Radical Games: A Knight’s Quest

Facing the Dragons of Questionable Time Management Skills
Facing the Dragons of Questionable Time Management Skills

Trying to make this game was a learning experience to be sure. Going in, I had a very tenuous grasp of code from a crash course I’d taken before deciding not to join the robotics club, a semester of general art in high school, and a hobby of arguing with strangers on the internet about how games should be made. I was sure to try and place as conservative an estimate on how far I would get in making the game as I possibly could, and yet, I still fell short. Despite that, though, last night, when I finally had combat working well enough that I could attack an enemy and it died when its health reached 0, I could’ve cried with joy.

The game certainly changed a lot from how I had originally planned it out. Honestly, in its first iteration entirely contained to my head, it was more of a visual novel than anything else, so it would have had to change, but still, it’s remarkable even then. I had originally envisioned the game to be a series of days, where each day would comprise you selecting various activities to do, such as drinking, praying, or spending time with specific characters, and at the end of each day a battle would occur against the evil king’s forces, where you would fight alongside an ally you would have to protect. Now, how much of that didn’t come to be due to it being a poor idea and how much of that didn’t come to be because it was significantly beyond my ability to actually put into the game is up for debate, regardless, the game doesn’t resemble that in the slightest.

The model it’s now settled on would just have one long and drawn out battle, with brief respites for attempts at comfort by Red and the nun while the other rebels fought led by the General. The General as a character was changed rather dramatically in design as well, his look from Roman to something more knightly and his personality to something less unintentionally abrasive towards the hero.

General
The General Now

Actually, that brings up another interesting change which occurred that I hadn’t even realized until now. I had shifted away from conversations affecting Levi’s blood entirely. The only way to gain blood would be to kill the enemy soldiers and the only way to decrease it would be to physically remove the blood from Levi i.e. by having the nun wash his hands. This change really affects the general most pronouncedly, since he’s no longer going to actively harm the player by conversation, and is instead the one who gives Levi the respite necessary to speak with the nun and be cleaned.

Still, even now I’m trying to figure out better ways to have built the game and more interesting ways it could have communicated what I wanted it to. The roles of the Nun and Red were something I wasn’t too happy with at the end, and I think I could have made them both more interesting. I think that it would have actually made more sense for Red to be more in favor of Levi fighting against the evil king while the nun would have been more cautious and reluctant to force their problems onto some poor guy who just fell through a portal and landed in front of them. That would have allowed for a cleaner transition to the nun helping Levi handle fighting, and would have let Red be less of an antagonistic character at the start.

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The Outside of the Church

Something that surprised me was how much easier it was to make the second scene after I had done the first. Due to some very lackluster time management skills, I was quite pressed for time when I finally settled down to make this scene, but I was able to do it with relatively little issue. Admittedly, there are quite a few things I would improve on in the scene if I were to go back to it, but it is certainly serviceable, and I received some compliments on it from my class. I did notice that people really wanted to go into the little houses in the back whenever they play tested the game, however, so now I know that when I include doors people will try to go into them.

Speaking of play testing, some interesting trends appeared in that. While there was some variation in how people responded to my first level, with some trying to run around between the pews, others talking to the nun immediately and then running into the sword which they couldn’t pick up, and still others who accidentally ran into Red, most people didn’t finish any of the conversation which I had put into the game. Each character had around three in any given scene, but frequently people would leave after only one or two. Some people even went through the second scene without talking to the general at all. That may have been an issue with the second scene, however, since the barricade on the right-hand side was being used as the barrier, and touching it loaded the battle scene after it. That seemed to catch a lot of people by surprise when they played my game, so I’ve learned a bit of a lesson there as well on the importance of making it clear what will and won’t lead to the next area.

I’m finally finishing up combat now. I still need to give the enemies the ability to attack the hero, and the selection circle doesn’t actually disappear until the enemy dies, which means on subsequent turns, when the hero selects an enemy for the second time, an additional selection circle is spawned. So there’s still more left for me to wrangle with, but I’m impressed at how far I’ve come since I started the year and balked at the idea of having multiple conversations going in one scene. And I’m looking forwards to what games I can make in the future as I gain a greater mastery (or any mastery at all, really) over Unity.

Author: Patrick Fox