ASCII Roguelike RPG written in SDL2 and C++11 taking place in a wasteland left by a Quantum Bomb called The Bubble. Do you have what it takes to become a millionaire? See Mechanics section for more.

Guide

Controls

Read the in-game tutorial!

You can also recall the tutorial with the G key.

It helps to be familiar with Nethack or Caves of Qud. But the general flow is this:

Press 1 to interact with items.

Press 2 to interact with visible characters (similar to Backspace in Caves of Qud)

Press A to pull up a cursor and look around the world. Interacting with items in this context will typically move them between yourself and the tile under the cursor.

Use these three modes as much as possible to learn about the world around you. Then, when you're ready to move, use the arrow keys (or HJKL if you hate yourself) to move around, SDF to use items in your "quick slots" (Light Wpn, Heavy Wpn, and Tool in the inventory), and Shift + a selection with the inventory open to use arbitrary items.

Mechanics

This game is very punishing and you will die if you are not careful. Here is a guide to some of the basic mechanics.

Staying alive:

There are 5 things keeping you alive in Quantum Bubble. Your head, your chest, your health, your hunger, and your thirst. Hunger and thirst should stay low, health should stay high. Don't lose your head, either!

If you die, you will turn into an "x". While you have lost, the dead are all-knowing, so this will also allow you to see past walls and get a better grip on your environment. Dying is a perfectly valid way to get a better grip on the map and find secrets. 

Being over 15 hunger or thirst will impose a status effect- Hunger and Dehydration respectively. Hunger makes you lose approximately every other turn by Stunning you. Dehydration blinds you. If Stunned, do any action to progress to the next turn (though you will do nothing, the game will proceed and your stun timer will count down).

Making money:

Your goal in the game, besides not dying, is to make $1,000,000 and walk off the edge of the map. Money can be made by finding items. Every item in the game has a value, ranging from $0 to upwards of $1,000,000. Money is had by having the items in your inventory, with the implication that you'll sell them on Facebook later. 

More valuable items are likely to make you more powerful, but even more more valuable items might actually burn to the touch, so look out.

Losing money:

The Movers are a faction of humans in The Bubble that own most of the items you find. If a box bears their colors, taking the item will put you in debt. Go over a measely $100 dollars in debt, and the Movers will being hunting you down.

To reduce debt, use the cursor on an empty tile to drop items. If a Mover can see the item being dropped, they will take it, and your debt will count down. However, Movers are extremely powerful, and you will likely die to fast to even do that if you are not properly equipped. Basically, unless you're stealing armor or taking out all the Movers in an area one by one, don't steal.

It's a cold world out there.

If you don't know what an item does, read its item description. If you don't know what an actor is, move your cursor over them or select them in menu 2 to see what they're carrying and their health. 

This is more of a "you're going to die type game" meditative experience yeah? My goal when playing, personally, is to cause as much havoc as possible before the feds show up. 

Credits

This game was made in a team of 3 for W&M CSCI437: Game Design, a semester course, over about 2 months. I was the team leader and did most of the programming, but this game wouldn't be possible without the rest of the guys:

Fletcher O'Brien - Did the great majority of the map designs and the pink vortex enemy.

Isaaf Harfst - Some items and enemy AI work

Jakob Tarbell - Early concept design for the Giant Scenario

Dr. Pieter Peers - Class professor. Feedback on design documents and advice on team management.

Command Line Arguments

Quantum Bubble comes with a variety of settings to customize your experience, provided through the command line:

--font-path=<PATH>: Specifies the relative file path to the font file used for rendering text in the application.

--font-size=<integer>: Sets the font size for text rendering.

--world-path=<PATH>: Specifies the relative file path to the world data file.

--player-name=<string>: Sets the player's name for the game session. Requires a string value.

--viewsize=<integer>x<integer>: Configures the number of tiles in the player viewport. 80x40 by default.

--seed=<integer>: Sets the random seed for procedural generation. Requires a numeric value. 0 by default.

--health=<integer>: Sets the initial health value for the player. Requires a numeric value.

--hunger=<integer>: Sets the initial hunger value for the player. Requires a numeric value.

--thirst=<integer>: Sets the initial thirst value for the player. Requires a numeric value.

Reflection and Future Plans

This game would have benefited a lot from more testing. The systems in place are very interesting, but don't get pushed nearly to the level that they could if I put more time towards this project. While I don't know if I'll be patching this game specifically, it's definitely going to influence how I approach systems-heavy games in the future, both because I don't want to repeat mistakes of scaling the complexity too fast and because my head is even more full of RPG ideas than when I started.