FAQ

Forum : https://forum.chaosforge.org/
Discord : https://discord.gg/jupiterhell
Reddit : https://www.reddit.com/r/JupiterHell/

First of all, diagonals were never a part of Jupiter Hell. The decision to only have cardinal movements was made years ago at project conception. The gameplay and graphics were designed with that in mind.

The decision was made to make gameplay smooth and quick. Only a minority of modern PC users have access to a numpad, and there is no solution for a gamepad that allows for quick pick up and play. No solution was found which would not require the player to adapt to some unintuitive control scheme. Hence, at design stage we decided to not have diagonals and design the game around it.

Any further discussion about this is pointless, because short of a full overhaul of the project (including all the level geometry assets and general scale of things, and full rebalance of all the systems) there's no way to sensibly put diagonals back in.

Jupiter Hell's major design principle is that there should be no case where an optimal way of gameplay requires a boring repetition or grind of a given task. If the optimal way of gameplay would be going to every weapon and manually unloading it, this would be a chore which doesn't add much to the gameplay. Circumventions like having weapons automatically unload on drop or picking up weapons that you already have instead unloading ammo have been considered, but each of those comes with further complications or UX issues.

While not by a wide marigin, yet that is still correct. Jupiter Hell is in Early Access, while DRL is a more or less finished game. Jupiter Hell is heading in its own direction, hopefully with your feedback! However, before we exit Early Access we intent to significantly surpass DRL in the amount of content, not only in graphics.

Roguelikes in general grow horizontally. The game is beatable from start to finish, we're working on more options, more tactical possibilities and more variety on every stage of the game. See the ROADMAP for more information!

The price of Jupiter Hell communicates that it's not a half-year development asset store based Unity game, but a labor of love, a development history spanning 7 years, and a lot of sleepless nights, an engine build from scratch for this particular game. It signifies an attention to detail and design, and to player feedback that is not present in more commercially oriented Indie games. It's a promise of treating players and their feedback seriously, both during the Early Access stage as well as with free updates after launch.

You don't. Facing of both the player and the enemies has NO EFFECT on any gameplay system - it's just visual fluff.

Not as much as you think it would. One of the biggest strengths of JH is it's animation blending system - the game plays as fast as you submit keys/buttons to it. For mouse support we will have to turn off that system, which will make the character move a lot slower than with a keyboard or a pad. We cannot speed up the animation there as it would look silly and confusing. That said, mouse support will appear in one of the later versions as an opt-in accessability option turned off by default.

While tactically it would make sense, and would allow for better planning of moves, this would however drastically slow down optimal gameplay. We want to keep the game fast paced. If one would need to analyze the order of enemy movement each turn to play optimally, this would drastically slow down the game.

We will be adding here more answers if the question start to appear often.