What if you found yourself in a basement with aggressive martial artists and clowns all around you? What if they quickly adapted to your style, specifically to make you miserable? And what if you couldn't stop smiling, while you were trying to escape?
A Smiling Nightmare answers this question exactly.
You will play as a nice, cute smile trying to reach the stairs to get out of a weird basement.
But it's not going to be that easy! In each room you visit there are going to be enemies going for your head (especially considering you literally have nothing else...)
You can use WASD to roam around the rooms freely. You cannot pass walls and you won't be able to escape a room until you clear all the enemies inside it. To do so, you have two ways of dealing damage: pressing one of the directional arrows allows you to shoot a shot in that direction, which will damage the first enemy it collides with, or disappear if it hits a wall. Instead, if you hold the spacebar while pressing a directional arrow, you're going to perform a swing attack that damages all the enemies nearby; use it carefully, because even though it deals more damage than the shots its range is quite limited!
In any moment you can check your current HP in the top left.
Once you've cleared a room, you can reach one of the open borders to go to the next one; enemies won't respawn if you visit a room you've cleared already.
The floor and each room are generated randomly, using a "The binding of Isaac"-style algorithm to generate the configuration, and a graph-based random generation for the room layout.
This is your escape from this nightmare!
It will appear in a single room when you've cleared it; reach it to escape and win!
These two are the enemies you're going to face in your journey.
The karateka will chase you down, trying to hurt you. Sometimes, he will also try to perform a flying kick on you; beware of the sound he makes and the position he assumes before doing so, and when you see it, prepare to dodge!
This guy is tough, so it's better using the swing attack to take him down if possible.
The clown instead won't try to reach you (even though touching him still hurts), trying instead to shoot you from afar. Be careful, because sometimes he will go berserk and self-destruct! Beware of the histerical laughter he makes and the green texture he takes when doing so, or you're gonna go out with a blast, but not in a good way!
This, along with their low HP, make shooting the optimal strategy to face clowns.
Here's the fun part: the game actually adapts to you! It will make more enemies appear if you are having it too easy, and less if you're struggling too much.
But that's not all! Depending on how you prefer to strike, the game will spawn enemies in a way to better mess with you: if you prefer swinging, you'll see more clowns, while if you prefer shooting, you'll see more karatekas! Also, the enemies themselves adjust themselves using stats from each room you've visited: the better you get at dodging, the more the clowns will shoot at you, and the better you get at escaping the karatekas, the faster they get!
Most of the sounds were produced by me myself in my room, probably scaring the neighbors in the process. The only exceptions are the applause sound (https://pixabay.com/sound-effects/search/applause/) and the womp womp (https://orangefreesounds.com/womp-womp/).
The sprites for the enemies were made by my friend DreamCharmer (Instagram: @_dream_charmer_); all the other sprites are royalty free images I am not required to cite.
The Isaac-style font comes from https://moddingofisaac.com/mod/1701/team-meat-isaac_font, while the other one comes from https://justseeds.org/project/justseeds-open-type-project/.