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Peaceful Dungeons

  • Brady
  • 03/12/2013 01:25 PM
  • 382 views
After making a big monster dungeon for Episode IX, topped with harder enemies, lots of travel time and plenty of bosses, I thought I'd try making some more relaxing dungeons for Episode X.

Two solo missions will be included in Episode X, both of which are non-monster based dungeons, and one of them is completely without risk of failure!

Now one of them, Leesa's Mission, I just played around with the idea of a maze with expenses. There's no combat or danger during the mission, but you will run out of mana by clearing the path while you try to find the exit. Pretty quick dungeon to make (and play) but has quite a chill wee vibe to it.

Dane's Mission, however, was a whole other kettle of fish. It's actually pretty quick to play through and has no chance of failure of any kind (other than trying your patience), but was a total friggin' nightmare to develop, I shit you not.

The concept of it was really fun (shamelessly stolen from FF8), and I thought it'd make a really cool dungeon gimmick for a RPGM game, especially since I don't think I have ever seen it in an RPGM game before, but by god it was a handful to design it. Not only did I have to sit and plan out the whole map (more than once, as I kept changing it) but had to have every room layout designed specifically. And despite only actually being about 12 "rooms" within the dungeon, it still took up a good 30/40 maps to make it all, and the transfer eventing was possibly the most confusing I've ever had to do.

The amount of brain cells I cooked as I sat there trying to work out what goes where and trying to think about everything in reverse...god.

The dungeon itself, from a mapping perspective, is incredibly basic to the point where it's actually pretty boring, but don't let you think that it's not there for a reason! Overcomplicating the mapping would not only make the design job a hell of a lot harder, but it would certainly detract from the dungeon gimmick itself. Not that (in my experience anyways) you really pay much attention to the mapping; you spend all your time trying to keep your head on track.

Great fun to design though, even if it was a bloody stinking nightmare. Even though I know the exact layout of the dungeon I still get so lost looking for the switches :)