Dome Keeper is a Tower Defense Digging Game with Roguelike elements, developed by bippinbits and published by Raw Fury in September 2022.
In it, you play a Dome Keeper defending your Dome against waves of alien attackers, while using your down time between waves to mine below your Dome in search of minerals for upgrades and a mysterious alien artifact to bring home.
Tropes Present:
- Anti-Hoarding: The player can carry only a few resources at once before being significantly slowed down, often requiring more than one trip to get the loot.
- BFS: In Sword Mode, one branch is the Heavy Sword which makes swinging and shooting it slower but do more damage.
- Arrange Mode: While the game does have an ending, there is a separate Endless Mode.
- Boss Battle: Once the player picks up a golden box and places it in their dome, it instantly automates the dome's weapons and initiates a boss battle with the hardest enemies in the game.
- Death World: It doesn't take long after your Dome lands on a new planet for the local fauna to decide they've found something new to smash. And there are four of the areas.
- Down in the Dumps: The Land of The Orbs looks a lot like an alien waste dump. One of the earlier aliens to attack your Dome even appears to be sentient toxic waste.
- Gravity Master: The Assessor's mechanics revolve around their ability to manipulate gravity, courtesy of advanced technology.
- Hold the Line: The player needs to protect the Dome from increasingly strong waves of enemies, which arrive about every minute. The Dome can be repaired by sacrificing Cobalt, but it can't take a lot of hits before the game over.
- Job-Stealing Robot: The game has a special Automation mode which automates your weapons systems and helps you focus more on mining. The only reason you may ever have to upgrade your weapon systems is for them to deal more damage against the enemies.
- Resources Management Gameplay: The player can mine Iron, Cobalt, and Water and use them for upgrades. However, getting more resources often means increasingly longer trips underground under a limited time.
- Roguelike: The destruction of the dome means restarting, which randomizes the underground layout. The player can choose one gadget to be already unlocked at the new game, and if they already have it.
- This Is a Drill: Drillers are the tanks of the monsters. They're large, slow, and take a long time to approach the dome, but if they make it over, they sit down and use their heads to drill into the done. On the player side, Engineers drill through the ground with drills that are upgraded to let them tunnel through harder layers the deeper they go.
- Weird Weather: Sometimes, the player will come up from their mines to find that the sky is raining a suspiciously rusty red substance.
- Zerg Rush: Ticks attack the dome in groups of 20 at once. Regular enemies also appear more and more at later waves. Picking up the Final Relic in Relic Hunt has every enemy attack the dome all at once. You get an achievement if you make it through without dying to it.
