Indie Journal: Week 4

I realised that the potential of stealing abilities, of unlocking abilities, can lead to a certain type of game: a Metroidvania. The general idea of this genre is that you progress through the game unlocking abilities, and using those abilities to access new areas.  I feel like I can create that for my project - with enough abilities and obstacles, I could create a kinda of Metroidvania prototype. So, I went to go about it so I could unlock the abilities. At least, I set it so I could lock them and unlock them as I please through the use of a bool. This was in preparation for later use, when I implement the level and upgrades.

However, for the rest of the week, I focused on making more abilities. This is where I came to a stop a bit - it was hard to think of 'instant use, cooldown' abilities that would be unique enough to define an entire enemy. The first one I created was a simple AoE knockback - once used, any nearby enemies would be damaged and knocked back, and then go on cooldown. 



However, I felt like this wasn't too inspired - I wanted something that encouraged movement. I ended up creating an additional ability that would teleport the player to the enemy and strike them, repeat this attack 3 times and if the enemy died, would repeat the whole ability again. This allowed for a satisfying 'combo' where you kill each enemy one by one if they are low enough. This was exactly the type of ability I wanted to have - it even had obstacle potential, where you could teleport pass something to an enemy in range.



These abilities, mainly the 'blink slash', along with the tweaking and tightening of controls and movement became the majority of my week's work. I thought that after this, I would like to develop a new ability, but an upgrade instead of a captured ability.

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