Dragonfly Tavern

Dragonfly Tavern was my final project for my Bachelor of Creative Media Production at Massey University. It's a retro style top down action adventure game in which the player utilizes an elemental based magic system to fight enemies. This was a group project with a core team of 7 people and my role on the project was the game design lead and co-creative lead.

As a Creative Lead, I was one of the people who developed the original concept for the game and oversaw the guests concept artists from the Design Degree that helped with our project.

As Design Lead, I created the design documents for the project, designed the levels, and managed my department of 5 people including myself who all helped with these tasks.

The basis of the magic system is that each element that the player can use reacts with different parts of the environment differently. For example, shooting a fireball at a fire enemy will cause it to explode, but shooting a water bolt will create a cloud of steam. This added a level of strategy or challenge to the combat system depending on what combination of enemies are nearby and which element the player chooses to use.

The gameplay of Dragonfly Tavern consists of exploration of the three environments of the Village, Water Cave, and Burning Forest, as well as combat. We wanted to add some puzzles relating to the elemental mechanics but unfortunately ran out of time to implement them before the deadline for the project. This is something we're considering developing further in the future.