During the summer break from university, I decided to participate in the Brackeys Game Jam 2023 which lasted from 20th August to the 27th August where the chosen theme was Diving Deeper.
Given the theme I decided to make a short dungeon crawler loosely inspired by both Zelda games and also bubble bobble. I wanted to ensure to keep it simple by keeping a small scope, only a small dungeon with a final boss to wrap everything up nicely. The last solo game jam that I did was a narrative based game and it didn’t turn out as well as it could’ve because I think I overcomplicated it so I wanted everything about this game to be a lot simpler: Short and polished.
The game I actually made was a short dungeon crawler where you explore a short dungeon filled with simple enemies, finding keys and defeat the final boss to rescue your friend the rogue. It’s quite short maybe 5-10 minutes long and I definitely learned a lot from the project: Learning how to create an attack, using asset packs to make an cohesive environment, how to design a simple dungeon and really just how to keep a game relatively simple since that is something I have struggled with in the past. After I implemented most of the basic mechanics I had a lot of time left to work on the design portion, notably the actual level design of the dungeon. I decided to make a 1 layer after another so I could always add more if I had the time for it. I ended up with a dungeon with 2 levels, the first layer being quite simple with only 1 key and one door leading into a miniboss swarm of enemies after that the second layer has more enemies and is generally much bigger and ends with a more traditional boss fight. This structure worked well for me since I could’ve put the boss on a higher/ lower level depending on how much I got done.
Overall I was quite happy with the project once it was done and submitted, one of my friends played the game and then gave quite good feedback on how it can be improved. Armed with this new feedback I decided to improve upon what I had done previously. The first thing I did was fix a few minor issues that I hadn’t found beforehand like I forgot to put a do once node for the miniboss so it would keep spawning the enemies but wasn’t game breaking. Most of the issues were with the combat system and blocking, so I changed the block to be more generous for the player to use and added a lock on system for combat which allows the combat to flow better in general. The final part of it was about the final boss being a little bit too hard, so I decided to add more delays to the attack pattern creating a bigger opening to attack the boss.
This project wasn’t perfect though I think it was overall a good experience to participate since I learned a lot more about game design and what makes a successful game. I think next time I attempt a game jam I may go for a different style of game, currently considering an arcade style game since that would be interesting to try and attempt.
Links if you would like to play either of the versions:
Diving into the dungeon by ElectrodeO (itch.io)
Both are the same project with V1 and V2 labelled onto the executables