The First Hero

The First Hero - Version 0.1 public demo release

The First Hero is a traditional roguelike - a turn-based dungeon crawler, only rendered with simple tiles instead of ASCII characters.  Dungeons are procedurally generated, and item appearances are randomized, meaning they must be identified fresh each game.  If you're familiar with Nethack, ADOM, or Caves of Qud, the gameplay should be very familiar.

There is an integrated tutorial to walk through basic gameplay, and tips that pop up whenever you change dungeon levels that introduce further concepts.  When in doubt, you can press Enter to bring up a command list.  Note that Numlock isn't well-supported, and it's recommended to play without it.

At present, the screen can be resized with some graphical glitches, and the main display can be zoomed with the mouse wheel.  Making the window narrower is not recommended.  There's not currently any support for resizing the text.

What it's about

The First Hero tells the story of the newly-revived God of Heroes who is trying to reclaim their power.  You interact with a new pantheon that's taken over, and send your avatar through world portals that take you to stories somewhere inside the multiverse where you can regain some of your lost essence.

Along the way, you'll side with one faction of new gods against another, deal with your brother Nemesis who has uncertain motives, and eventually use your mortal form to kill a god in their home realm.  Stories are designed to be short compared to most roguelikes, and often completable in one sitting.  There are optional metaprogression elements - all quests can be completed without equipping the essence you gain from prior quests, but it might be difficult! (Metaprogression is not implemented in the demo.)

The First Hero features spells and weapon techs based on elemental charges: draw water charges from a river to cast your water spells, cast them freely when near the source, and hoard them to use at the right time when you can't easily recharge them.

Each weapon scales differently based on your stats: a rapier grows stronger as your dexterity grows, an arming sword is fairly balanced, and a maul rewards raw strength.  Armor features both defense and thickness; if a weapon's penetration is too low for the armor thickness it's striking, it suffers an extra penalty to hit.  

What's included in the demo

At present, version 0.1 contains one story with a fixed setting: you're going into goblin-infested dungeons to slay the goblin leader.  Future versions will vary the adventure's setting substantially.  The demo has a tutorial, some other deities that can be interacted with to get some story, and a fully completable first quest that you can win.

The first story should be winnable in about 20-30 minutes, and players who are experienced with roguelikes may expect to win by their third attempt, depending on chosen race and archetype. This first quest is intended to be fairly forgiving.

Saving and loading are not implemented at the moment. They didn't make the cut for this release, and shouldn't be necessary for one playthrough.  Large parts of the UI are rough.

Look at items ('l' on the ground, or 'i' when in your inventory) to learn more about what they do.  Collect gold for fun! Shops aren't implemented yet.

Author's notes:

This is my first released indie game, and at present it represents about three months of work.  I've been working in the software industry for twenty years, but all of my career has been large-scale live-service projects.  This is the first time my name has landed on a "Credits" page.

Please report bugs to cookt@uw.edu, or coyotetraveller on discord.

I can't take donations from itch.io, but I do have a ko-fi!  I'd like a chance to think of myself as a professional game developer, even if it's only a single $1 donation for an alpha demo.  https://ko-fi.com/bigsagebeast