Project: Esper is a traditional roguelike; turn-based, grid-based, permadeath. Your god has sent you into the earth with a single instruction: find their altar and present yourself upon it.
Descend. Take everything that isn't nailed down. Exploit every mechanic in the game. Die. Do it again.
THE LATE GAME
Traditional roguelikes offer depth of simulation and mechanical mastery that nothing else in games touches. They also share a flaw: power converges. Once you've assembled the endgame kit, builds homogenize, threats stop asking questions, and the remaining half of the dungeon becomes an attrition match against your own patience.
Project: Esper is built from the ground up so that the late game keeps asking questions.
EVERY POWER HAS A CONDITION
Item effects are driven by predicates: conditions that must hold for the effect to be live. The stronger the effect, the stranger the condition. A ring that shields you from fire if you're standing in water. An axe that hits like a battering ram, but only while something in the room is bleeding. A crown that makes you untouchable as long as a clone of it sits on a throne in another plane of existence - items that are subquests unto themselves, with a dozen new strange ways to be undone.
No effect ever shrinks your attack surface; it only makes it more esoteric. However powerful you become, something can still be done to you, and every fight remains a problem to solve rather than a formality to grind out.
YOUR ENEMIES HAVE CONDITIONS TOO
Monsters run on the same system, and they fight to keep their own effects online. A creature that grows monstrously strong while surrounded will summon things to surround itself with, then scatter the board when it's done with them. None of that behavior is written anywhere; it falls out of the creature's analysis of its own abilities.
Imagine a skeleton spawns holding an axe that paralyzes its wielder as long as it can see four other creatures. You're under-leveled and there's no winning a straight fight, so instead you start it herding: keeping the other monsters in the room alive and at arm's length, close enough to hold the skeleton frozen, far enough that they don't maul you, while you put arrows in it one at a time.
COMPLETELY RANDOM ITEMS AND CREATURES
Not randomized stat lines. Items, effects, creatures, and magic are generated whole-cloth, producing mechanics that were never written down. No amount of prior experience will tell you what exactly is in store on your next run, or even what could be. This is procgen like you've never seen before!
Perhaps an axe you can swing to deal 50 damage to the healthiest item in sight, at the cost of destroying itself. Or maybe a large, bony, four-headed spear-wielder with no legs, which teleports to its prey to attack and leaves curses upon their heads.
BODIES, FULLY SIMULATED
Creatures and the player run through exactly the same pipeline, which is why Project: Esper is able to push its effect space further than any other roguelike:
- Domination of other creatures, potentially any number at once, permanently if you can manage it. Assemble your own party!
- Polymorph across the entity type barrier: creature into item, item into creature
- Cloning of items and creatures alike
- Summoning arbitrary items and creatures
All of it interoperates. Dominate a pack of monsters, clone one of them, and turn the clone into a sword to wield in a pinch.
Your own character is assembled the same way every creature in the dungeon is. Rather than picking a class, you specify four independent traits for over 14,000 unique starting combinations.
A REACTIVE WORLD
Walls are diggable. Fire melts stone and thaws ice. An ice storm freezes the floor you're standing on. Every material responds to what you do to it, and so does everything standing on it.
SETTING
A high fantasy world where the depths contain any number of hidden secrets amidst the dark shadows. Some of the things down here are assembled out of body parts that don't belong together, and they are pursuing their own ends by whatever means are available to them. So are you. Allies are scarce, and life is all too fragile a concept.
CURRENT STATE
Project: Esper is in active development and currently in Alpha. The engine, the effect language, item and creature generation, character creation, and predicate-aware enemy AI are all running; which is to say, 90% of the hard stuff that keeps us from spewing out content.
Our first alpha demo will cover the first 5 experience levels, with roughly 75 entity types, completely random items and enemies, and the terrain system. If all goes well, over a series of regular massive updates in Early Access the game will be expanded to its final form with 250+ total new maps spread over 20+ total new branches and 4 additional endings.
WARNINGS
ASCII Only, For Now: The game ships in ASCII. An API for custom tilesets is coming shortly. An official tileset is much further out.
Independent and Unfunded: Esper is built as a hobby project with no crowdfunding, purely to create the game we want to play. The engine is good enough that progress should be fast, but a hobby project is a hobby project, and there is always the risk of it slowing or stopping. The roadmap above is a plan, and final results may vary. To avoid overpromising if content ends up being cut, pricing will always be based on the current state of the game and not on future planned content; so the price will go up as more content is added.
No Safety Net: Permadeath, one difficulty, no seeded runs, and essentially no cross-run persistence. We believe this is truer to the original roguelike experience and makes progress more meaningful, but we recognize it may be a turn-off in a game of this scope. We plan to include an "adventure mode" that allows respawning, with some lore disabled.
It Gets Complicated On Purpose: Late-game effect dependency webs are genuinely convoluted, and that is the entire point. If you want a build you can assemble and forget, this is not that game.
