Heroine! Making Making Levels Easier, and Reinventing Fire

Hello readers, this is the second devlog in a series talking about how we are going about developing Heroine. I've been really busy this week, so this one will be a little bit on the shorter side. Nevertheless, I hope you enjoy!

For our new readers, Heroine is a dungeon crawleresque game initially prototyped during the Dungeon Crawler 2023 game jam. This time our protagonist Joanne will be ascending a great mountain. Players need to learn and remember the the attack patterns required to defeat enemies as they progress through each dungeon and ascend the mountain. We are adding a lot more depth to the gameplay of dungeons and also greatly improving the art as well. Play the game jam prototype if you haven't already here!

Technical Log:

So, today as mentioned in the previous devlog, we will be talking about one of the ways we are planning to enable us to make a better game. Through improving our tools and workflow. By improving our workflow, we can reduce iteration time and therefore this enables us to improve our game in less time.

One of the tools that we are developing to this end is a map editor and generator. Rather then explain it with tons of text, here's an image from our editor which shows an example of how we can use basic 2D tiles to represent our game.

The arrows indicate the directions which players flow through the level. The character is placed at the spawn point and the players goal is to reach the flag. There are a series of layers, one for entities and one for the underlying map. This map is then used as input to generate the full map. (Psst: our actual game will not be this basic - don't worry!) This illustrates the workflow that we are planning to use so we can design levels and then create the art for them after.

Since every single frame and view of our game is handcrafted by our artist, this type of level editor makes it much easier to estimate the amount of work required per level in terms of assets and also lets us visualize more easily how the player will play this level. This type of workflow is a great improvement over our previous approach during the game jam which was to use a text editor:

This is hard to read, edit, and honestly is also hard to visualize how exactly the player would play this. We are definitely preferring to use this new version as we are creating Heroine!

In any case, here is a preview of our artist experimenting with colours. I would title this piece "reinventing fire". Please feel free to use this to clean your eyes from all the programming art we just saw! :)

That's all for this week!

Next week we we'll be sharing a redesign of our beloved Toomba enemy. Look forward to it! As always let us know if there's anything you want to see talked about or even if there's something you enjoyed/didn't enjoy about this weeks devlog.

ganthefan

LoFi Boi

NOX

Until Next Time!

- Demon Head Team