Towers of Vallas is done!... and has been for a little while now. I'm not ready to release it yet, but I am ready to move on to another project.
I started a full-color isometric
"Vallas game". While I got the programming side of things down pretty well, artwork and level design proved to be a significant hurdle. I started tinkering with my entry from
Stencyl Jam 18 and realized that it was refreshing to have new challenges. It's easier to think about levels in 2D space than 3D--and certainly it is easier to draw artwork for 2D.
I began expanding on the Stencyl Jam game... mostly for practice at first. I like the direction it's going now, and it's still fun to work on. Enemy AI is my most significant programming challenge. The remaining challenges are mostly design related--an area I'd like more experience in. It's good to have some personal goals for a project--"what would you like to learn?"
I do want to make another game in this series. I introduced a cast of characters in
Towers of Vallas. While this game would be a prequel, I can still add to the story. I
don't like the title: "Thief of Vallas". It's a working title for now.
One potential problem I thought about--would it make sense to have a mix of 2D and 2.5D/3D games in the same series? I don't think that, in of itself, is a problem. There are plenty of examples of series that went from 2D to 3D: Mario, Sonic, GTA... some with better results than others. Those that lost their unique characteristics met with less favorable reviews, which brings up the next question--what makes a "Vallas game" just that? Besides the graphical dimensions, what do the games in the series have in common?
So far there are two completed games:
Towers of Vallas and
Temple of Idosra.
Idosra may not end up being canon, though... at least, not as exactly presented. Reworking that one has been on the to-do list for a while. That makes
Towers the only completed game, although there were several incarnations of
Thief of Vallas going all the way back to my very first Stencyl game.
Here's the working list:
- Action Adventure. This genre has been a consistent staple. Towers is the most slow-paced.
- RPG Elements. All of the games, except Idosra, had some form of experience points and other RPG elements. I've purposefully omitted exp-grinding, though. There is a finite number of experience points in the game, and the player usually needs to clear an area just once to get what they need to progress.
- Speedrun. The player is rewarded for moving fast: a higher score, spare resources, or some combination was the reward.
- Books. Reading has always been the main avenue to advance the player character.
- MUD Elements. A nod to text-based MMORPGs from the 90's. The usual RPG fare is there: individual character statistics, lots of skills to learn and character abilities to acquire. Many aspects of the game rules come from one MUD in particular... one I ran back at the turn of the century... including...
- Style Points and Rogue Rating. Small bonuses at the end of the level (like the Smash Bros. "Special Bonus") and a rank assigned. The ranks have always been P (perfect), S, A, B, C, D. The perfect rating has always been 800. If you're a bit older and from the US, then you know the significance of the number.
- Secrets. Lots of secret areas to find. Towers has tons of them!
All of the "Vallas games" have been a nod to some past computer system. I have a Gameboy-inspired game, an 8-bit inspired game, but no DOS game. DOS was the system I grew up with, too! So my "new game" will use the default 256-color VGA 13h palette.
Here is a short video play-through of the first level. It's not finalized, though. In particular, some of the graphics will be redone. There are some tiles I'd like to redraw. I definitely will redraw the enemies. All of the enemies are using their original sprites from the Stencyl Jam 18 game. They should all be bigger than Marika--not smaller.
<![CDATA[<a href="https://www.youtube.com/v/7ccfJVXT8AY" target="_blank" class="new_win">https://www.youtube.com/v/7ccfJVXT8AY</a>]]> Getting a prefect rating is tough. One feature that was oddly satisfying to implement was the "Cool!" bonus that appears when you collect several gems in a row. There's a story behind that (of course!). I still remember in the instructions for
Commander Keen 4 there was a line about how some of the candy collectibles were arranged so you can get them all "in one cool jump". I spent many hours in my childhood trying to figure out how to get extra points by collecting all of the jawbreakers at once. Of course, that feature wasn't programmed in. But now I have it in my game!
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So be sure your game runs in windowed mode.
My wife is trying it for the first time and so I joined her. I write everything in TeX, so I won't get a word count until I convert to plain text at the end of the month. So far I'm about twenty pages in. I'm trying something new and writing a science fiction novel. World-building is a bit more challenging than I thought it'd be.
