It is not perfect at all, but it’s a pretty big expansion from where the course left us at the end. I would really like to move on to projects I am more invested in.
Things I added
Added Aggro/Deaggro range to slimes,
added secondary enemy with no deaggro,
two types of bosses both with special abilities(spawn more enemies on hit, and a flamethrower - I also had to create the lizard boss entirely myself! …it’s ugly :'D)
added food-chests for healing the player,
added spiked hazards to damage the player able to be controlled with the switches,
made music an autoload to prevent changing on scenes,
added houses, more npcs with the inside of the houses for them, more dialogue,
created ‘player reaction’ boxes so the player could interact and react to the environmental items,
created pets for the npcs,
created player pets as rewards that permanently follow player once received,
used more of the tilesets we were shown
and some more small things I’m sure
I did try and put a lot of time into it, giving it a lot of check overs (still finding a couple spots needing touch ups) and I’d love to hear anyone else’s thoughts on how it turned out.
Top-down combat like this always kind of sucks, but are the lay out for the floors and puzzles okay?
Eventually I think I’d like to further expand on ‘Riff and Raff’ as playable characters for dungeon crawlers and other games, and this feels like a fun place for them to have started. Other than potentially patching bugs, I’m not sure if I’ll add more to this project in the future due to limits with browser games. I do have plenty of ideas still if I ever decide to.
Thanks as always to Gamedev discord and teachers for making it possible to be on the path at all.
You did an excellent job here; while it’s definitely missing a perfectly understandable touch of polish here and there, this doesn’t feel like a tutorial project at all.
I think my favourite bit of this was the gate switch that needs to be pressed by an aggroed slime. That felt like something straight out of DROD!
If you were to expand on dungeon crawlers or similar styles in the future, it would be nice to have a way of determining how much treasure there is left to find, and/or have some unlockable help, as most games actually don’t do a great job with that. I missed one chest the first time around, and I wasn’t sure if Cataclopse, with its huge single eye and wall-phasing abilities (what a cool little critter btw) was meant to help me detect it somehow, like the underground fairies in Terraria. Supraland would be a great case study for that. It’s the only game I’ve ever played that struck the right balance of “we hid a bunch of secrets really well and you’re never gonna find them all!” yet you don’t need to sift through a wiki to reach 100% completion, due to in-game features that will help you clean up all the loose ends. It’s also an outstanding puzzle adventure in its own right. Here’s a 100% Let’s Play:
Thanks so much for your thoughts! That was my favorite part too If I had kept building the dungeon I wanted to find more ways to implement working with or using the enemies in the puzzles instead of just fighting/hazards.
Figuring out how to end it without just a ‘well done game over’ screen was hard. Giving the player ‘something’ as a reward was the goal and I settled on giving them a pet that followed them mostly out of ease. I wanted to expand on them further but started getting a little lost while getting them implemented at all. Making the second to last one actually helpful like those fairies would’ve been genius. Felt like I was overthinking the end reward for a few days as my first ideas were too complicated, so the pets ended up just being something to settle on for simplicity.
I considered receiving the Cataclopse as the way to tell there was still treasure remaining since the shaman confirms it. While I did briefly consider that the player would have no way to know how many they missed, if they were in the dungeon, what floor, or in the forest- I hate to say I thought the struggle of implementing ways to narrow it down wouldn’t be worth it for this project.
My failure comes from not at least taking notes on potential solutions for the issue though as I do agree for future projects it is something I think I should practice being sure to include. I always enjoy including collector elements to games and it’s an important QOL element to that.
If I ever get to make a proper update on this expanding the rewards/pets are definitely where I’d start on modifying it. Next to adding a way to track how much there is to find.
Thank you for sharing Supraland with me - I’ve never seen it before, but the style of gameplay actually continues to reinforce my dream game feels so possible. It’s looks and sounds amazing in what I’ve watched so far, I’ll likely watch most if not all of that just for the level design and mechanic notes. Lots to learn.
Well, then you don’t have to look further than the DROD series itself! To this day, I doubt you’ll find deeper, smarter, and more engaging puzzles anywhere else.
It’s all good - these are learning projects, and not meant to be polished to a mirror finish. I actually came to the same conclusion about the art/backgrounds for my Project Rocket; I put so much into the game objects and features that once it came time for decoration, I just didn’t want to do any more with it, and it was time to move on. What you learn from these small projects is much more important than the final result in any particular metric.
That’s a bit harsh =)
You gained from this project, so now you just need to apply those gains going forward. That’s how you improve. No stress.
Great! In that case, I’ve got another solution to consider. While pets are certainly an option (maybe a hiss/growl or pawing at a wall when you’re close to something), I also recalled how Paper Mario 64 handles finding hidden star pieces. The game itself is set up a lot like this project: camera scrolling, but still divided into separate scenes with entrances/exits between them. About halfway through the game, you receive a badge that will blink and beep each time you enter a scene that contains an uncollected star piece, but that’s as much of a hint as you get (it’s not a metal detector - it just jingles a little on scene change). No warning? Then there’s no star piece here - check a different scene. Badges equate to capabilities, most of which are combat-related, and you can only equip so many points’ worth of badges at once, so hunting for star pieces with this badge is still a semi-deliberate choice by the player. There’s also a fortune teller that you can pay (in a renewable currency) for more specific star piece hints.
Glad you’re liking Supraland btw; it really is something very special. Good luck with your next project!
If I had kept building the dungeon I wanted to find more ways to