19th Weekly Update : Dungeon is (almost) finished !

Yeepee, the Dungeon is (almost) finished !

Creation of the Levels 19 & 20 has been very fast : their design is more classic than the previous levels, and now I’m pretty efficient to create this kind of level.

Level 19 has a big room a bit in the style of the one found in the Level 8 of Dungeon Master (including its never ending corridor, for the ones who have a good memory ). Its puzzle is a relatively simple error/try & observation one, although there’s a bunch of things to watch, so it shouldn’t be too fast to solve it. It’s the kind of puzzle I very wonder if it’s too easy or not, but hopefully, I’ll get some feedback from Beta testers.

I struggled a bit more for the Level 20. I wanted to do something a bit special for the ending, but I didn’t get any big empowered vision ; however, I managed to make it a bit special anyway : it’s a bit smaller than the other levels, with less mobs, but 8 Elite fights (an Elite is a very strong mob) where all other levels usually have only 1-3 of them. I didn’t create a puzzle for  this level. I totally run out of ideas for them. But I still got something pretty nice : I put a painful labyrinth, or more exactly a small but suffocating maze, where it’s very challenging to keep one bearing. So all in all, it’s a level that is very in line with the whole Dungeon, while still offering some nice variations and unique stuff.

So as it was fast to create these 2 Levels, I got also time to integrate 3 bosses & design their fights for the last Tier (ie: Levels 17-20). Once again, these fights fit the tone of the game, while having a few specificities : 1st one is a sorceress with special spells, 2nd one is also a spell fights but with a completely different flow where you’ll have to dodge some big AoE shadow balls, and 3rd one is classic “ads” fight, where additional mobs come into play with a demonist boss.

I hoped to start the final boss fight, but I had to spend a lot of time to work on the visual FX for all the special spells of these 3 bosses. I might delay its creation anyway ; I want to be sure I won’t change my mind about its design : it’s going to be very special, with several phases.

 

So now that the Dungeon is more or less done, the game as a whole is also not far anymore to be done. Let’s review the main things that still need to be done to reach the release state :

• Intro, Party Creation, End Scene & Credits : all these things won’t be too complex, but they’ll still need some time as they won’t be too simple either
• Test the whole dungeon & fix all its little issues, tune the boss fights so they are hard enough but not impossible, etc…
• Create the Talent trees and abilities for the 4 classes of the  game (each class should have 3 Talent trees) : that’s a big part, with tons of stuff to design & test
• Final Boss fight design
• Finish the GUI : there, the hard part is to find a talented but not too expensive 2D artist and give him clear instructions to follow ; functionally, the GUI is nearly finished
• Sound FX : another good bunch of stuff to do ; I’m still not sure how I’ll do that, but hopefully I’ll find some library with ton of sounds for RPG games
• Create a few additional abilities for the mobs : now a lot of mobs share some abilities ; it needs to have a bit more variety
• Visual FX : create all the visual FX needed for the toons & the mobs’ abilities (although a good bunch are already done)
• Loot : buy (or get custom work) & integrate the models for the items that still don’t have any model ; this one should be fast enough, as right now I miss only the armors and a few weapons
• Marketing : mostly create a trailer video & a Greenlight page for the game
• Bonus : if I have the time & mood for it, I’ll add some extra stuff & loot in the Dungeon

And it’ll be done..!

Ok, but before all that, I have something else to do : upgrade the project to Unity 5 ; right now, I’m still using Unity 4. So I hope it’ll need less than 1 week, but I’m really not sure where I’m putting my feet with all this, it could get really messy really fast.

I’ll let you know the result in 1 week !