Dungeon Dream
Dungeon Dream is a combination of a Dungeon Crawler and the classic game Pipe Dream (aka Pipe Mania).
Place pathways which your hero will follow. Collect swords to fight monsters, pickaxes to tunnel through hard rocks, and torches to light your way. Watch out for pits and crumbled pathways! Find a red key before exiting through the red door. Your coins on exit is your final score.
Dungeon Dream (working title) is currently in development. Regular updates are expected and the following rules may be out of date.
Comments
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Interesting concept--from reading your description, I gather that the goal of the game is to find the key and make it to the door. And enemies and objects also occupy the tiles on their own layer (so they are placed independently of the pipe layer).
As all of this information could only be known from reading your description, I found it was difficult to know what the goal of the game was from just playing the game, so it was a bit discouraging playing it the first time. So I might suggest making your game UI more informative by having a more guided on-boarding experience. As a specific example, for the line-up of pipes, at first I didn't even know it was a line-up, and thought all pipes had equal significance. Maybe if you allowed the pipe icons to animate and move along a path, that would show the player that once you use a pipe segment, more pipe segments will come in (maybe even show a fifth pipe segment that is unselectable).
Secondly, it's awesome that you're making a hybrid of two different genres. Because the main game layout is designed as a pipe mania type of game, I think it's a good idea to introduce the dungeon crawling component gradually, both in a gameplay sense (e.g. introduce one type of object in the first level, then more in later levels) and also in the project timeline (e.g. in your first build, introduce one dungeon crawling element like the key and the door, then more elements in future builds).
Anyway, nice job so far. Looking forward to more updates!
Thanks for the feedback! Glad you enjoyed the concept :D
Yes objects and enemies are "randomly" placed at the start of the game, think of it like a scratchcard as you place pipes (or dig tunnels).
You're right that there's a lot of UI missing - and most of the things you touched on are in the plan. I like the idea of animating the upcoming pipes, that will definitely make it clearer which direction they're arriving from.
In terms of introducing the mechanics etc. the current plan is that there will be a series of levels where tiles are introduced one at a time. E.g. the first level will be only coins. On every level, the number of coins you exit with will be your score, which will then give a 1-3 star rating, then stars are spent on unlocking new heroes (with different starting gear or abilities). So each level will be standalone with the objective of getting the most coins.
What I'm still figuring out is how I could also make a "true" dungeon crawling mode, where the hero and any gear they have carry over to the next level (sort of like the game Hoplite).
Recently I've been updating the art - moving to a 16x16 tileset. Not all tiles are finished but here's a recent mockup:
Sounds cool. I can imagine how the stars/coin idea gives incentive to the player to take the more challenging route, effectively increasing screen-time, which is great. I also see that you're also using Game Maker Studio. For the inventory, some kind of resizable data structure would be my first instinct. I haven't looked into the data-saving functions yet, but the new GMS 2 IDE is pretty slick so far.
Looking forward to more!
It's an interesting combination of different source material. The high amount of different tiles that can exist make the game interesting, but also mean that the game takes some time to learn. But because of the interesting nature of it (at least for me), it feels worthy of learning. Some sound effects could always be nice to enhance the game.
I'd like to invite your game to take part in our Game Development World Championship!