I first had the idea for the concept of this game back in Summer 2016. I enjoy playing action/adventure games that have fun combat mechanics and an interesting world design. I had just recently finished a playthrough of Shovel Knight and I thought, “This is a really great game. Why aren’t there more games that bring this sort of experiance to the player?” Another game I would compare Shovel Knight to would be the Legend of Zelda series. What stuck out to me was both games had tons of optional equipment to use but your main weapon was always reliable. I figured, if I’m going to make a video game let’s start out as 2D; can’t be too hard compared to making a 3D game of a similar scale. So I began thinking about how I’d want my game’s story to flow, what kind of events did I want, how would the player fight or interact with the environment, character designs, etc. I had even asked my friends on their opinions and what they would like to see and possibly incorporate those ideas. After about a year of just brainstorming I only had a rough skeleton draft of how the game would play out. Nevermind the combat mechanics, because I hadn’t even started coding to figure out if I could accomplish what I wanted to or not. The core concept of this game is there are 2 main routes that the player takes halfway into the game’s story, and depending on his choices you would have different boss fights and interactions. Ultimately I expect a majority of people to finish their first playthough with the bad ending, only because it is scripted to be more like a typical scenario; fight monsters. Of course I want to allude to the fact that after they are locked down the bad route that maybe there is something more to the “enemy” that they are facing.
It is the fall semester of 2017 and I just started ICS 485, a video game design course. It is here that I decided I want to see how much of my game I can make a reality. I was fortunate enough to convince 3 ACM students to join my endeavors. The hard part was getting other coders to join me… Luckily I had a friend who needed a team whom I convinced to join me.
I made a Discord server for group discussions and posts, Will made our “studio website”, and Londy, Mark, and Melissa made wonderful assets for the game. Ultimately our game demo for the class fell a bit flat. It was really difficult to give any person just a slice of gameplay that represented the entire game. The whole point of the game is built upon the player’s decisions. Still, it was a lot of fun getting things to work, and I hope everyone else expresses interest in helping me with the game when they have more time available.
My game takes place in a fictional medieval kingdom where the player is a young boy enlisted as a squire for the protection of the town. Throughout the game the player will meet other squires that are on missions like yourself to keep the kingdom safe. Halfway through the game, based on the actions the player has taken he will be shifted into one of two paths that lead to opposing endings. I hope that players will find their first playthrough unique to them and hope they try to replay the game for the other ending.
You can check out my public GitHub repository here and follow the work I’ve done so far. If you are interested in giving suggestions or offering your help or support feel free to e-mail me.
Thanks to the 485 class, I have my foot in the door of developing my game. Here is a link to a video demonstrating what we accomplished. And here is another video demonstrating an improved boss implementation that I finished a couple weeks after the class was done.