Sentient Edge
Take advantage of hapless heroes to increase your strength until you can defeat death itself in this Incremental Action RPG.
- Use the mouse to force your hero to move around, and click to make them swing you
- Defeat enemies to gain gold and find a shop to buy upgrades. You'll find more upgrades as you explore
- Kill all enemies to clear that node, clear all nodes to proceed to the next section. Just follow the path to find the next node.
- Your hero will heal any time you return to the map
- Be careful, if your hero dies, you'll lose any upgrades you purchased for them, but you'll keep your upgrades. A new hero will come and find you eventually...
- Move into the edge of the screen to exit an area. If there are enemies left, it'll take ~2 seconds to run away.
- Your hero moves slower and takes more damage while attacking and waiting for their attack to recharge, so avoid spamming attack.
- Your hero can fast travel between shops by using the arrow icons.
- While on the map, you can click the bottom bar to see a breakdown of you and your hero's stats
Design Document: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dMR1QEl3k0w5pcw4Irm3zjVLuULtn3D-dmgJ235kkEw/...
Credits:
Inspiration - Ginormo Sword: https://www.crazygames.com/game/ginormo-sword
Coding, Menu Art, Map Art by me (dwhiffing)
Map Icons and Upgrade Icons: https://piiixl.itch.io/1-bit-16px-icons-part-1
Player Sprites (With modifications): https://butterhands.itch.io/doomsphere-charset
Enemy Sprites (With modifications): https://hexany-ives.itch.io/hexanys-monster-menagerie
Menu Music - Suggest and Zippy by Context Sensitive: https://contextsensitive.bandcamp.com/
Game Music - Chilled by Purple Planet: https://www.purple-planet.com/
Various SFX: https://contextsensitive.bandcamp.com/
Comments
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"Be careful, if your hero dies, you'll lose any upgrades you purchased for them, but you'll keep your upgrades."
I'm sorry? This part is a bit confusing. What exactly is lost and what is kept upon death?
You are the sword! Each of the upgrades in the shop has a picture of either the sword or the hero next to it. Hero upgrades are lost when the hero dies. Sword upgrades last forever
A rather fun game, actually!
I'm not really sure about "Incremental" aside from being a condensed RPG, as you don't gain anything from the reset, it's just only a 'partial' one, but was still fun to play all the way through (even did it without dying in ~40 minutes)
Glad you enjoyed it!
I didn't think calling it incremental was a stretch personally, plenty of incremental games lack a prestige reset. Sorry if you felt it was misleading, and thanks for playing
Oh, my apologies, I wasn't meaning to suggest it was *misleading*, just a bit miscategorized. You are right though, there are incrementals that don't have a prestige, either at all or because the "reset" is something forced on you (see games like Increlution, Groundhog Life, Progress Knight, etc)
I think it's also a little fuzzier because it's an RPG, so there has to be *something* seperating the two genres for sanity's sake, but it's hardly a formalized thing!
Ah no worries, though I'd go all the way and say all RPGs with leveling systems have incremental mechanics! After all, progress quest is probably the first thing we could call a incremental/idle game, and is fundamentally just an RPG that plays itself.
Some genres are just vague. I call this incremental because it scratches the same itch other active play incremental games scratch for me. Us gamers like to call anything with a leveling system an RPG, but when you look at the history of table top RPGs, there's a lot more to it than number go up. Action RPGs on the other hand are very much focused on number go up.
I did want to add a new game+ where the enemies and upgrades keep scaling, but I ran out of time. If that were in place, would it firmly place the game in the genre for you? Don't mean to come across argumentative, just curious where we draw the line
Heh, that is a fair point, there's just a myriad of connotations behind the genre of "incremental" that an action RPG doesn't necessarily meet, even though it absolutely satisfies the technical definitions!
I'm not sure if the NG+ option would change where this game stands for me, genre-wise, although it's certainly interesting to try to think of *why* it doesn't change anything, and perhaps I'll end up with an answer that helps me figure out my design crutches and biases, but for now I unfortunately have to say "I don't know why exactly I have this opinion/stance, just that it is the conclusion I'm currently drawing".
Either way, I can at the very least say it was a fun game, unless someone decides to contest the definition of game or something XD
Appreciate your thoughts and kind words sir!