One Eye Open - graduation project

So this is my (unfinished) graduation project which I worked on solo during winter 2021 for 4 weeks.

For my graduation project I wanted to try something I had not done before but also found interesting. So, I decided to try my hand at a turn-based adventure game. I wish I could have completed at least a demo for this game but not so surprisingly, 4 weeks goes by very quickly especially when I'm not the greatest programmer (yet).

Style

before starting this project, I had recently played Inscryption and really loved the gritty and old looking style and as I am already a fan of gritty dark fantasy, I wanted to try and replicate it for myself. After adding a bunch of aftereffects and descaling the resolution I was surprised by how good it looks.

Combat

The combat was a big hurdle for me both design wise and programming wise. I stuck with turned-based combat instead of something like an auto battler because it’s more structured and felt safer to prototype.
Now one big problem I had with this combat was that I needed a way to make the player's choice matter, so it wasn't just a game where you spam the attack button to win.

I had an idea of making it like rock paper scissors, this would give the actions agency, but I had trouble thinking of how to implement RPG elements into it and I didn't want the combat to focus too much on RNG. Another Idea I had was to make it like Pokémon, where you would have monsters of distinct types but then realized I would not have time for this.

So in the end I decided on a system like Dungeon & Dragons. It has a good framework to implement stats and items while making them work together well. With that as inspiration, I brought it down to 3 major stats with their own sub stats that are used by both the player and enemies. These is strength which determines health and melee chance to hit, dexterity determines chance to be hit, and intelligence determines mana and magic chance to hit. To facilitate player growth there are items that can be acquired to increases these stats.

The combat works such as the enemies only action is to attack the player. To make this less monotonous there are different-looking enemies that each has their stats and amount of damage they can do. The player on the other hand has three actions, a melee attack and two interchangeable slots for magical spells.

The types of magic spells available are healing magic which increases your health, buff magic which increases one of your stats, debuff magic which decreases one of the enemies’ stats, and damaging magic which of course damages the enemy.

Levels

Instead of trying to make a huge open-world or complicated levels, to simplify the game, I split the game into small rooms, each having the same layout of a corridor with a crossroads at the end of it, so I could easily just focus on what to have in the rooms. There are 2 types of rooms, enemy rooms which can have 1, 2, or 3 enemies of various kinds in them, and a checkpoint room which the player always comes to after 4 rooms of enemies. checkpoints are where players rest to replenish lost health and mana, check their stats, replace any of their spells, or use any gold at a shop to buy more powerful weapons and armour. Each time the player reaches this room they also gain a skill point to level up a stat of their choice.

Camera & Controls

The controls are quite simple, the player has buttons for each combat action, buttons for which direction to go at the end of a room, and buttons for the shop/leveling up. All camera and player movements are scripted so the player doesn’t have any real influence in where to look or walk, this was very much a stylistic design choice, as it both helped tone down the overall complexity of the game while also giving it an arcade feel.

Hope there wasn't too much text and you enjoyed reading!
FYI the assets used in this project are not made by me, they are either from the unity asset store or sketchfab.