Each of the dungeons for The Moon Fields are called “Fields”. The demo “Field” is a crypt. Inside this crypt you’ll find slimes, baby slimes, knife wielding skeletons, mummies, cultists, and floating eyes. The theme for the dungeon is:
“One of us”
You start at a campfire outside of the field. As said earlier, you prepare yourself for your journey at the camp. I am thinking that there will be a tent object that you can enter and it will be another room where you can collect your belongings or change your armor. I need to formalize how this works in an organic way without menus, but we’ll see. For the demo you have your sword and your bow.
Once you have gathered your belongings you enter the field.
Inside the field it will look familiar. The first room will be a three pronged room with two open doors and one locked door. I am not sure how I want to set up the dungeon, but I know the flow I want and the types of rooms I want.
In general the rooms are:
Filler rooms. These are meant for pacing. The first room is an example of a filler room. The idea here is that while there’s no action, the player still has to think about things. This room will look like other rooms. There will be random details that could be part of puzzles. And when I say puzzles I mean really, incredibly simple puzzles. Pushing a block to unlock a door. Bombing a wall. Lighting braziers. I will make a big post about how I want to deal with puzzles. Essentially the solution to the puzzle should be simple, but identifying puzzles will be slightly weird and difficult.
Imminent Danger rooms. These rooms have open doors and enemies that generally wander about. The enemies won’t be the types of enemies that focus down on the player, but they will be annoying to pass through. These rooms slow the player’s movement, and should make anxious players wary. Like the filler rooms they have allusions to puzzles.
Locked rooms. These rooms are the high action rooms. You enter this room and danger spawns and you have to deal with it. The danger can be anything like enemies or an impending trap or both. Dealing with the room might be killing the enemies, killing a specific enemy, and/or solving a puzzle.
I want one of the locked rooms in this dungeon linked to a repeated sound effect. Throughout the whole dungeon I want chanting to happen in the background and eventually have a locked room that has hordes of cloaked enemies stream out of somewhere. The chanting can change to a more aggressive note and eventually when you kill all of the cultists the chanting is done in the dungeon forever.
Most of these rooms are going to be 1x1 sized rooms just like ZeldaNES. The “gimmick” that I want to use in this dungeon deals with zooming and rooms of sizes larger than 1x1.
The general flow of this field:
- I want to take players through a familiar space in this dungeon first - 5ish rooms that are very Zelda-y
- Then slowly introduce darkness
- Zoomed in darkness
- Confusion in the darkness
- Lighting the torch to literally illuminate darkness and push out the zoom
- Using the torch to solve a puzzle and push out the zoom even more for a giant boss fight
Actually finding the torch can happen anywhere, but I want the player to go through the darkness without a lit torch. Finding the torch and not being able to use it (maybe because it got extinguished before the rooms you want it) would be pretty cool. Then you solve a “bigger puzzle” and the water is gone and you can light your torch and you are now empowered!
The zoomed in darkness/confusion in the darkness is also an important thing I want in this dungeon. I want some rooms that are bigger than 1x1 ZeldaNES rooms, but I want to hide them in darkness first. Essentially some rooms will be 1x1 and dark and zoomed in. Then I want one room, probably horizontal, to be at least three wide. It will be a tricky navigating maze room that I want the player to feel like it’s “slightly too big”. But the player won’t be sure until they get the torch and realize that yeah it is too big.
I am doing some mockups of the dungeon today. Hopefully I’ll make a mockup of a normally lit dungeon, one of a dungeon that’s lit only by torchfire, and then something weird? We’ll see. I still need to figure out normal maps, too.
