Show HN: An open-source rhythm dungeon crawler in 16 x 9 pixels
5 comments
·June 6, 2025zeta0134
Yes, fellow rhythm-based dungeon crawlers unite! This looks great fun, the tiny resolution is such a fun artistic constraint.
I love the way you describe the time travel aspect. My own project has to run on an NES, and memory constraints mean I can't actually store a previous game state entirely, so there are endless hacks and cheats to "rewrite history" after resolving most of the enemies in advance, to account for the player's actions at the last moment before display.
I can't cheat the beat timing though (drawing is way too slow) so I've got the beat judgement tuned to look less awful while being reasonably forgiving about late inputs. To compensate, I stretch out the animation timing on the following beat, so the early cels aren't weirdly bunched up after late inputs. It works well enough given the constraints.
It's fun seeing all the different approaches to this problem in the rhythm game sphere! It's way more complicated than you'd initially think, and games have all sorts of tricks up there sleeve to deal with it.
ja2
I hope you'll submit a presentation for Roguelike Celebration 2025. Call for presenters ends on June 30th. I know you don't claim the work to be rogue-ish, but it is, and would fit the conference perfectly.
90s_dev
> the Tiny Mass Games project, a loose collective of game devs focused on creating polished short-form games in two-month dev cycles
What software is most often used by these persons? I assume pico8?
jasonjmcghee
Very creative - the size means you could do all kinds of creative things with it- reminds me of "snake in favicon" and making games in a font with harfbuzz etc
sleepybrett
crypt of the necrodancer
I just released my latest Godot project, a rhythm-based dungeon crawler a la Crypt of the Necrodancer. The entire game plays out in 16 x 9 pixels because of a dare from my game dev group. I've open-sourced (MIT) the code and project files. Of course, the music files I don't own aren't included in the Github project, but I'm releasing the game's hand-crafted pixel sprites under CC0. The Github page also talks about some of the tricks you need to make the rhythm part of the game play nice with the dungeon crawling part.