An Adventure Begins!

Building a game can be fun. It's also a good exercise for creativity and there's so many different elements involved, from coming up with a good storyline and building characters to implementing gameplay mechanics and designing the game environments itself. Unity is a well-known game engine that is used by indie developers to major game publishers. Recently, I've been playing around with Unity for a game idea that I've been wanting to build for a while now. My experience so far has been good, Unity has plenty of example games and there's documentation covering most areas on what I need to know.

In this post, I'll give a brief overview of the game project that I'm currently working on and the initial ideas that I've come up with.

Introduction #

The concept of the game is that it's a fast-paced dungeon crawler where the main objective is to adventure as deep into a dungeon as possible and progress through a variety of levels with varying complexity and challenges. The player's point of view is through a controllable hero on screen. A hero can perform different types of movement actions such as walking, aiming, shooting and a special unique ability that can be used to help with progressing through the game environment. The gameplay mechanics are inspired by games such as Enter the Gungeon and Soul Knight. I am yet to decide on the type of art style for this game but I'm considering 2D, retro pixel art graphics that are similar to these games.

Premise #

The game world fiction is set in a starting room called the cellar. Think of the cellar as a safe area where the controllable hero can prepare their gear before venturing into the dungeon via a trapdoor. The heroes need to explore the dungeons, fight against evil forces and rescue characters that have been trapped. Once they enter the trapdoor, they will find themselves inside a dungeon level. Each dungeon level consists of several rooms, and these rooms may have enemies, traps or chests that can be interacted with. The further into the dungeon the player explores, the levels increase in difficulty. The levels will also become larger in size, and there will be stronger enemy encounters with different abilities.

Level Design #

Since the game mainly focuses on exploring a dungeon level, there will be multiple rooms per level. Each room will consist of exit points that lead to other rooms. The rooms will be designed to look like a maze, the purpose is to make it confusing but challenging to navigate through. Within a single room, there can be several different types of objects or non-playable characters that the player can interact with. There will collectable objects like coins (to buy things from the in-game shop), health potions (to recover health), weapons etc. Whenever a player enters a room, if there are enemies present in that room then all exits will be blocked off until the player manages to defeat all enemies in the room. Once defeated, the exits will be unlocked. The reason for this environmental feature is to prevent the player from "escaping" or moving into another room without clearing all enemies first.

Players will have a choice on how to play the game in their own way. They will have the option to take a risk and try to complete every room in the dungeon level to earn plenty of coins to purchase items from the shop or they can play it safe and move on to the next level as soon as they find the exit. These are my initial ideas on the game. While there's still a lot work to be done, I'm interested in working on this new project and look forward to posting updates as the game development progresses.