Crystals of ZOXX Prototype

This was pretty much the first game I tried to make on my own ever, about 3 years ago (2016). I got pretty far, and actually it's surprisingly playable even now. It's all hand-rolled javascript, some absolutely bonkers CSS, and the art is from oryx design lab, with minor tweaks by me. It's just been collecting dust on my github, and I decided to sand-off a few broken corners and submit it to Fragment Jam.

You can kill monsters and collect gold until you die. After 10(?) monsters, you switch levels, which just determines which monsters you face. Monsters never level up, they just slowly wear you into the ground. Gold is not ever used for anything.

I had stupid big plans for this, including talking to monsters, buying items from merchants, some sort of endgame, etc. What ground it to a halt is that, uh, I didn't know a lot about programming games, and I made some huge mistakes when building it. I remember reading in some roguelike tutorial something like 'ALWAYS SEPARATE YOUR MECHANICS FROM YOUR DISPLAY' and when I was building this I thought 'yeah, but that sounds like a lot of unnecessary abstraction I don't need.' Hoo-boy, was I wrong. So if you're playing it and suddenly the turns start to fall apart and the game generally shits the bed, well, that's why.

Looking back on it, I do like this concept. I would like to revisit in the future. I have much better ideas of how I should build something like this. We'll see if I ever find time.