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Game Title: |
RPG Town |
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Development Team Members: |
Tedo Salim Daigo Sato |
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Game Genre: |
Tactical Turn-Based Adventure |
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Brief Description: |
A 2-D Isometric world where the player takes on the role of a dungeon explorer. In the dungeon the player will encounter various monsters and he needs to use the magical skill cards in order to survive. |
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Overview |
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Game Story / Objective: |
The player plays as a dungeon explorer, searching the dungeon to find the murderer of his friend eAnikif, she had spent a long time searching for this dungeon in which Diabolos, the main villain resides. Now the player has to guide our hero for her final encounter with Diabolos. |
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Game Mechanics + Controls: |
The game adapts the re-active turn-based system adopted by the Mysterious Dungeon game titles. This system means that every turn the player takes, the monsters will take theirs, and if the player doesnft do anything then the monsters turn will have to wait. This is just like any other turn-based systems, however we give the player less wait time so he/she does not feel the rigidness of the usual turn-based game. |
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Technology: |
Isometric World Random Dungeon Generator Rotating UI for card selecting A*/Breadth First Search pathfindings |
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Aesthetics: |
We decide to go for old-school pixel art for this game. As the actual resolution is only 320 by 240, the game can be very pixelized when set to full screen mode, which creates the old-school feeling for the game. Some of the art assets we made by ourselves, namely the map tilesets, cards, both UI and on the map, UI experience points gauge. Others we took from various games ripped by www.spriters-resource.com. The background music is all original as they were provided by a friend composer. |
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Media |
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Screenshots: |
Include (or link) one or more of your favorite screenshots. |
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(Optional) Download: |
Coming Soon. |
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Development Summary |
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CODE: |
The only 3rd party library we used is Star Ruby. All other code were made by us. |
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CONTENT: |
Character sprites are taken from www.spriters-resource.com. UI, effect and tilemaps are original creations. Sound effects are free-to-use from www.sounddogs.com. Background music are created by Yousuke Torii, a friend of Daigo. |
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Reflections |
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Three Greatest Challenges: |
Random Dungeon Generator We followed the approach of the old PC game Rogue. So at first we divide the map into sections, and in each section we create a room. After that is done, we link each of the rooms together. Pathfinding A* pathfinding is an expensive algorithm. Due to the number of times we need to do pathfinding, we needed to optimize it in order for the game to run decently. We solved this by dividing the search into rooms, which is convenient for us as we already have it from the random dungeon generator. Isometric Isometric is a concept of faking depth on a 2D plane, so there were a lot of hacks and tweakings, which are very unintuitive. |
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Three things that went right: |
StarRuby is a 2D game library using the Ruby scripting language. We felt that the development process is heavily facilitated by the simplicity and efficiency of the both the library and the language. Programming features have been very quick and easy, so the actual time from idea to actual implementation of it is much reduced, which also helped a lot in keeping morale and excitement high. Motivation Throughout the longwinded development of the game, we never felt sick of it and thoroughly enjoyed the creation process. This is one of the major factors that made the game turn out as polished as it is. The reason for that is game design, we both loved old-school 2D adventure games on the SNES, and this game is in a lot of ways a reminiscent of those games. Every feature that we implemented and see in the game drove us more. So this gave us the extra boost to make this game as good as it. |
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Three things that went wrong: |
Design Process In the beginning, we spent too much effort in trying to make the idea as innovative as possible. This led us to wild, out-of-the-box ideas. However these ideas were in most cases complex or heavy in scope. The idea that we initially settled on was interesting and innovative, however we struggled a lot to keep it feasible. |
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Other final thoughts: |
Do not innovate for innovationfs sake. We are not saying that innovation is not good, just that these things you cannot force. If you have an innovative idea, go for it! However, innovation is not required for a fun game. Making games for yourself is fun. Many times people say game designers should not design games for themselves. That is perfectly true as there are a lot of factors you need to take into consideration when making a game that you want to sell and earn money from, e.g. Target Audience, Market, etc. However, designing and making games that you truly want to make can be very rewarding sometimes. This is what I think the definition of an independent game is. Isometric is decorational. When we designed the game in the beginning, we were very certain of having it isometric. It is not until later that we realized even if the outcome looked great, it created a lot of technical challenges that we could have avoided if we just went simple top-down, and that the game would not have looked much worse either. So this advice is actually very general: Think carefully about features that you want to add in your game. Think about how much value it adds, and also alternatives for it. |