THE GAMEPLAY PROTOTYPE!

As a few big announcements are looming, I felt it is a good time to share this great milestone during the initial stages of development with everyone.

Below, you can see the gameplay's combat prototype when the game was first being designed. I wanted to create a prototype of the gameplay to see if the game itself would be fun to play before putting more effort and budget into it.

The main goal of the Prototype was to test if the defining aspects of Defenders of Dwaca would be fun as a game. So these are the main areas that I set out the team to create:

1. Spells
2. Spell Slot System
3. Movement
4. Health (Hero and monster)
5. Monster movement
6. Monster attack
7. Gold collection

The list is in no particular order, but these are the main areas that needs to be tested before I deemed if the game was worth creating and sharing with the world.

The prototype is really simple, with a lot of bugs, but the general idea of the gameplay was there, and I felt it was fun enough to warrant more investment of time and money!

Here are the highlights of the gameplay prototype, I'll do a quick description of each them under the GIFs.

In the above GIF, I just started the arena, and so the first thing we see is the Spell Selection screen. This is only for the prototype, as Spell Selection will be done outside of the arena, and attached to specific heroes. (Don't worry, you can change your spells and spell sequence any time!

The Spells I selected are "Fire Bolt", "Fire Bolt", "Fireball", "Fireball", "Fireball". So you can see Ellie casting the Spells in a sequence during combat and she automatically targets the closest monster.

Fireball does an area of effect damage with some pushback. Fire Bolt does single target damage, but it pieces through multiple monsters! (You can see it at work in the later GIFs.)

In this next GIF, I cut off some of the long waiting times between Wave 1 and 2 and skip to Wave 3 through the magic of video editing!

In here, you can see the higher monster count and how different spells work to clear them.

Also, at one point in the GIF, a Gold bar drops and I went to collect it. You can use Gold bars to buy Spell Scrolls, Equipment Chests and hire new heroes! (Spell Scrolls and Equipment Chests are gachas to get new Spells and Equipment.)

And here, the difficulty ramps up to 11! Skipping Wave 4 and going straight into Wave 5, there's a huge amount of monsters to test how the engine can handle it. You can also see the life bar on top right going down whenever we touch a monster, the arrows also damages the hero if it hits!

After dying, we are given an option to return to the Main Menu or to restart the arena.

Overall, the movement itself feels a little floaty, so we've worked on that. The Virtual Joystick can also be used on any part of the screen now, damage numbers, UI revamp and tweaking still needs to be done as well. But the prototype fulfilled it's testing requirements, and I'm glad to say we've already pushed on and have been preparing a Prototype 2.0 with fixes and new bells and whistles!

Once that is done, I'll share it with you guys as well, and maybe we might run a Limited Playtest!

I hope this Dev Update is enjoyable with more insights into how Defenders of Dwaca will be played. Please excuse the quality of the GIFs, it's my first time creating it, and it looks like you can count the pixels lol.

Anyway, would you guys be interested in joining a Discord for news and updates? Let me know in the comments!

As always, thank you for reading, please "Like" the post if it's interested and you'd like to see more of this kind of content, and feel free add your thoughts and/or feedback, I'll be sure to read them!