The Game so far...

Hello! Welcome to the development blog for Solo Quest. My name is Ying Fu and I'll talk a bit about this game I'm currently developing. Solo Quest an action-packed 2D hack-and-slash platformer that puts you in the shoes of a valiant warrior.  This game mechanics were also inspired by the soulslike genre as I wanted to try bringing those thrilling experience from those epic 3d Games into a more simple and 2D style of experience. 

This game is an assignment created for a subject called Game Genre Studies 2. In this subject, I have to build a game from scratch based on a genre given (Beat-em-up). Despite that, we were allowed to make it into a hack-and-slash as the class agree that hack-and-slash was an iteration of Beat-em-up, so I went with it as it is one of my favourite genre.

If you're curious why it's called 'Solo Quest', well in the game, you play as a solitary adventurer who has to fight enemies alone but it is also a reference to my game development journey in this project as I am the only developer on the quest to develop this game. 

While we had around 4 weeks to develop this game, I was only really able to spend about 5-6 days on developing this project due to other responsibilities and with that, a lot of planned features did not make the cut but well, let's see what we have.

Beginning with the player who have the basic mechanics of movement and attack, the unique parts was stamina system(sound familiar souls fan;)) and the block mechanic. Originally, I had made a prototype of a guard (reduce damage) and parry (perfect guard) mechanic but it was buggy as heck in the first iteration and looking at my tight deadlines, I decided to scrap it as it would have taken too long to refine it and opted for a block mechanic. The block mechanic is a 1 one-time nullification all damage so as soon as you are hit while guarding, the damage is nullified but you will stop guarding. Thus to stop multiple attacks, player had to keep tapping the guard the right time to block it(like a very easy version of perfect guard)

Despite wanting to give the player some really cool skills and ultimate, I decided  to against it and left him to be simple and 'humanlike'  in terms of game mechanics. Instead I focused on the bosses itself as the core experience of souls game is in the bosses and how memorable they are!

With that said, I created a melee boss with some rather unique gimmick and mechanics (play to find out) and wanted to create a thrilling close combat encounter with this design. This boss will constantly hunt you down and give powerful strikes and player have to overcome them. 

Another boss variation was a range boss this time in the form of a wizard, instead of chasing you down, he moves randomly and attack with homing spells which you have dodge while getting close.

Without getting too deep in their feature, I can tell you that the core design experience in both of these bosses was to make it feel player inferior to them as they have all these special skills, and you can only really fight with the sword and shield. Despite there is a way to beat even if you are just a lowly human and that is, i think, the core fun of a souls design as overcoming such powerful enemies that feels like you are not supposed to win against is just ecstasy and the state of focus in beating them just enchances the immersive experience.

But dont let that scare you from playing even if you are not used to action games, as I made it in a way that it can be easily win if you know the pattern except for the last stage which i do think is difficult but well, I think it's better to leave it as a surprise. *hint* those 2 bosses seem like they make a good couple, don't they?

Anyway that's all folks for this update, hopefully the next genre can bring in some exciting features (and not kill me from overwork)