Development Process

Our first step in game development was brainstorming a theme, a game feel, and general mechanics we wanted to work with. We wrote up a list of ideas and narrowed it down to our top 3 concepts: big city navigation, doomsday, and spooky castle. We voted again, and decided we would make a game in a castle where the player would gather elemental spells and gain new abilities.

Each of us claimed an element to work on, and a corresponding level for each element when it is introduced. Lambert worked on water, Yishi worked on air, Elijah worked on earth, and Jimmy worked on fire. We had determined what each would be capable of when meeting, but we were also given freedom on how to implement and animate them.

The original player and starting scene.

Design of the player sprite.

The earth testing scene: two patches of earth lay on the scene to help and inhibit the player’s goal of collecting spells. To the right of the player (the pink block) are a spell (the yellow block) and a door (the red block).

The first enemy sprite.

The water level was all about fast moving enemies. There were blue and white slimes. White slimes cannot be destroyed but they can be stunned for a longer period of time with the ice blast. The damage of the ice blast was not very effective against the slimes (the blue ones took very little damage while the white ones were completely immune). The goal of this was all about freezing the faster moving white slimes and healing the damage taken. This level was really about the balance between when the player should freeze the enemy and when the player should just take the damage and move on.

We also developed additional mechanics, such as the spell collection, navigation to other levels, hit points, and enemy creation. We debated between using mana and a cooldown, and decided to use both, depending on the spell used.

Playtesting

Our next step was to start playtesting. We showed our classmates the game, which they really enjoyed. The only suggestion was to allow for a more visible switching between spells. We added this to our game.

Spell selection.

Upon level completion, we playtested again, and found that our level difficulty was starting high and ending low. Because of this, we changed the order of our levels.

This game was created as an assignment for a game programming course. Our in-class slideshow presentation can be found here.

A more messy devlog containing our notes throughout the three weeks can be found here.