Dark Vessel
An evil lurks in the depths. Only the bravest and more powerful heroes can hope to get to the deepest reaches of darkness. Yes. The more powerful the hero, the better vessel for the nameless evil to possess...
Made for Unofficial Defold Game Jam #2, though it's sadly quite unfinished.
Instructions:
- Use Call to summon different cave Dwellers.
- Use Empower to upgrade one Dweller per level to a boss variant with a special ability.
- The more powerful the Dweller, the more Essence an action takes and the longer you have to hold the mouse pressed to finish it
- Spiders and cheap, weak and dispensable. The Brood Mother will build a nest and spawn more spiders automatically
- Goblins pack a bit more punch, but even low level heroes will easily overcome them. Their Shaman will recruit both guards are diggers, who will mine for gold to lure more heroes to the caves.
- Drakes are an expensive but very powerful unit, capable of holding off even powerful heroes. The Black Drake is even harder to overcome.
- Orc clubs hit hard, but that's not the only reason to summon them. The Orc Shaman will build a summoning stone and recruit powerful Orc Cultists, who will worship Your Evil presence and rapidly replenish your Essence stores.
As the hapless heroes come across your minions, they will raise fear in the village. That will both increase your maximum Essence and lure more powerful heroes to fight in the caves. Your goal is to lure a single powerful hero to the lowest level. Should he be able to resist your evil will, you will be banished from the realm. But if you let your power grow, you'll take his body and be free to wreak whatever havoc you want in the peaceful lands above.
Oh, and if you press spacebar, a level 1 hero will spawn. I sort of forgot I left that in the game...
As I was trying to fit into the Jam deadline, I was forced to cut more and more features I would ideally want to have in the game, but I kept notes, so here's what could have been and may still be in the future, in no particular order:
- Villagers going around
- Day/night cycle
- Dwellers attacking village with various objectives (kill, abduct, steal gold)
- Bounties for dead enemies changing depending on how much of a danger each dweller type poses
- Direct interaction with the village
- Dark cult
- Sending dread visions to attract heroes
- Helping or hindering village growth
- Adventurer-based economy for the village. Have it grow as heroes use services.
- More hero types - archers, healers, mages...
- Adventuring parties sticking together
- Double (or triple) cave space by allowing actors to walk on the background
- Making it possible to descend to a lower level without going through *every single enemy* on the current level
- Using gold dropped in the dungeon to create cursed items to help heroes while corrupting them at the same time
- Raising undead
- Replacing some remaining placeholders with actual graphics
- Also adding tiny animations to everything
- Sound playing only from cave level the mouse is currently pointing at
- Restrictions on where and when certain dwellers can be placed (gold, depth etc.)
- DRAGON
- Using the lore text in any kind of meaningful way. Maybe it will fit on the title screen, piece by random piece
- Advancement from Nameless to Formless to Awakened
- Game balance =(
- Agitate and Corrupt actions
- Town portal for heroes to speed things up
- Death animations, was looking forward to fire death in particular
- More than two sounds
- Android build
- Essence represented graphically rather than by numbers
Credits:
GFX:
Gold icons: https://opengameart.org/content/gold-treasure-icons
SFX
Pickaxe: https://freesound.org/people/Benboncan/sounds/71823/
Coins: https://freesound.org/people/PetervH/sounds/324760/
Comments
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This is really cool! If I have any feedback it would be that it might be a little bit easy after a bit, I have hundreds if not thousand of units now and the villagers instantly die when they enter. I guess balance is probably the hardest part in such a game :) Anyway, great work!
Yeah. Unfortunately, balance was one of the things I was forced to cut due to time constraints. When you get thousands of units, the game actually becomes close to unwinnable (as the goal is to eventually let a hero through). The heroes definitely need some form of AOE attacks, otherwise throngs of spiders just eat them up. On the flip side, if you mash spacebar real fast, a swarm of lvl 1 heroes will easily go through pretty much anything.
The idea is to build up the dungeon to weed out unworthy heroes and eventually lure a worthy challenger to challenge you at the bottom, but it's going to take a bit more effort to make that work.
What it really needs is more focus on the loot dropped from heroes. A way to redistribute it to the lower levels so the next hero doesn't just snatch it up.
This is cool. Not bad at all! Some more "feedback" would be good, to show when you actually do things. That would make it much less confusing to pick up. Especially with the guys so small, it's pretty hard to tell if anything happened or not. I like how some of the different monsters do random little things on their own, like the upgraded spiders spawning more, etc. I like the idea of filling up a cave with "essence" and letting stuff grow out of that.
You gotta work on that wish-list though. It's not even as long as the game itself!
Yeah. I'm thinking of cleaning it up a little by adding a menu and improving the end game message, but the more complex improvements will have to wait until the weather gets colder =P