Overview:
Dungeons of Borthez is a small asynchronous multiplayer dungeon crawl/arena game.
The game takes place in a desert themed dungeon where three heroes are running through trying to collect the treasure. While the three heroes are going through the dungeon and finding power-ups, a fourth player is fighting their way through another part of the dungeon increasing their own strength. The game takes place in two separate phases. The first phase is the exploration phase where the heroes and the boss (player 4) are traversing through the dungeon killing enemies to level up and collecting power ups for the second phase. The second phase pits the boss against the three heroes where they fight it out for the treasure of the dungeon.
My Role:
My role on this project falls in to everything programming related. The main goal is to structure the game so that it is easy for the artist and the designer to add more content to the game, and manipulate what they have added.
The typical run through the dungeon is made by the players progressing through a random series of premade rooms. The room generation is created in a way so that the designer can build the basic room layout out of preset pieces. After that they can choose locations for chests to spawn and potential enemy spawns. When the room is added to the list, it has a chance to appear during the course of the game. When players enter the room, they encounter a wave of enemies and potentially a chest. While they have the option to flee the room at anytime, it is better for them to kill all the enemies and get the experience in preparation for the boss fight.
The heroes and boss have differing play styles from each other. The heroes are wizards whose main attack is firing beams from their wands. During the course of the game they can find chests that contain power ups that change the type of beam they can fire. The basic types are healing, power, and spread beams. These beams can be used on their own, but they also can be combined to increase their effectiveness. The beams a created so that the designer can go in and easily adjust values on the different beam types to determine their effects, such as the damage it does, the length of the beam, the number of beams, the angle the beams are fired, etc… We wanted to capture the essence of combining weapons for different effects similar to Treasure’s Gunstart Heroes.
The boss consists of melee based attacks with lunging, a swipe, a ground pound/flop, and a shock wave attack. Using these attacks and the environment, the boss needs to out smart the player to get close enough to deal serious damage.
A set amount of time roaming the dungeon, all the players are dropped into an arena and the three heroes duke it out with the boss. Depending on how well the coordination between the heroes are and how much experience each side has, the arena match up can range from being a sweep to an intense match up.
The following video shows a play through of the game with temporary sound effects and music included.
What’s next:
If I get the chance, I would like to come back to this project. From testing and everything, people seemed like they had a fun time playing the game. Each round had people coming up with different strategies on how to take down the boss, and win or lose they wanted to jump straight into another round.
There are a few things that I would like to clean up with a second pass at this game. First the animations on the boss can use a little work. Most notably on the boss. Second, I would like to make the game more accessible. As of right now, four people are needed to play the game, since it’s 3v1.