Game available on the team's Itch.io page
Link to the Game Design Document
Introduction
End of first year's project. Dungeon Scroller is a mix between a Dungeon Crawler and a Drafting game, made with Game Maker 2.0, by Owen Davies, Pierrick Charbonnier, Oskar Blandin, and myself, with a three weeks time frame.
We chose our roles based on everybody's skills. As such, my tasks were mostly : Game Design, Project Management, Sound Design, along with the Music..
The game is playable using a keyboard or a Xbox 360 controller, with a better control scheme using the controller.
Development
The basic idea was to make a dungeon crawler with some randomness, inspired by the rogue-like style. This meant a game with a lot of unknown and random in the foundation of the idea.
What the team though of was to get a "draft style" system. This means having deck of spells, in which the player randomly draws during the fights. It would then become bigger during the game, by regularly adding new spells. Along with that, the casting system was made to encourage thinking fast. As such, the player only has three spells at a time, and casting one also discards the two others, giving the player a new hand. This means having to adapt to the new situation after every cast, and choosing the best course of action depending on the options.
One of the consequences of this choice was the need to slow down the game. Indeed, there was a deep need to have a cooldown to the use of spells, due to the players having a tendency to repeatedly press the same key and stringing spells together without thinking.
This delay then influenced the Level Design : If the player has to think and take into account some time for their actions, then the game must be clear and not have too much action at the same time. This meant having large rooms, to allow some freedom of movement and hiding spots, and a low number of enemies, to avoid some situations where the player would never be able to do anything.
The feedbacks were positives, albeit with some difficulty from the players to understand the gameplay. Due to this, a tutorial room was added. It contains the basic informations about the control scheme, along with two training dummies, for the player to test their spells. Finally, there is a scroll on the floor, in order to teach the player that they'll need to draft, and how to do it.
Results and future
The final result got a warm welcome. The training room allowed players to have a better understanding of the game, making it smoother. The only lasting complaint was about the difficulty to understand what spells do without being able to test them.
Some tries were made for this. Mostly adding an explanation in the form of a pop up when you can take a scroll, along with an access to the deck at anytime to look at the descriptions. However, both these ideas were ineffective, due to players ignoring the informations. So far, no good solution have been found.
Le projet est depuis laissé en pause.
There may be a new version someday, made with Unity.
However, it's not currently a priority.
