Dungeons and doors
Hello! I spent the last two weeks animating a boss, adding doors and keys to the game, and converting parts of my game’s adventure mode into dungeons.
Boss sprites
The game’s fire mage boss fight is fully animated! I’d like to add a few small visual effects to the startup and recovery of her attacks if I have the time, but everything else is done. You can see it in motion here:
Adventure mode dungeons
I recently built my game’s adventure mode as one big connected overworld, instead of the separate overworld and dungeons that you find in most other action-adventure games.
After building out the world and playtesting the game from start to finish, I came to the conclusion that this was a mistake. I kept wanting to be able to give the game harder combat, a larger map and more interesting navigation challenges, but the interconnected nature of the overworld meant that you kept having to backtrack back and forth across a giant map that was full of difficult combat arenas.
It was also hard to come up with enough useful things to hide in treasure chests. Aside from a few permanent upgrades (e.g. the jump ability), almost every single item in the game was optional. It never felt like you were exploring an area, and instead it felt like you just had to make a beeline to each boss fight.
Splitting most of the game’s areas off into separate dungeons would solve a lot of these problems. It would let me make the dungeons bigger and more difficult without affecting how hard it is to traverse the overworld, and I could add some locked doors and keys to the dungeons to make them gradually open up as you explore them.
I gave my old Chessplosion key sprites a bit of a polish, quickly made some placeholder door sprites by drawing a keyhole on top of a wall, and converted adventure mode’s mole-themed area (where you unlock the jump ability) into a dungeon:
I’m really happy with how this plays! I’m now building dungeons out of the rest of the game’s adventure mode areas, and then I’ll get to work on the overworld. Hopefully I’ll have more dungeons to show off next time!
Anything else?
My friend NomnomNami just announced her new visual novel Return to Ash! I'm looking forward to playing the finished game when it releases next month. Nami also designed my game's humanoid characters and my vtuber character, as well as drawing the store page art for Chessplosion and Ducky's Delivery Service. So if you like any of those things, you might like this game too!
Deltarune chapters 3 and 4 are out now! Deltarune chapter 2 launched a few days after my game Chessplosion and it was exactly what I needed to relax and unwind at the time. I can't wait to see what they've made since then.
A bunch of the VODs from the Combo Breaker fighting game tournament are up. Watching the Vampire Savior top 24 made me want to give the game another try myself sometime!
That's all I've been up to this week. I hope you have a fantastic couple of weeks and I’ll see you next time!