Play it!

First things first: I’m happy about how the game turned out – it’s the first time for me that I finished a Ludum Dare game as I initially designed it, without cutting any features.

I worked with my girlfriend on ‘Dungeon Deadline’ and she helped me a lot coming up with the idea and refining the gameplay elements, while she designed all levels beautifully as well.
As you probably can immediately tell, I’m using Oryx famous ‘LoFi Fantasy’ set – the same set that many other games use (for example ‘Realm of the Mad God’ & ‘Legends of Yore’) so this part was settled. For the audio I asked Landon Podbielski for help and he composed a wonderful tune for it.

I’m very grateful to those two guys, since all that you see and hear in my game was made by them.
(besides the impromptu sound effects and some minor graphics that I did)
So my job was coding and actually developing that whole thing – and it took some very long hours to do so. however – since I’m by now basically fluent in the Flashpunk engine I was coding at an amazing speed and was surprised of myself for a few times – loved it.

Despite being a overall very positive experience I also had some minor downsides:
The code looks like hell … I’m always starting out neat and organized and end up hacking stuff together in a way that should give any compiler a heart attack. It’s still memory-leak proof and more or less reasonably performance optimized though.
Some of the features are a bit buggy, or at least under-developed – one of them being the warrior attack. It’s a bit unbalanced and simply not very well done – but I kept putting it off and ended up having to keep it like it is now. Please try out the other two classes to play the game in a balanced way.

After reading the comments that I got by now I’m happy to report that people generally like my game – some seem to like it quite a lot

Several people suggested that the time limitation hinders the potential of the game – since they want to explore the dungeons in a more traditional RPG way. While I certainly understand that feeling – this is simply an other type of game and the theme of this Ludum Dare is ’10 seconds’ after all. However – I might develop this further and ditch the time limitation to include up/down stairs and a shopping – which should make this a much more classical dungeon crawler. We’ll see.

I also have to thank the whole Ludum Dare community – all of you are awesome!
It’s amazing that so many games got made and I’m going to take my time playing as many as I can over the next days.

Have Fun!