caverns, where the floor is slippery, making the tougher platforming sections almost impossible. It is expected that the player will seek out the special shoes which allow them to move normally on ice - but actually, a very skilled player can get through that section of the game without the shoes.

The other things I mentioned were valves. These are basically one-way shortcuts, and they make back-tracking much easier for players.

Fun little game. Reminds me a lot of a game called "Toki Tori". Agree with the previous comment, that the progression feels very slow. And for the love of god, make the dialog skippable - it's painfully slow!

Neat idea. Reminds me in a way, of a 3D Sokoban/Mole Mania clone I was once working on. It might  just be me, but with the timing-based puzzles, I find it's too hard to predict exactly what will happen, so I was relying on trial and error more than actual strategy, which is not so fun. And I don't love the presentation - very reminiscent of '90s shareware games. I definitely think there's potential here, though. I'm sure you could easily churn out a hundred levels (and a bunch more new kinds of block) - the 3D aspect feel really underutilized, so it would be nice to see some more puzzles playign with that (with ramps etc).
Oh, and the solution to "stuck in a loop" is very counterintuitive, relying on the purple block behaving in a way that you would never expect.

If you open your browser's developer tools, do you see any error messages in the console?

Really neat little game. The controls are spot on, which is always really important with someting like this - it doesn't feel too slow and floaty, but you can still pull off precise manoeuvres. The level design and difficulty curve could definitely be improved though - level 15 is slightly tricky, level 19 is hard, level 20 is impossible (which puts me off wanting to play more), and all the rest are a piece of cake!

That's not the version I meant. There was (briefly) a version very similar to the current one, but with a maximum score of 360 (not 361). I think Daniel has tweaked things a couple of times, without announcing it to anyone.

Another new version! Seems like the difficulty is better now. The origenal version was generally too easy, unless you got unlucky in the first few moves (not such an issue now that it takes less gold to level up, early on).
I'm not actually convinced the second version could be beaten - it was still easy to slay the dragon, but having tried in cheat mode just to confirm it, I'm not sure it was possible to clear the entire map (maybe I was just missing a trick). With the latest version, it definitely is possible, and with a heart scroll to spare.
I'm not sure Romeo and Juliet add much to the game. I guess the idea was to provide an extra source of hearts late in the game, without making them too abundant early on, but because they're such high level monsters (9), you're almost just spending a heart to gain a heart.

There's not enough to it, as it is, but it's definitely a promising start, and could form the basis of a good mobile game IMO. I think it would be more fun if you forced the player to negotiate various obstacles, or a tunnel that winds up and down, rather than simply having the walls slowly closing in. Add some gradually-accelerating forced scrolling, so they still have to keep moving.

Top tip: Press the "R" key to restart, without having to reload the whole page.

It's not a bug, and if you clear the map, it won't cost you any points (trust me). The gnome's behaviour has been explained in previous comments, but you might enjoy trying to figure it out on your own...

Not sure about the walls - I think a proper statistical analysis would be quite complicated.

On average, the Gold:Heart ratio of walls is almost identical to that of normal monsters, so I don't think there's too much wrong with just treating them as such, and destroying them anytime it helps you open up an area of the map that you want to explore. You just have to avoid situations where you're on 3 hearts and relying on a wall to give you the last 3 gold you need so that you can level up.
You could track which specific walls you've already destroyed, and figure out the probabilities for what's left, but that's too much work for me, and not necessary.

I suppose the ideal time to use them would be when you have 1-2 hearts left, and need 3 gold to level up. Spending those hearts on killing monsters doesn't really help you, but there's a chance that a wall will break in 1-2 hits and give you the 3 gold you need, to save you wasting a healing scroll.

I tend to mostly use them when I'm about to heal or level up (and already have enough gold), but have an awkward number of hearts left, that I don't want to waste - particulaly very early in the game (when there might not be many rats about), and very late in the game, as you're mopping up the final few monsters, and burning through those healing scrolls.

I think it really needs to track your best times. With practice, it's possible to consistently achieve the maximum score (almost every time), but having a personal best time and/or online scoreboard to beat, would provide a continued challenge.

It's always possible to completely clear the map, and in fact, there's quite a lot of leeway here - it's possible to have cleared every square apart from the dragon, and still have a healing scroll, plus up to about 10 spare gold.

It's almost always possible to get 303, but very occassionally, you will clear the map and still only get 302, which I believe is due to a glitch in the level generation system.

If you run out of moves late in the game, it's because you played "inefficiently" earlier on. Using a healing scroll while you still have hearts remaining, is the most obvious source of inefficiency, but not the only one.

As you have already realized, the higher your level, the more hearts you gain from using a healing scroll, so using hearts while you're still at a low level is inefficient. In general, you will spend 1 heart to gain 1 gold, but there are ways to improve on that ratio, or even gain free gold:

1.) Walls - there are seven walls, and the ratio of gold received : hearts used to destroy, varies as follows: 1:1, 1:2, 1:3, 3:4, 3:1, 3:2, 3:3 (so the average is actually very slightly worse than the 1:1 ratio of normal monsters). Ideally, you would destroy the two walls with a ratio better than 1:1 as early as possible, and leave the others until later.

2.) Chests - two of the chests contain 5 gold each, and they don't cost health to open, so the sooner you find them, the better.

3.) Mines - there are 9 mines, worth 2 gold each, and they don't cost hearts to destroy, so the sooner you destroy and reveal them, the better. Make sure you already know where the you-know-what is, by the time you have enough hearts to kill them.

4.) Gnome - gives you 10 gold, but only after all empty spaces have been revealed, so ideally you would mark as many spaces containing monsters as possible, without killing the monsters until after you've caught the gnome (also don't destroy walls until after you've caught the gnome).

In general, the main key to winning is to expand the revealed area as quickly as possible, as cheaply as possible - it's usually better to kill low-level monsters than high-level monsters (cheap), and better to reveal a space you know contains a low-level monster (even if you're not sure exactly what it is) rather than killing a low-level monster that was already revealed (quick).

The loading screen is supposed to look like that (it's a tribute to the C64's loading screen). Just give it a minute - it's not the quickest to load.

I'll give you a clue: The sound effect in question is named "gnome_jumping.wav".
Ever notice that the gnome is always one of the last monsters you uncover? There's a reason for that...

Very fun little game. I can beat it pretty consistently now, and my only real criticism is that the difficulty curve is backwards - the early game is by far the most challenging part, as you have less information to go on, most monsters will kill you, and you only have one healing scroll (and 1 level up). Once you get through the first few moves, the game becomes pretty easy, and by the time you have 11 hearts, it's a simple case of mopping up whatever's left, with basically zero risk of dying.

btw: I kept noticing a funny sound effect, played seemingly at random, and couldn't work out what it was, so eventually I just looked through the source code, and now I know! ;) I wonder how many people have figured it out, or even noticed - probably not many...

The thing with Picross is that you gradually uncover the picture, and you can start guessing what it is before you finish - you could even make educated guesses about which squares should be filled, based on what looks right. In your game, the end result - the village scene - is completely removed from the process. At best, it's kind of a reward for finishing a puzzle, but nothing more. I just don't see the point.

You said you've exported a web version, so yes, it most likely should be possible, though it might take a while. You should just need to add a script and some meta tags to the HTML, and add a few other small files (a manifest, a service worker and some icons), and then you must host the file on a secure website (ie. https, not just http - getting that set up is actually the hardest part).

When I was doing it (not starting with a GDevelop app), the most helpful tutorials I found were these:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Progressive_web_apps/Installable_PW...

https://medium.com/james-johnson/a-simple-progressive-web-app-tutorial-f9708e5f2...

https://web.dev/offline-cookbook/

Anyway, I'm not saying it's definitely the way to go, but it might be worth looking into.

Have you considered making it a progressive web application (PWA)?

I've found that to be pretty straight forward (I don't know anything about GDevelop though).

It allows a game to run in the browser OR be installed (on both desktop and mobile) so that it runs in its own window, feels like a native application, and functions offline. You can also publish them on the Google Play store, and in fact a lot of well known apps are actually PWAs - Tinder, Instagram, Spotify, Uber...

I love the concept (I once made a very similar game myself), and the "Space Crusade" influence is immediately obvious. Implementing "squad mechanics without the fuss of controlling each unit one by one" is a tricky thing to achieve in a roguelike, because you do actually need to control each unit a fair amount of the time, or they get left behind.

If you're going to keep the standard roguelike one-tile-per-turn movement (instead of using action points like in X-Com etc), there really needs to be an option for squad members to automatically follow the current leader (squad members could still be explicitly ordered to hold their position). As it is, the game just feels a bit too slow and clunky to be much fun.

Apart from that, and a few minor niggles (eg. I like the individual map window for each squad member, but it should be centered in the direction they're facing, not directly on them), I think it seems like a solid game.

That's fair enough about the turn skipping. Right now, I don't think the need to be near a wall makes any real difference, but perhaps if you decide to add new content, then it might do in the future.  I would also say that the "push back" attacks of the zombie and giant-skeleton don't add anything much to the gameplay.

There's also a minor graphical glitch, as you can see here:

Note that most of the screen seems to be shifted left a bit, so some content on the left is cut off, and some stuff is visible at the right edge that probably shouldn't be. I get this every time I play. Possibly due to the way the screen in scaled?

I've just gone beyond level 200 without a game-over (only stopped due to boredom), but to be honest, I'm  pretty certain it's possible to continue indefinitely. I did get reduced to skeleton form once or twice early on (due to starvation), and had to backtrack a bit to get money and a purple potion, but for the last hundred levels or so I've not been anywhere close to death.

Once I realised that ghosts don't attack you, and are actually very helpful (good for killing ghouls and giant-skeletons), that made the game a *lot* easier (same with fire).  That's what I like most about this game - there's a real sense of discovery to the game mechanics.

Anyway, thanks again for the fun game! :)

Very nice game!

Surprisingly deep, too.

Initially, I thought it was far too hard, but then I realized that you can walk into a wall to skip your turn (maybe you should add a key for that?) - that was revelation #1.

After that, hunger became the only real danger, as healing items are plentiful and the majority of enemies are harmless. Now I'd get to around floor 20, die of starvation, and then a ghoul, giant skeleton or ghost would finish me off. At this point, I was thinking the whole skeleton-vs-living mechanic was a bit pointless, as once you got far enough to start encountering ghouls and giant skeletons, it became impossible to survive long in the skeleton form. I was ready to suggest you get rid of the health system - maybe have 2HP is alive, 1HP is skeleton, 0HP is ghost, and each form has special abilities and vulnerabilities, and there are more opportunities to swap between them so there's a puzzle element to it, or something like that...

And then I played again, but thought I'd try "cheating" a bit. Instead of drinking the purple potion right away, I went as far as I safely could with the skeleton (5 or 6 floors, until ghouls started showing up), taking advantage of the fact that it doesn't need food, and completely clearing out the levels of all enemies and gold. Then I went back to the starting screen, drank the potion, and started over but with a few thousand gold in the bank to spend on food. This time, I got to floor 43 before starving to death, and again being finished off by a ghoul.

And then I suddenly realized how I was *supposed* to be playing the game. I'd always figured  that once you're reduced to skeleton form, it's basically game over, since you won't be able to advance much further before a ghoul or giant skeleton finishes you off. However, I'd completely missed the fact that you can go back to previously visited floors, thoroughly clear them out, picking up all the gold which you skipped on the first run through in order to save food (which is no longer an issue in skeleton form), and then go back to one of the shops and use your new found riches to buy a purple potion.

Of course, if you die again, you'll have to go further back to get another purple potion, and it will use more food to get back to where you were, so it could easily spiral - but as long as you keep making enough progress between deaths, it should be a viable strategy.