Hi everybody. Again, it's been a long time, but now the summer is finally over and I can show you some updates to the game.
What do we do inside a dungeon?
After completing the collision-handling code overhaul and while filling the lower dungeon section with life, I literally wondered what the player should do inside the dungeon -- besides walking around and killing monsters. For the upper dungeon part, it was okay to use find-the-right-key tasks. For the lower part, however, I wanted a little more RPG-like mechanics, so I added two non-monster NPCs in order to deepen the story (albeit a rather weak story). Together with the story elements, there is a puzzle that can be solved in order to gain a bonus on the sword.
The puzzle consists of a couple of stones that have to be placed in the correct order (see the screenshot blow):
An appropriate ending
The dungeon crawler challenge version of the game ended rather abrupt. In order to give the game an appropriate ending, I felt that there should be an end boss. In a raycasting engine, there is a natural size limit for sprites (since the ceiling and floor heights are fixed here, and also because the sprites rotate with the camera). In order to create a boss that is adequately daunting, I decided to create a lindworm / a dragon-like snake that is assembled from multiple sprites. It moves very similar to the snake in the original snake-game. The screenshots below show a first impression. I also made a short video of the movement of the lindworm (see below).
The Fire Of Ardor - Lindworm End Boss (Early WIP) (YouTube)
Ready for Beta-Testing?
The puzzle and the boss-fight are not yet finished, but they are the last two features I will implement for this game. When those two tasks are done, I will start a short beta testing phase in order to collect player feedback and bringing this game towards a release.
Thank you for reading,
Carsten