BeamBrain

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.

Wanted to give them a plain, unassuming appearance, with only a leather vest for armor - the protagonist is a peasant and can't afford anything on the level of full plate, but they've prepared themselves for the dangers they're facing the best they can.

For having only spent a few hours on the background image, I think it turned out very well. It used to take me days to make those, and they weren't quite as good.

My goal was to have the demo released by the end of the year, and I am definitely on schedule for that.

Kind of sad there never was one for Victoria 2, it's the right timeframe for it

help

There are decades where nothing happens and there are weeks where decades happen

Hey, nerds. Still hard at work on my Zelda clone. Based on feedback from many different people, I've settled on a tentative title of Guardian Cry. I hope to have a playable demo with the Phoenix Temple out by the end of the year, which will require me to do a lot in a short timeframe, but so far I'm on track to pull it off.

The big silver emblem you see in the screenshot is how the player will track their progress through the game. On its surface are reliefs of the four Guardians - the Minotaur, the Gryphon, the Phoenix, and the Unicorn. Each time you defeat one of the Guardians and gain its ability, that Guardian's eye glows ruby on the emblem. In the pic none of the eyes are glowing, even though the player would have beaten the Minotaur and the Gryphon by the time they're in the Phoenix Temple - I wanted to show the emblem without any modifications.