Last month I talked about Midnight Journey and me sucking at Level Design, I also said working on it wasn’t very interesting to me anymore because Level Design is not something I’m particularly interested into and I don’t really want to spend my time on it, so the best decision here was to give up Midnight Journey. Hooray! I canceled one more game project!

I felt I needed to reevaluate what games I wanted to work on because I’ve blown scope or started working on something I couldn’t really accomplish on my last 3 or 4 games. This worries me a lot because I thought I was over these mistakes already after releasing two (simple, but released!) mobile games. So I went a bit hardcore, did some research and wrote a list of limitations I will work with.

List of Limitations to not blow your scope:

1. No Level Design.
2. No Narrative (or dialogue, or cutscenes).
3. No Puzzles.
4. No multiplayer or networking.
5. 2 to 3 month projects.
6. Design around a theme.
7. Progression means ramping difficulty of core game loop.

So that’s when I decided to work on my new game, Aglarond. Aglarond is a simple roguelike but with enhanced game feel and pretty graphics. This should be in scope because there is literally tutorials for people to create roguelikes in 1 or 2 weeks, so I do believe it’s feasible.

In fact, I wrote a quick first post about Aglarond on my “studio” devlog (https://fourthdimension.studio/devlog/2019-09-15-What-is-Aglarond/) – In this post I talk a bit more about the dungeon generation and turn-based system, I want to write more frequent updates about Aglarond.

If you wanna know, these are all the game ideas I came up with when working around those limitations. There’s a big chance actually I get to work on more of them if I don’t procrastinate and don’t blow my scope again.

1. Aglarond
2. Turn-Based Combat: Something that would have a combat-system like Pokémon and the game would be about facing enemies one after the other until you die (It’s a Pokemon Roguelike!)
3. Card Game: Something like a deck-building roguelike (it would be very simple and I would search art packs or open art to see if it was feasible art-wise), you would start with a deck, defeat an enemy, after every enemy defeated you choose some cards to add to your deck, do that until you lose (It’s a Hearthstone Roguelike!)
4. Tetris Attack Style: One type of game I tried working a long time ago was a “puzzle” similar to Tetris Attack and Pokémon Puzzle Challenge, it is similar to a match-3 game but I think they are more interesting. So I thought of making a game using this mechanic where you could face enemy after enemy and difficulty go up for every enemy (It’s a Tetris Attack Roguelike!)
5. Incremental Game: I worked on Pizza Clicker a while ago and writing an Incremental system is something I still want to do again and make it better, but I would need a theme for that.
6. Veteran Bros: A Couch Co-Op shooter where one player moves and the other shoots, the thing is that it would be two characters, one in a wheelchair using the gun and another character pushing the wheelchair.
7. Insanely Juiced Rock Paper Scissors: That’s the Joke. It would be like battles, but the battles are rock paper scissors, and every time you win or lose you takes damage until someone loses the match. Imagine that but extremely juiced.

Anyway, that’s it for this month! See you in the next one and you can follow me on Twitter if you want!