Hello, everyone!
It's been a bit less than a month since I released the demo for Guardian Cry. I took about a week to solicit feedback, and I've gotten a lot done since then.
The second dungeon, the Gryphon Temple, is fully mapped out. All enemies, room features, and puzzles have been implemented except for the gryphon herself (who will take a considerable amount of dev time to do assets and programming for - likely as much as the entire rest of the dungeon combined!). Most of the new features still use placeholder graphics, but as you can see from the screenshot, I'm making good progress on finalized assets - most of the tilemap is done, though I have yet to start on the enemies.
For the Gryphon Temple, I'm keeping two themes in mind: "The Gryphon is the fierce warrior of the Guardians" and "Her temple is a cave."
For the former, the player enters from the lower right, goes through a short section that introduces the dungeon's enemies and puzzle setups, and then almost immediately enters a room where the Guardian Key is in plain sight, right next to the Guardian Door. The catch? The Guardian Key is behind four regular locked doors, and the player needs to venture into the depths of the Temple to find them. The Gryphon is the warrior of the Guardians: she doesn't hide in the depths of her temple. The way to her is immediately made clear, challenging the player to overcome it. Also tying into this theme, puzzles will revolve around killing enemies - the player will need to come up with creative ways to dispatch enemies that are inaccessible or immune to their regular attacks. (As an added bonus, this means I only had to make new enemies, instead of entirely new puzzle elements like the arrow throwers and braziers in the Phoenix Temple.)
For the latter: caves are strange, disorienting places. You can spend hours crawling through tight, narrow passages only to turn a corner and emerge into an absolutely massive open chamber. The plan for this dungeon includes multiple open rooms, larger than any found in the Phoenix Temple. This is offset by the many winding, claustrophobic corridors that the player will need to navigate to make it to these rooms, often grappling with enemies and hazards like pits in the process. To make the layout feel more natural, I plan to minimize the use of right angles in room design.
