Scoping Down

So over the course of two weeks (the amount of time I have been developing this game) one of the major things that play-testing has forced me to do is scope down.  Credit also has to be given to BadTV because after I had described to him all the mechanics in the game he looked me straight in the eye and asked me if I was gonna be able to implement all of that, and balance it, in the time-frame I was working in.  The answer was a resounding "No".

So before I get into the nitty-gritty of how this game has developed, I want to go over where this game started.

It had some pretty humble beginnings.  In fact, it was never meant to be a game at all.  I was putting together some pixel art sprite animations for a different class when I realized 2D sprite animation was The Shit.  One little animated dude walking around was way more fun than my current game, and that is pretty sad I guess.  So I decided to roll with it.

It was at this point I decided it would be a simple dungeon crawler, and wizards would be involved (since I wanted to do a dragon warrior-esque wizard animation).  I came up with this idea of a cave infested with wizards all-of-the-sudden, and you would have to kill them.  Also there was a town.  BadTV helped me come up with the name.  He asked me why wizards would "infest" a cave and just chill there.  I answered him and the rest is history.

If you've been following along, and have played the game (that seems like a non-intersecting Venn diagram to me) you might have realized I haven't developed the idea very much past this point.  Well the reason I'm writing this post is because I had.  In the original design the player can shoot spells like the wizards (in the current game he shoots arrows) and he had to upgrade his spells at the spell shop, and he could shoot three spells because there were three wizard types (now there are only two) and there would be a rock-paper-scissor system for how effective the spells were.  Bah.

I had the spells partially implemented as well.  The player was shooting ice spells just like the blue wizards.  It was Xen and BadTV who punched me in the face with reality.  Xen said he couldn't tell the difference between the player spells and the wizard spells, he pouted a bit (haha, Xen).  He wanted to be different and cooler than the wizards.  BadTV laughed in the face of the scope of my game.