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A jam submission

Australian Pub SimulatorView game page

Get to your mates without getting knocked out.
Submitted by Timmy Graham — 3 days, 1 hour before the deadline
Add to collection

Play dungeon crawler

Australian Pub Simulator's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Innovation#374.0004.000
Fun#383.7503.750
Polish#503.7503.750

Ranked from 4 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

Successful or Incomplete?

Success

Did development of the game take place during the 7DRL Challenge week?

Yes

Is your game a roguelike?

Yes

Turn-based

Yes

Meta-Progression

No

Roguelike Elements
Roguelike elements:

Turn-based - player acts, then all NPCs and enemies act. Every move, attack, and interaction consumes one turn.

Permadeath - one life per run, no checkpoints or saves. Death ends the run and records your score.

Procedurally generated maps - every pub is unique in layout, name, rooms, enemies, loot, and traps. No two runs are the same.

Field of view with fog of war - precise shadowcasting (ROT.js) with persistent explored-tile memory.

Grid-based movement on a 240x160 tile map viewed through a scrolling viewport.

Inventory and item system - 10-slot inventory with consumables, tools, and passive equipment. Enemies drop loot from weighted tables.

Traps and environmental hazards - 9 trap types, including spilt drinks, broken glass, falling TVs, dodgy food, and sun exposure, placed procedurally by room type.

Status effects - 10 types, including drunk, wet, poisoned, sunburnt, and mesmerised, applied by enemies, traps, and the environment.

AI with emergent behaviour - a provocation state machine from passive to watching to warned to hostile creates escalating tension. Brawls can chain-react through nearby NPCs. There are 16+ distinct AI behaviour strategies.

Difficulty scaling - BFS from the entrance assigns difficulty zones from safe to easy to medium to hard to boss, scaling enemy stats deeper into the pub.

Procedural content generation:

In this game the dungeons are pubs.

Pub (dungeon) layout - 3 building skeleton types, corner, street-front, and L-shaped, built around a hallway spine, 5 anchor rooms, and greedy packing of 13+ secondary room types into an approximately 190x120 tile envelope. Each run produces 20 to 30 rooms from 18 distinct types.

Pub name - weighted pattern selection from 8 templates, such as "The [Grand Adjective] Hotel", "The [Aussie Town] Hotel", and "[Trade]'s Arms", drawing from pools of Australian place names, animals, icons, and slang.

Room furnishing - area-scaled furniture placement with patterns such as table groups, L-counters, and row seating, plus multi-tile objects like pool tables and couches, companion placement such as chairs around tables, and connected variants such as bar counter L, M, and R segments.

Enemy and NPC spawning - room-type-specific enemy pools with contextual placement, such as bartenders behind bars, bouncers at doors, and seated patrons at tables. There is a 10% bad day chance for pre-hostile spawns.

Loot - per-enemy weighted drop tables across 20 enemy types, plus per-room ground loot with randomised counts and placement.

Dialogue - NPC dialogue trees assigned procedurally from pools keyed by NPC role, name archetype, and room type.

Screenshots

Yes

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Comments

Submitted (1 edit)

This is quite an impressive game. I can't say i'm too familiar with the Australian culture and the slang but it seems quite genuine. It's crazy how each NPC has a different dialogue tree and you can speak to them like in a RPG game. There's a constant chatter going on shown with  floating texts. Game really has a very lively atmosphere and excellent sense of humour.

Sometimes it's hard to move around  bcs there are too many NPC's/enemies and the spaces are too narrow. Things can get hectic very quickly. Sometimes multiple enemies start to hit, i can't tell who is who, i can't find my character in the chaos. You wrote that there's a 10 slot inventory in the game. I tried all the keys on the keyboard and none of them opened an inventory and you can pick up items from the ground. I just couldn't figure out how inventory works in this game.

Also game gives you a hint that you can restore your health on a bar but it's pure luck to find one. I got killed until i find it. I think i managed to reach the Beer Garden's door 3 times but always got killed by the bouncer. I probably tried to beat the game like 10 times to no avail :) Way too hard for me

Switching between ASCII graphics and sprites is a crazy feature to add in a jam game  and it's very cool. I love your cover art btw whoever made it did a great job. It's pure 80's DOS game nostalgia.

I think it's one of the wackiest, funniest and most ambitious games of this year's jam!

Developer(+1)

Oh, thank you so much, Kozure Okami. I'm really glad you enjoyed it and thank you for the kind words. There are so many incredible games in the jam this year - I'm glad to have contributed to it. Sorry you had some issues with it - I'll have a look into this and see if they are bugs. The game is indeed very hard, but my hope is that people can find the knowledge as they play to turn the RNG in their favour :-). That said, I might actually tone down the difficulty a bit - it is a bit too brutal. I noticed that some players have finished it in less than 700 turns. To me, that is incredible. I can't really finish it myself!! 

At any rate, thank you for leaving the message, and it's amazing to me that I am able to share this little tiny world with so many people around the world. I also drew the cover art myself. It's based off a real pub but I traced it manually and then obviously changed a lot and added my own embellishments. The original pub image is in the credits if you're curious. I really wanted to capture the beauty and pure escapism of the 80s DOS era. Especially the Sierra era of EGA games. I used the PICO-8 palette, so it's in the ball park. 

Thanks so much again and I'll let you know if I can track down those bugs (sorry about that!).

Tim

What a wild game

Developer

Thanks for playing! Your mates will always be waiting for you at the Majestic Hotel, if you ever return! 

Submitted

Crikey! I grew up watching Neighbours and Home and Away, so the language felt pretty natural to me, mate. As a self proclaimed Master Pintsman I have had my fair share of dungeon and pub crawling experiences. It felt a bit like a Scottish bar brawl simulator (I'm Scottish), just with more huntsman spiders. I really enjoyed the conversations. They were funny and made it feel like a proper pub where you wander around having a yarn and maybe grabbing a schooner.

Developer

Thanks mate!! Glad you enjoyed it and found a publican kinship with the banter and the vibe in there. My grandfather was Scottish so maybe some of it is genetically coming through into this little bar brawl dungeon crawler simulating thingy 

Submitted

It's art. A terrifyingly genuine experience, enjoyed it far more than I could've expected orimagined

Developer(+1)

Oh thank you so much - it's funny how you mention terror as a feeling that comes out of it. Honestly, the more I worked on it and immersed myself in it, the more it felt like somehow a horror type of purgatory. Fun for the whole family. thanks for playing!!