OfMiceAndMechs throws you into a broken world that lost its purpose. Its century old mechanisations still move on and grind everyone to dust who tries to live within it.
So fight, survive, subjugate and destroy. You are not alone though, since your mind control implant will guide you.
It will teach you not only how to fight through the dungeons, but also how to make the workers in your base give you the resources you need.
Here is a video of the cinematic intros to check the mood of the game.
In technical terms the game is not only a roguelike, but also a base builder and a factory builder.
You control an @ in a top down view, walking through an ASCII world. You bump into enemies to attack them, but also can do special attacks that fills up your exhaustion bar.
You do not move through a dungeon level by level, but have an open world setup where you can move freely. Your goal is to beat 8 dungeons that are part of the world.
A notable quirk of the fighting sytem is that you heal faster the less HP you have. This pushes the player to go to the edge of dying for free healing or spend a lot of healing items. Once you die your character is dead and stays dead. If you don't control a base the game is permadeath, if you have a base you can continue as different character.
So some differences to the classical rogue exist, but i think you see the inspriration. There are more features like ranged combat and upgrades etc, here is a video explaining that in more detail.
You take over a base relatively early in the game and it can supply you with upgrades, extralives and you need it to hold the GlassHearts you steal from the dungeons.
You can expand the base by ordering rooms to be built with different functions. For example you can build storage rooms or manufacturing halls for more walls. The workers will on their own be able to build and use those rooms. If you want deeper control, you can use a job-matrix to set what worker does what type of job with what priority. You have several ways to schedule items to be build in the workshops in the rooms and the workers will know how to use various stockpiles and machines.
If your base holds GlassHearts, enemy waves will appear regulary and you should build traps to defend against them or your base will be overrun. As long as there are workers in your base you will respawn as one of those workers, if you die. If a wave kills all the workers in your base you will not be able to respawn.
This is not als complex as Dwarf-Fortess or Rimworld, but i think you can see the similarities. Here is a video giving a more detailed explanaition.
What i'm really proud of is that this is not a special mode, but you can walk through your base yourself and use the workshops and actively participate in the base defense. Since managing the base and using the managment item can be complex an extensive help function guides the player through the menues.
The room you build have the systems set up, that the workers need to deliver items to the correct spots etc. But those are just prefabs and you can design your own rooms.
The core idea for that is that the workshops are not self contained, but interact with other tiles. For example a ScrapCompactor takes Scrap from the tile to the left and outputs MetalBars to the tile to the right. So if you want to ensure that the ScrapCompactor always has Scrap to work with, you can draw a input stockpile for Scrap next to it and the workers will fill it up. Similarly you can place multiple workshops next to each other to build a production chain where every workshop uses the output of its neighbour.
If that is not enough for you, you can also record macros. So you record yourself doing a sequence of actions and store that into an command-item. Then you can have Ghuls repeat those actions and operate machines for you. This is a turing complete system and since the command-item is an ingame item you can use commands from commands and even carry them around and put them in stacks etc ...
This aspect of the game is very optional right now, but available for the motivated. Here is a video giving a more detailed explanaition.
First off: A person that helping me out the last years dropped out at the end of the year, because of time constraints. Thanks for the support!
Most of the year was spent polishing the game. Basically i have been in a feature freeze for the whole year. This does not actually mean no new features were added at all, but only important stuff was added. For example a whole new endgame section was added, because the ending didn't feel satisfying without it.
In rough terms the year started with polishing fixing bugs and doing many many full playthroughs. Once the gamplay felt good to me, i imagine focused on the hint/tutorial function. The hint function can run in automode, until it gets stuck somewhere. So the next step was to fix all places the hint function got stuck and fix all the crashes it found on the way. After many fixes, it stopped finding issues all the time and the hint function started to complete full runs. I used that time to make the hints not only work, but also lead to interesting solutions.
That was the point where i finally got the person that was helping me to do actual full playthroughs. A whole bunch of unclear instructions and ways to get stuck were revealed and fixed. A full run was completed though and i started to look out for more testers, but the year ran out.
For 2026 i plan to do three things:
1.) I'll be looking for testers, process feedback, implement improvements and repeat. The idea is that while there is a lot that could be added to the game, it already a full run has about 8 hours of playtime and that is enough to start with. The priority now is ensuring the players can actually understand and enjoy what exists. There are too many deaths in the tutorial right now, but it is getting better with every test. Once a significant number of people complain about too little content, adding more content can be the focus again. The next big step will be a feedback friday mid-february.
2.) I'll be working on making the game more visible. If i want people to actually play the game i need to leave my cave and interact with people more. For example i plan to set up a steam page, an itch page, a new and simplified website, packages for different linux distributions and getting accepted into repositories. I'll also plan do dev streams on twitch and be active on various social media to push updates and talk about gamedev.
3.) I'll open up ways to support me financially. I see some potential in the game and i'm aiming to put up the game as early access on steam while keeping it as free download on github. I'm also looking into opening a patreon and similar things.
If i find the time i'll prepare a tile based mode and work more on alternate endings.
sooo ... if you made it this far thanks for reading and please test ^^