The Untitled Game

Developer Logs

The Concept

The initial concept for The Untitled Game (Yes, that is the current working name. It'll make more sense with the narrative), was about trying to combine the aspects of a 2D dungeon crawler with a 2D platformer in a way that I, personally, have not seen done before. Instead of taking design aspects of these two genre and putting them together into one experience, what if we simple use both in different stages and ensure mechanics create a seamless transition from one to the other. That was the starting stages of The Untitled Game.

Cohesiveness and Mechanics

The main issue with combining two types of games that have different control schemes and design ideas is that you need to make the two sometimes conflicting concept play together in a cohesive manner. That is why typically you would choose one of the types and add ideas from the other rather than try to create both at the same time. However, that struggle is part of the draw of this project and a challenge I intend to tackle.

The solution I came up with is the stages and keeping consistency in when the player interacts with these stages. For all exploration up until the dungeon of the stage, the gameplay is that of a platformer as seen in the image above. That means a sidescroller camera with lots of jumping and avoiding falling to death. This is to signify the player traveling through the world, something that platformers are well adept at showing. Once the player passes the platforming stage, they are then allowed to enter the dungeon of the stage where the game changes to a top down dungeon crawler.

In the dungeon, the camera changes to a top down view and the player now can move in all 4 directions. Instead of platforms, there are now rooms with enemies the player must defeat as well as puzzles they must solve in order to unlock the final room and fight the boss of the stage. Defeating the boss will clear the stage and let them proceed to the next one where the formula will repeat. The issues that arise is how to keep the two experiences cohesive. Outside of the narrative reason as explained with the platformer portions, mechanics is another way to unify these two different types of games.

For one, I try to keep all the keys the same for the two stages, changing nothing between them. The only thing different is the WASD movement and the lack of a jump in the dungeon portions. I go over some of the reasons for the keybinds in more detail in a dev log. The concept though is to just keep things as consistent as possible. Another mechanic is the combat and environment mechanics. For combat, it functions all the same with enemies that function essentially the same. Therefore, when switching between the two modes, the player doesn't need to learn two different systems which is essential to a cohesive player experience. For the environment mechanics, the thought process is very much the same. This gives the added benefit of introducing mechanics to the player in the platforming stages which gives them plenty of time to experiment and master before heading into the dungeon and face the boss.

Through these methods, I hope to make the gameplay fluid for the player and to give the player a new experience that they most likely have never seen before. With more playtesting, there can and most likely will be areas where there is room for improvements and I intend to find these and create solutions to them when I do. Right now, one of the main issues is jumping and how much of an important feature it is to the platforming portions and its absence in the dungeon portions. The solution to that is difficult to find and it may end up being a "bite the bullet" type situation, but that doesn't mean I'll stop looking for one.

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