Songbringer uses letters to generate RPG worlds
Party ship
Oh! Songbringer [official site] - a procedurally-generated RPG which was first announced/spoken of back in the mists of 2015 - is now almost finished and is due for release in this, the Year of the Mammoth. I wanted to flag it up primarily because I don't tend to like pixel art and this has some lovely-looking pixel art/pixel art adjacent places!
As per the current press release:
"Songbringer presents a gorgeous procedurally-generated overworld with ten dungeons in 3/4 perspective. Players enter a six-letter world seed code when starting a new adventure, granting them the possibility to explore 308 million unique environment combinations – no adventure is ever the same, unless you share your code with friends: The seed codes generate the world dynamically and deterministically, so entering the same seed will always generate the same world."
Obviously it would be a bit of extra work but I'd have been tempted to do something special (either as a reward or a trap) for particular swearwords or similar so I can't help wondering if solo developer Nathanael Weiss went down that route too. Given he's the game's lone coder, artist and musician it might have been rather a tall order to add special nonsense like that in, though!
It continues with a smidge about the gameplay:
"As Roq, learn to utilize the powers of the rare cacti you will find in the world to see things that aren't there (or are they?): doors, items and other loot that can help you on your journey."
Looking at the trailer, I think the white-bladed weapon is probably the nanosword which is maybe a riff on a lightsaber, and the thing he throws out is the boomerang top hat, and there are bombs and other bits. If you're in the mood for some local co-op there's also the capacity for a friend to join in and take on the role of your robo-pal, Jib.
Songbringer, by the way, is the name of Roq's party ship.
