Drodian's (De)Fault

[Kilthorne]

Drodian's (De)Fault - A Game Inspired by The Tower of Druaga

Hello Playdate enthusiasts! We’ve been working on a game for a little bit now and figured it was time to put something out into the world. This is Drodian's (De)Fault, a small reconstruction of an old arcade game you may not have heard of.

The Tower of Druaga is downright mean and complicated, but it has some brilliant ideas in its design. With Drodian's (De)Fault, we wanted to keep the same game feel while updating the design to be less cruel.

The best way to describe it would be a Maze Adventure Arcade game. You fight some robots, find the key, get to the door and repeat. Each level has a secret objective that unlocks an upgrade for the player until the end of the run. We’re currently aiming for 40 levels, probably with a small story mode and a more classic arcade mode.

We’ll be updating this thread and our socials as things progress. Thanks for checking it out!

~ Nathan Kilthorne

Join us on Blue Sky!

[AffinityChris]

Artist / Dev on the team here - excited to show off more from Drodian’s (De)Fault soon!

[RustySabre (Eric)]

This looks pretty sweet. Anxious to see where it goes!

[Kilthorne]

Overview: Player Mechanics

Hello again, today I wanted to start a general breakdown of the game’s mechanics. Figured I’d start with the player and what they can do.

Movement

The game is primarily a maze of walls that requires the player to make quick decisions. As you move through the maze you’re limited to traveling in straight lines along the x and y. The challenge with how it’s been built out was making sure the player doesn’t get stuck on pixels while taking corners. I probably over-complicated things but the goal was to use Tower of Druaga’s movement as inspiration while fixing the more infuriating quirks.

To work around corners there’s an auto correction to compensate for the player’s position on the tile when they turn. This way if they change directions on the D-Pad before their blocky hit box is aligned with the hallway it will nudge them forward until they can turn.

Attacking

When the player presses ‘A’ they go through the animation of drawing their sword - it’s not instantaneous, much like how The Tower of Druaga handles it, requiring the player to be deliberate. If they’re still holding the button when the sword is fully drawn they can start attacking enemies.

Running into a baddie will do a sort of jousting bout where the enemy loses health while the player loses power. If they don’t have the sword fully drawn when they run collide then they lose a life and restart the floor.

Defending

If the player doesn’t have their sword out then their shield will protect them from projectiles in the direction they’re facing. If the sword is in swing animation then the shield is inactive, this is when the player is most vulnerable. When the sword is fully drawn the shield protects the player on their left side (of the direction they’re facing). It’s a bit strange at first but attacking through an enemy while blocking a projectile on your side feels pretty cool.

Alright that’s all I have today, I’ve already gone on too long. Next week we’ll probably ramble on about some player resources, woo!

~Nathan Kilthorne

Join us on Blue Sky!

[Kilthorne]

Hey, thanks! We have a vertical slice planned on the horizon. Whether it’s a demo or playtest, etc., we hope to have something you can try out soon!

[Kilthorne]

Overview: Player Resources

As mentioned in the last post, I wanted to talk a bit about the player resources.

Remaining Lives and Energy

Drodian’s (De)fault leans toward an arcade style game loop, so the player has so many lives to get as far as they can in a run. We’ll probably stick with a traditional 3 lives with more earned as you play.

A more unusual resource though, is the player’s energy bar (shown on the far right). If the player has their sword out when they run into an enemy they’ll hurt the baddie, but they also lose energy. When they run out they lose a life, think of it more as an endurance meter. It should deter the player from trying to kill every enemy on the screen, since the goal is to get through each floor quickly. We plan to use it for various enemy designs, such as energy sapping traps.

Upgrades

While the primary objective of each floor is to get the key and reach the door, they each have a hidden objective as well. These vary greatly and consist of ideas like “step on these two tiles” or “Block 5 projectiles”. This gets a lot more in depth but for accomplishing each objective an upgrade pickup will appear on the screen.

If the player picks it up they will get an upgrade that will last them the rest of the run. The upgrades range from a boost to your stats, to easier enemy behavior and other oddities.

Wall Hacks
Things are really stacked against our hero, so they brought along their own cheating mechanic! When the player presses the ‘B’ button while facing a wall they will digitally dissolve that wall. They have one use per floor to start with and can get more as they play, sure comes in handy while stuck in a maze.

That about sums it up. Not sure what we’ll have next week but there’s been some cool updates so we’ll catch you soon!

~ Nathan Kilthorne

Join us on Blue Sky!

[AffinityChris]

Overview: Sprites!

Hi there, I’m Chris (AffinityChris), one of the devs on Drodian’s (De)Fault. I’m primarily an artist on the project, but much like most of us small devs I get my hands in all the pies depending on project needs.

I’m here today to show you the good stuff - character sprites!

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Our Main Character

Our inspiration being The Tower of Druaga, I felt we needed a “classic” seeming hero type and paired with the world being more in the sci-fi cyber realm, I found myself drawn to a more Tron or Mega Man styled character, but I’ve always been fond of the goofiness of Ratchet & Clank’s Captain Quark.

So I made him nice and beefy with a good ol' butt chin and sent him on his way.

All of the sprites are composed of an armless body, a left arm (shield and side-shield), and right arm (sword and empty). We built it this way so that the player could always move around without being forced to stop when drawing or lowering their weapons. Plus, as we make more unique items for upgrades, instead of building dozens of sprite sheets to account for the combinations of equipment, we can instead just replace the sheet for just the left or right arms independently.

(Side note, the sprite you’ve seen of our main character in earlier posts has been a placeholder until this guy was ready for the lime light.)

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Enemies & Objects

We’re still pretty early in development, but our lovely lead dev Nathan created some delightful goons to act as our problem through the journey. He’ll handwave this, but I think they have some real character to them.

Eventually, some of these may get reworked and polished up, but this’ll give you an idea of what the major pieces of the game look like.

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Stay tuned for more! We’ll keep posting in this thread, but if Bluesky is more of your speed, I’m the one that’ll be posting over there most of the time.

Cheers!

AffinityChris | Drodian’s (De)Fault | Affinity Archives

[AffinityChris]

Update 5! - Environment Art

No game is complete without environment art! This won’t be rocket science for anyone that’s ever used tile sheets, but here’s how we’ve been setting this up in Drodian’s (De)Fault.

We have a very simple 16 tile sheet that all of our levels are based on. Level design uses this to visually block out levels and then we convert that into a series of numbers used in code to actually construct the level.

    1, 2, 12, 12, 8, 1, 12, 2, 12, 12, 12, 8, 7, 2, 2, 8, 7, 3,
    7, 12, 11, 14, 13, 12, 15, 8, 4, 13, 14, 13, 11, 8, 7, 15, 15, 8,
    4, 13, 8, 13, 10, 9, 14, 4, 13, 10, 4, 9, 12, 11, 14, 9, 14, 4,
    13, 14, 13, 11, 12, 12, 11, 15, 10, 7, 11, 12, 11, 2, 15, 2, 11, 14,
    9, 15, 11, 12, 11, 10, 7, 11, 12, 15, 8, 9, 8, 7, 11, 12, 12, 10,
    1, 11, 2, 11, 2, 2, 11, 3, 5, 9, 11, 2, 11, 11, 2, 11, 10, 16,

From this, I draw out a tile sheet that matches the shapes of the tiles, making sure it’s something that works together to form cohesive environments (e.g. walls will blend with edges, floor patterns are consistent, etc.)

And then voilà! We have our levels ready for action in game!

The next step from there would be drawing props that you can overlay with the art in the environment on a more “hand crafted” way. Throw a spider web here, a destroyed machine there, and then you have your nicely fleshed out environments.

That’s essentially our next next step with our environment art at this point.

Working on games for the Playdate can be a bit tougher since you don’t have a visual editor (unless you’re using Pulp), so it was important for me as an artist to be able to quickly generate builds so I could see how the actual art was working in game. This is true for prop placement too, since everything is based on pixel space rather than dragging and dropping assets wherever I please.

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Anyway, that’s a short and sweet one today. We plan on having a full unique tile set per 10 floors of Drodian’s (De)Fault, so I look forward to sharing more in the future!

Cheers,

AffinityChris | Drodian’s (De)Fault | Affinity Archives

[Kilthorne]

Overview: Our Inspiration

The idea for Drodian’s (De)Fault came from one of those old games that’s lived rent free in my head for years. I don’t remember how I stumbled on The Tower of Druaga, but it’s often brought up whenever we talk about hard games that have a lot of potential. It was originally an arcade cabinet that was later rebuilt on a number of other platforms.

The truth is, it’s mean. The Tower of Druaga boasts multiple enemies, 60 levels, and a secret objective that unlocks an item upgrade for each level. Back then, they were kind enough to let you know the first 10 or so secret objectives and related item by putting them on the side of the cabinet. Every objective after that had to be discovered by the player base which, likely, cost an untold number of hours and coins.

The mechanics aren’t obvious to the player and one wrong swing of a sword can ruin a run. Just when you get the hang of it, you get blasted by a billion wizards that don’t care about your feelings. If you like challenging games, then I recommend giving it a try, but if you want to keep your wits about you, please use save states (The Switch Version was helpful).

The Tower of Druaga - Arcade

So, why would we make a game inspired by something so cruel? Because we’re gluttons for punishment, but also because it’s a really neat idea. For an arcade game back in the day, there’s a surprising amount of depth. Climbing the tower and learning how to overcome the tougher objectives feels rewarding. The enemies bring their own challenge and unlocking powerful items give each map its own flavor. Overall, the element of discovery is satisfying, which has its hand in Drodian’s design.

The goal is to lean into the unique ideas that make ToD what it is, while removing a lot of the frustrations. We’ve kept key components like movement (with improvements), the importance of the shield and blocking, objectives and upgrades per level, and general game loop.

ToD - Famicom

We’re in the works of making a lot of adjustments too. The plan is to have a more diverse group of enemies, a boss at every 10 levels, a built-in menu to explain the objectives, and secrets within secrets. We want Drodian’s (De)Fault to have that challenging edge, while mitigating those cumbersome elements from ToD.

What’s Next

We have some new art to implement (as seen above) and we’re taking a first pass at some SFX/music. The trap tile is mostly done which brings us to three bad guys, and I desperately need to get the score timer in. This puts us closer to our first major milestone, not gonna lie, it’s pretty exciting!

'Til next week!

-Nathan

[Kilthorne]

Update 7! - Movin' Along

Hey everyone, it’s been a couple weeks since our last post. We’ve been rather busy between development and life stuff. I’ll keep this one short and sweet!
Recent Updates:

• We’re in the testing phase for a lot of our SFX. Eddie, our audio engineer, gave us a lot of iterations of different sounds for things like level start/end queues, enemy death, the door opening, etc. We’re combing through that now.

• The new player sprite is looking good! We ended up adding another art sprite to the player, it used to have one for both the shield and sword. Now they’re two separate sprites so that we can make art for each upgrade of the sword and shield.

• The alternate objective and the upgrade for level 9 are in!

• I’ve been adding some adjustable variables for our level designer, Tony. There’s been some good level and enemy polish, and things are starting to look more like a game.

• Shoutout to Chris, he’s been making some helpful tools to improve task tracking and communication between the four of us.

What’s Next:

• Implementing the timer that acts as both an incentive move forward and a score bonus.

• Chris has started working on new UI assets to replace what shows on the right side of the screen. This will also affect the system menu.

• Overall content and bug hunting. Once things feel better, we’ll move onto level 10 (boss battle).

I’ll leave off with this little blooper, our hero wanted to flex his guns no matter which direction he was facing.

-Nathan