This week I've drafted the base animation for a my next game dev project; name TBD. The game's designed is inspired by games like Madness Hydraulic and HeartShip with a touch of Dragon's Lair. You'll play as Taigo, an elf hero, who fights waves of enemies in a magical tower in search of riches. After each wave, the floor lifts up, raising you to the next part of the tower without any scene transitions.

The animation below is at 512x512 and rendered in Procreate. The current in-game character size is 128x128, which loses some detail so I may not go as low.

I'm thinking the display window will be 960x540, which seems to sit well within the available page space. This was the dimensions of Party Land (HaxelFlixel game jam, prototype) and I liked it. At this dimension, if the character is shrunk to 128 pixels tall, the available space provides an area for the character to maneuver and fight waves of monster on one screen. Below is the current prototype in the current dimensions.

As you can see above, there's plenty of vertical and horizontal space to add items in the scene for the character to jump/interact with. The art is rendered initially at a higher resolution then downsized. If I don't like the single screen display (perhaps due to lose of details), I can make the tower level several screen widths and have the camera follow the player around.

I'm also moving away from tiled based maps to hand drawn levels. I still use the 2D platformer physics (no Z axis), but hand drawn map provides a more visually organic space (IMHO) than tiles. This seems fairly common these days and is easy to do in Godot.

Next week, the focus is player controls, starting with a controller first, then mouse/keyboard, and working out the physics to provide a smoother more enjoyable movement experience. This will of course feedback into my need to modify/update animations as needed. My stretch goals will be to add the first few levels of the tower with the raising floor.

For those that made it this far, thanks for taking time. I would love to get ideas or feedback as I go.

Cheers!

HaxeFlixel game jam was a fun experience. It's been a long time since I've been on newgrounds and jumping into the game jam was an enjoyable experience and a great reintroduction to the site. I'm extremely grateful for my game being front-paged and all of the feedback I've received!

Originally, I wanted the game to be about a plague doctor saving villagers from a blight. This would be a platform stylized in Mike Mignola coloring/shading. I actually put together a tile set and a main character with animations, but I couldn't accomplish what I wanted to do with HaxeFlixel in the amount of time. So I abandoned the concept and made Party Land. Looking over the concept art I put together, I think there may be some merit in dusting it off at a later date.

Plague Doctor concept

Going forward, I plan to work with Godot. As an old school gamer (since the 2600), I have several game concepts I want to make. These are mostly humorous takes on games I've enjoyed in my youth. As I hone my art/animation/developer skills I'll try to release smaller game projects built in Godot on newgrounds; maybe even turn this portal into a mini dev blog until I come up with a good name for a twitter account.

Once again, thanks for all those that took the time to play Party Land.