Red Mars Digital

Deadly Dungeons

22 Jan 2018

Finally!!

As it turns out, making a game is a ridiculous amount of fun, but also takes even more ridiculous levels of time and patience. No surprises there I suppose. As expected, my 4 week time limit was overly optimistic - but 3 additional weeks later I am now able to unveil the first complete version of my SNES-esque 16-bit throwback, "the Deadly Dungeons of Baron Backslash".

              

www.baronbackslash.com

Although the game is fully playable (and very challenging), a lot of the content is still rough around the edges and in some cases not much more than a placeholder. This is particularly true of the sound effects and music - much of the former is very obviously DIY, and the latter was quickly knocked out over a couple of evenings without much finesse. There are probably also still plenty of bugs - I already have a short list of non-breaking issues that I plan to tackle at some point soon, and it'll almost certainly continue to grow.

Having said all that, I am pretty pleased with how things turned out overall! Given that I didn't have the first clue about basically any aspect of game development until less than 2 months ago, I'm quite proud of the way I tackled some of the trickier stuff - things like the creature AI, the level generator algorithm, the animations (well, some of them at least...) and the overall game engine performance.

Most importantly, and the real point of all this in the first place, the experience taught me a hell of a lot with regards to general, transferable programming concepts. Things like the importance of code organization, how to write reusable functions and classes, and debugging (so, so much debugging...). It also gave me some really good hands-on practice with object-oriented, pseudo-classical and functional design patterns.

So anyway, there you have it - this took over my life for the last couple of months, but at least it made it through to release. Was it worth it? Well, have a go and decide for yourself :)


Previous post: Game on! (01 Dec 2017)

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