Skip to main content

Indie game storeFree gamesFun gamesHorror games
Game developmentAssetsComics
SalesBundles
Jobs
TagsGame Engines

Given that it's coming from you, the comment 'very nice 3D engine' is certainly high praise. Thanks for that! I had to make a lot of concessions to get acceptable performance on the GBA and I think there is more to go, but I found it surprising how few first person dungeon crawlers were on the GBA (especially given how big the genre became on DS later), so I wanted to do something along those lines.

  • Yep, this was a fairly simple bug, but it was introduced by changes made in the last ten minutes of the jam, so unfortunately it ended up getting in.
  • Enemies randomly drop one of two types of collectibles (equipment and spirit crystals - equipment for providing more damage / defense, spirit crystals for raising your stats and giving access to more spells), but there is only a 10% chance. This will be increased, especially for early foes.
  • The first boss has an overly high Magic stat due to an oversight when throwing numbers into a spreadsheet =P Also being corrected.
  • A total lack of levelling in the game is a conscious design choice - I wanted to make it entirely based on the spirit crystals. Unfortunately it means that when a tough battle ends and you get nothing from it, there was absolutely no benefit to you and that can be a pretty bad feeling. I would like to fix that somehow...

Thanks. I'm pretty happy with it overall, and I have short, medium and long term plans for the game (long term plans really being my original plans, which were cut short by the realities of game jamming =P)

If you want to keep improving the 3D engine, I think frame rate is already good enough for a turn based game, maybe it would be better to focus on adding more lightning effects or something like that while keeping the same or similar frame rate.

I understand that you want to avoid levelling, but in that case maybe it would have been better to add some/more chests, besides increasing loot drop chance. I killed way more than ten enemies and they didn't drop any crystal, and thanks to the bosses bug they didn't give me their weapons, so stat wise I was like at the beginning of the game.

I'm happy you want to keep working on this game.

A GBA commercial game similar to yours that I like a lot is Mazes of Fate, you should try it if you haven't yet.

It's funny that you mention that, because MS told me earlier that improvements to the lighting effects are planned. He also mentioned dissatisfaction with the random number results a few hours ago. Great minds think alike, I suppose. I like the idea of having a few chests around because there are plenty of places to hide them.

We've played Mazes of Fate. As far as we know, it's the only first person dungeon crawler on the GBA and we wanted to provide another entry in this underrepresented genre.

I think there's some Phantasy Star ports for the GBA and there's also an english translation for the GBA port of Shin Megami Tensei, but as you said the only non-port first person dungeon crawler that I remember for the GBA is Mazes of Fate.