Game Development

Ideas and Assets

Throughout the game development process, we started with brainstorming the basic idea of what our game was so that we could start to search for related assets in the Unity assets store. We started to look at dungeon crawling games such as Diablo to base our game and ended up with a knight battling skeletons.

We later chose the Dungeon Characters assets on the assets store to be our basic assets. The Modular Castle was used for laying out the world. We also include a few other assets to add some details to our UI design of the game. For each character in the game, we ensure that there are animations alongside our characters. 

We all split the work by developing our own levels for the game. Claire did the documentation and menu screens, Ziynou created the final boss interactions, and Andy created the player movement.

Developing the Levels

We wanted a tutorial for the player but didn't want a screen that simply explained what the controls were. Instead, we decided to tell the player how to play the game using NPC dialogue. The first few scenes were made for the player to learn how to play the game by using a dialogue box that the player would interact with.

For each level, we wanted to bring in combat and a sense of exploration. So, each level blocks progression by either having the player kill every enemy in the level or by collecting an item. The final battle would have an unkillable enemy chasing the player while the player has to finish the level's objective to enter a door and beat the game.

Play Testing

For the beta version, we have our first three levels: the introduction level, the first level allowing players to fight with skeletons, and the basic build of the second level’s world. We received a lot of feedback from other groups, the main one being our on-screen text being too small and hard to see during the game. People also didn't notice the dialogue box appearing during the tutorial phase of the game and recommended it be at the center of the screen when prompted. They also suggested pickups being triggers so players collected them by walking over items.

Our Current Version

In our current version, we updated the UI to allow the players to better see the on-screen text. The font size was increased and the font color was changed to white to be clearer. The dialogue box slides into the center, so the player knows exactly when they're interacting with the tutorial NPC. We completed the levels that we needed.