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In this arcade game with rogue-lite elements, as a grim lord, you have to summon your army through the “portal towers”.

Many different minions from another plane can be conjured at your disposal. Hire the strongest armies and show the villagers no mercy! Reap the souls of mortals to increase your power. After the fight, unlock perks for you and your army.

Gather your strength anew and return from “oblivion” once again, for the doom you bring can only be set back, but it could never be vanquished!

Hi everybody, my team and I have developed a little game (which is in its alpha stage) and published it on itch.io.
Play it and drop some feedback if you want to give us some suggestions.
We will keep you posted with some new features and other stuff.

How we build our fast iterative design process

Problem 

A fast iteration process is the first requirement to develop a game meant to blend quick, old-school gameplay with a deep progression system. As far as game balancing goes, a single parameter can change the whole experience radically.

Meanwhile, game balance is in itself a tool to convey an in-game narrative and communicate to the Player the direction of the whole experience.

Hence, finding the correct settings to accurately convey the fundamental premise of the game (“evil overlord raising hordes of farm-threatening minions”), required a flexible yet powerful tool to swiftly cycle through testing and iterations until achieving the original vision, without the need to create new builds at every single experiment.

The use of a data-driven approach, through the power of the JSON-based dictionary, proved to be a reliable and efficient manner to tweak gameplay values and achieve (hopefully!) that “when the sun hits that ridge just right” moment every designer craves for.

Solution

Therefore, it was clear that prototyping using the Godot Engine was the right fit for us. The feature set provided by the integrated scripting language GDScript enabled us to implement our design vision. 

The Dictionary type and its JSON serialization support are the foundations upon which we have built the data-driven system powering all the gameplay logic.

 Every configuration parameter used by the grim lord, his minions, enemy structures, and enemy characters are dynamically loaded from an external JSON file and applied to every spawned gameplay entity. 

Moreover, GDScript comes with an effective property system. Using the _set and _get methods of the Object class is possible to update the parameters of spawned entities both during gameplay (through in-game upgrades) and by unlocking power-ups from the tech-tree system.

Conclusion

Among the many advantages of using such an approach, there is the possibility to have the designer working on balancing right from the get-go, allowing the programmer to work in parallel on new features, expand existing ones and enlarge the dictionary itself with new parameters. 

One small downside of this system may be the need for a designer to be familiar with editing JSON files and similar formats. On the other hand, this can be easily fixed by going the extra mile and creating a simple WYSIWYG editor based on the dictionary system (which can also be a good way to eventually open the game to modding and crowdsourced development)

We have received your feedback, and we have listened to you!

We've worked hard and changed some stuff, listed below.

Rember that, if you have some suggestions, you can write a post on our discussion board on Itch.io or Join our Discord Server.

Change Log 0.1.12a

• Modified in-game target system to randomly generate targets based on available buildings.
• Grim Lord portal towers now give additional protection to Grim Lord when active (including visual feedback).
• Portal Towers now have a visible health bar.
• Enemy souls now are colour-coded to represent their value (darker means a higher amount).
• Ranged enemies now have a visible health bar (this should make them more visible).
• Changed colour of enemy projectiles.
• Health increasing upgrades now adds to the current health points of the Grim Lord (and not only to max health).
• Added new in-game upgrades.
• Added incremental re-roll upgrade (In-Game upgrades have a chance to show up, so re-rolling increases the chance to get offered a rare upgrade).
• General game balancing.
• Portal Towers now damage enemies on spawn/despawn (thunders are directed at damaged enemies).
• Grim Lord minions are now semi-transparent.
• Limited the maximum number of spawnable ranged enemies during waves.
• Revised some upgrades cost and dropped soul amount.
• Added a how-to-play menu.