Overview

Bash and blast your way through a never ending series of progressively-harder dungeons while picking up elemental upgrades that fuse to make stronger combined elements. Tetrarch is a creepy action dungeon crawler inspired by The Binding of Isaac as part of the Jamlytics Jam #2 gamejam with the theme of fusion.

Thoughts

Please drop a comment on your honest thoughts of the game's potential, I'm waffling on if the game concept is worth exploring further. Frankly, I feel like the elemental fusion mechanic that originally inspired this game may have fallen a bit flat but I think 'The Binding of Isaac - but primarily melee' as a concept has some interesting potential. Obviously, it has some of that good ol' fashion gamejam jank (enter text-based status effects) but still interested in hearing any major bug finds as well.

Credits/Disclosures:

- AI: This is likely controversial but I think honest conversations on the topic are important to have: one of my goals with this project was to explore the strengths/pitfalls in leveraging AI to support coding. I largely let Claude run wild for the first half to see where it would land. The second half basically consisted of me untangling spaghetti for longer than it would've taken to write from scratch. One of my biggest takeaways was seeing how quickly AI can become a liability if left unchecked. That being said, I still believe it's an extremely useful tool worth leveraging; much like a tutorial, there's immense value potential as long as it's used to supplement critical thinking, but becomes a waste of time if the user goes on autopilot. If nothing else, this project was reassuring in serving as a concrete example that AI is not replacing strong coders anytime soon.

- Sprites: The sprites used in this jam were a mixture of my own creations and sprites from Elthen's Pixel Art Shop - check him out on itch or patreon.

- Audio: The audio was a hodgepodge from CC BY 4.0 assets that unfortunately are too numerous to list out but I do want to give a special thanks to @danielsoundsgood for the Deadly Kombat Sound Effects pack - it did a lot of heavy lifting.