Devtober 2021

Dragon Down jam comments

2021-10-09T07:25:32Z

Nice beginning to a game, several parts seem nice, and there are both animations and decent and clear graphics. About the look-ahead mechanism, I believe it might be nice if the view changes more gradually at the beginning of changing look-ahead. Currently, when you are facing downwards and going up a bit, or vice versa (all along the vertical axis), the initial view-movement of the look-ahead makes the view start of with somewhat suddenly move in the new player direction, while the ending view-movement is more gradual and smooth. I am not certain that I am explaining what I mean well. There are no issues for the horizontal direction, which may be because of the view being larger horizontally. It is currently possible for enemies and the player to be completely hidden behind obstacles, which I think is an issue. While it in some ways fits the geometry and graphics well, I believe that it would be a good idea to either prevent monsters and the player from going to such places where they can be completely hidden by the terrain graphics, or else give some graphical indication (like showing a color outline on top of the graphics for the unit that would otherwise be hidden). For this game, I could imagine that both the best and the easiest approach would be to simply prevent units from going to such places, for instance by placing collision masks/similar on tiles where units would otherwise be obscured - though it may be best to reference similar games and see their approaches. You seem to have a nice beginning to a game, though it seems like it could also have a somewhat large scope. About the scope: If you mostly just want something to work on once in a while, and it is not a strict requirement to have something very playable and fun for others, I think it is fine as is, and that can be useful in multiple regards, both for learning, experimentation, playing around, etc. However, if your goals include the game being fun for playing, I think managing scope, managing resources, planning, etc. would be a very good idea, especially if you are the sole developer/programmer. Since the game is inspired by SNES RPGs, and I would assume that SNES RPGs typically had teams of developers and other professionals behind them working full-time for longer periods, I think two approaches might be useful (though this is just somewhat superficial ideas I have off the top of my head, and they do have drawbacks even if they work as intended): First, to cut features, scope, etc. out from typical SNES RPGs while still maintaining the properties of the game that you would like to keep, like exploration and discovery, challenge, fun, story, etc., in order to decrease the scope of the game and increase the chances of success; and second, to create different "stages" of the game development, where each stage has something fun and playable and easy to share with others, while still allowing for continuing with increasing the game and its features and content with the next stage. That way, even if you do not reach all stages that you would like, you still have a nice and fun game from an earlier stage. I think a number of development processes for various games do this in various ways - for instance, some games split their content into for instance chapters, and then once deadlines approach, cut content from (typically later) chapters (or even cut whole chapters, with varying levels of elegance of the cut). Some game development processes also end up postponing content/mechanics to sequels. - that said, this is again just somewhat superficial ideas I have off the top of my head on how you could approach this. And if your goal is more learning, experimentation, exploring game design and development, having fun with developing (which is important in itself :) ), etc., these ideas for development might well be counter-productive. It depends on your goals as well. If I may ask; which game engine/framework and libraries are you using for the game, and which programming language are you using? (also, sorry for the long rant :) ).

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A jam submission

Dragon DownView game page

Investigate the mystery of the dragon!

Submitted by blackears (@blackears) — 26 days, 15 hours before the deadline

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DishGamesSubmitted3 years ago

It was a cool game that could definatly be expanded on I espesially liked the music.

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blackearsDeveloper3 years ago

More is coming. I hope to have my next update in a couple of days.

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blackearsDeveloper3 years ago(+1)

Thanks for your review, melvinwm!

I agree that what is currently posted is not really playable and is meant more as a bit of a demo of the game mechanics I've been working on so far so that I can share them with the jam. The cave map is something could use some tweaking to remove those hiding places, but I'll likely replace this entire level later on - it's meant more as a developer's room for testing monsters.

A full RPG would be a huge scope and while I would like to make on some day, for the jam I'd like to focus on something smaller like you suggested. I was thinking of something like Lufia 2's treasure cave where it's basically a push-your-luck rogue like to get to the lowest level of the cavern. Of course, that was huge too with many monsters. I do want to have something fun to play on Oct 31, so I'll probably need to focus on wrapping things up in the last week and a half.

I'm using Godot 3.3.4 with C# for programming. I'm not using any frameworks other than the Godot API.

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blackearsDeveloper3 years ago(+1)

I just realized that the file I uploaded was an earlier debug build. I've replaced it with the final. Sorry about this. Many of the issues you described should be fixed in this build.

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Devtober 2021

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