Labyrinth: a retro dungeon crawler with a twisted maze!

Lukas_Palmer · August 22, 2016, 9:04pm

Labyrinth is a light dungeon crawler with a retro feel and aesthetic, set in a maze full of enemies and obstacles. Collect tools and weapons to fight your way out of the tunnels! Look around for keys; deeper into the maze loom dangers guarded by a lock. Learn the strengths and weaknesses of your weapons, in different situations certain ones will turn out quite useful. Part of the challenge of the game is not getting lost; earthquakes will wipe your map of where you’ve been every once in a while, so make sure to remember your surroundings while you’re fighting!

I’ve been learning the ins and outs of game development for a while, but this is the first time I’ve actually put together a project and brought it to completion! If you have any feedback or suggestions regarding Labyrinth I’ll gladly consider it!

Labyrinth is available on itch.io, and soon on the App Store!

Edit: adding the pictures and whatnot right now

Pkeod · August 22, 2016, 9:18pm

Some of the sounds have distortions or are harsh and should be improved. The music is a little too repetitive. For something atmospheric quickly, you could apply paulstretch to your existing music. Maybe post on /r/gamedev and see if an audio guy would be interested to help.

When I played I’d often fall down holes in rooms with with no monsters thinking I could go to a room below, or falling into a hole just before mobs spawned.

Maybe apply a hue shift, color map, or shader tint to your existing tiles to create some random color variations. You may even consider applying a gradient map type shader to the tiles layer and change that based on the zone.

On Windows, that extra black window is still a problem, but this is a Defold problem.

Kruithne · August 22, 2016, 10:24pm

What causes that extra black console window in this case?

Lukas_Palmer · August 22, 2016, 10:36pm

Defold compiles games to a command line win32 program; by default the command prompt window is shown regardless of any created Windows.

Kruithne · August 22, 2016, 10:42pm

Ah, that makes sense. I hope that’s on the list to get fixed, because it’s rather obnoxious. I really wish we could the internal Jira to get a sense of what’s on the agenda and what’s known and what’s not.

Pkeod · August 22, 2016, 11:59pm

I modified the game.projectc to enable fullscreen, and it seems to work well enough. Maybe add some ability in game to close the game as even alt+f4 doesn’t work in fullscreen (although you can’t detect that still I think…).

Add “Press Enter To Confirm” on settings screen?

Add some soft, subtle sounds when jumping / landing / hitting head on walls.

If the window is wide enough the death fade won’t fill it.

Lukas_Palmer · August 23, 2016, 12:04am

Thanks, all good feedback! I just finished setting my dorm up and the next few weeks are going to be a little packed, but if I end up with some time where there aren’t other things I should be doing I’ll try to address as much of what you’ve mentioned as I can.

britzl · August 23, 2016, 4:38am

Some feedback:

I’d like to be able to exit the About screen in a more intuitive way. I can only exit the about screen from the first page. ESC key would be the obvious choice I think.
I’d like to be able to exit the settings screen using ESC as well. Using the enter key doesn’t feel intuitive.
I’m struggling a bit with the keybindings. I think this is really a personal thing, but I’ve never really become friends with platformer games where you move and jump using wasd or arrow keys. I prefer jump being separated from the left and right movement. For me it works better to let arrow keys to move left/right and up/down ladders and then have jump+attack on something like Z and X. BTW can you play using a game pad?