Goal Line!
Darni on 2019/09/29 00:19
of Chaotic Elven Wizard
There are a million things that didn't make the cut, of course. A kind of game like this thrives in having infinite content, so it was a good exercise of figuring out what was critical and what could be taken out. There are only a few things that I could have added and were really a few hours away:
- Adjusting the parameters of each level to get more uniqueness from one to other
- Adding more kinds of monsters instead of the single "generic monster blob/thing" I ended up having (which could have helped a lot to the above)
- Adding different kinds of doors/ matching keys
If I look at my ideas list, there's a very extensive line of stuff that was postponed and I may do later:
- A magic system (the original character was supposed to be a wizard too) but the core mechanics ate all the time and spell-casting was a large investment (mostly because then I needed to implement a wide array of spells before it was interesting)
- An ability system, that can be received when leveling up. I wanted to give you in each level a choice of one out of 2 or 3 abilities picked randomly from the whole pool of abilities. That would force you to mix and match interesting characters on each play-through instead of thinking about "the optimal build"
- The two above would have allowed a class system (i.e warrior vs rogue vs mage).
- Walking vs running. one would include a search for traps to be more "careful", the other would take less time. In the end I defaulted to running. This was really simple to implement (use shift+arrow to walk, add a search in between each step), but I felt it would have been useful to explain and make visible the consequences of that to the player (i.e. feedback).
- Conditions (like poison, or curses)
- And of course even more monsters, traps and treasure
- For monsters I was thinking on a combination system to get more variety where you get a base creature plus an adjective. For example a "swarm of X" it's an X but harder to escape from, a "Giant X" is an X that deals more damage, etc. I also had plans for different effects for monster besides "you take damage"
- Tons of polish: On text messages, that sometimes are built with incorrect grammar, f-strings are great but not THAT smart unfortunately. Adding more graphics, visual feedback, floor tiles, actual walls, lighting, animations, ...
But all in all, I'm proud of the end result, and hoping you enjoy it!