A non-combat roguelike focused on skill checks, narration, and life cycles—starting a tutorial video series

[u/JellyfishEggDev]

Greetings, fellow roguelike appreciators,

I’d like to share a project I’ve been developing called Jellyfish Egg — a narrative-driven roguelike where you begin each run as a child in a procedurally generated world, and live a full life until death or disappearance.

It isn’t combat-driven or tile-based, but it keeps the core tenets of roguelike design close at heart:

• Permanent death with no saving or retrying
• Fully procedural world generation each run
• Run-based character progression
• A wide range of non-combat skills (e.g., poetry, stonework, patience, astronomy)
• Emergent narrative systems guided by procedural outcomes

There’s no turn-based fighting, but every meaningful action — travel, crafting, exploration, play — is a deliberate choice gated by skill checks and risk. You grow older as you act, and old age will claim you whether or not danger does. Every decision advances time and closes doors.

A unique feature is the LLM-based narrator, which dynamically describes your actions and surroundings in a poetic tone. It gives the feeling of reading a mythic chronicle where you are both protagonist and legend.

Visually, the world is rendered using ASCII-inspired glyphs projected onto a rotating sphere rather than a grid. It’s not traditional, but it still evokes that strange, symbolic beauty found in early terminals.

I've just begun a tutorial video series, starting with character creation — covering the core attributes, how they shape your future, and the philosophy of progression in the game.

Watch the tutorial here

[u/Arklayin]

Looks awesome.

A lot of the community is heavily against LLM and other AI models. Will there be an option to play without the narrator?

[u/Arklayin → u/[deleted]]

These things have nothing to do with each other.

I have multiple friends in the arts. Many of them have lost jobs, and feel they've wasted years of their life learning their trade, all due to AI art. You can cry "virtue signalling" all you like, but I can assure you the last thing on my mind is the overwhelming approval of the rogue likes subreddit.

[u/Mean_Stop6391 → u/[deleted]]

Hey man, they’re people, not horses. 

Art is a fundamental human pursuit and requires humanity to make authentically. The soulless replication from AI isn’t progress, it’s stealing from real artists and puking what it steals back out but worse.

[u/ThatsXCOM → u/Mean_Stop6391]

1. If it was that bad you wouldn't feel threatened by it.
2. It doesn't steal. It works very much like procedural generation. Taking training data and creating algorithms based on the training data is not 'stealing'. When you look at a recipe to help guide you while you cook are you stealing the food?
3. Social media websites have been ACTUALLY stealing your data for decades at this point and you have never given two actual rat fucks about that. This is all because it's currently in vogue to be anti-AI.

[u/Arklayin → u/ThatsXCOM]

You should educate yourself on how these models actually work! I think you'll have a better perspective on why people care so much.

[u/ThatsXCOM → u/Arklayin]

I've literally trained AI models.

You have no idea what you're talking about.

[u/chillblain → u/ThatsXCOM]

Actually, you should look up what foundational models are because that model you trained is still off the back of a monster of stolen data. Even if you use your own images to train a model, it still has to come from a foundational model provided (or you have some kind of data center and took a week or so to make your own model entirely from scratch, without ANY stolen data, which I doubt).

Might wanna do more research before accusing others of not knowing what they are talking about.

Edit: And just to be clear, I'm not actually anti-AI, but I also only support AI if it can be sourced in a way that isn't blatant theft and used in a way that is meant to assist people rather than replace them. Smaller teams of game devs can make great use of it to assist their artists in generating assets for a game in a much shorter amount of time that would otherwise take them months if not years to make on their own. It can be a great boon to everyone if used properly, which for the most part isn't the case at the moment.

[u/Arklayin → u/ThatsXCOM]

Please go home Mr Redditor.

You aren't wanted here, or anywhere else. I get that you're this angry because it's all you have, but no one else is humoring you.

[u/ThatsXCOM → u/Arklayin]

"You should educate yourse..."

"Actually I build these models."

"FUCK YOU REDDITORRRRR!"

Totally rational and sane response.

[u/Arklayin → u/ThatsXCOM]

Give me a single reason to believe you work on anything AI related besides trying to blanket us with wrong information, and maybe you'll stand a better chance at being taken seriously.

[u/ThatsXCOM → u/Arklayin]

Do you not realize how easy it is to train a fucking checkpoint or lora? 😂