Hello everyone!
I'm Jasen, the developer of this game. Thank you for visiting the page and checking out this announcement 📢
Let me introduce my game, Hundredfold: Hero's Ascent, to you all!
First of all, a big shout-out to the classic game NS-SHAFT — it's the inspiration behind my game, and I pay my highest respect to its creator!
Two or three years ago, I stumbled upon a video telling the developer story of NS-SHAFT, and it brought back some long-dormant memories. Then, at the beginning of this year, a thought suddenly struck me: what would this gameplay feel like if I added combat elements? Using a simple AI tool, I put together a web-based prototype of the game.
And so, the prototype was born. On the left was the gameplay screen — just like the classic 100-floor descent — but now you had to dodge monster bullets, and you could stomp on special blocks to deal damage to monsters or heal yourself. There were also special blocks like conveyor belts, spikes, and score tiles.
After that, I got my hands on Codex and started rebuilding the gameplay in the GODOT engine, beginning the process of polishing and expanding the game. I added more gameplay elements, more monster attack patterns, and broke the design down into several parts: the meta-progression system, the game loop, and the core gameplay. The most important part is the core gameplay — my current goal is to create 100 different monsters spread across 20 sections, with 5 monsters per section. AI has made my game development far more flexible: I hand my design concepts to an AI to prototype them. If I find it fun, it goes into the game; if not, I revise it or drop it.
Right now, I'm mainly enriching the game through monster attack patterns, special environmental effects for each chapter, block effects, and monster abilities. I've just about finished the third chapter (12 sections of content so far).
As for the meta loop, the external progression system has three parts:
Equipment System: Equipment can drop during gameplay and is mainly used to boost HP, attack, defense, and more.
Blacksmith: Forge equipment to improve its stats.
Rune Table: There are various items in the game, and the Rune Table lets you enhance their effects — faster item speed, damage to monsters, and so on.
For the main game flow, I chose not to include roguelike elements — there are just too many roguelikes these days!~ The focus is on the core gameplay experience, and the external progression won't have too much impact on the game flow itself.
Ahem — that's the design side of things all covered! Though I have to say, for me personally, the process of making the game matters a lot: I need to find the game fun myself in order to figure out which ideas are actually enjoyable.
But when it comes to introducing the game to everyone, my development process and personal experience suddenly don't seem that important anymore.
In that case, your experience becomes the single most important part of this game!!!!
View game pageI've already released the Playtest version of the game on Steam. This version is very rough — I haven't added much in the way of onboarding or tutorials.
Controls: A/D to move left and right, W to jump.
I'm mainly inviting everyone to try the game and see how it feels~
I'm also polishing the demo version for October's Steam Next Fest. I'll be adding a tutorial, English language support, and fixing various bugs with assets and layout!