THE LEGEND OF MONSTERS
PRODUCTION
I designed and developed The Legend of Monsters in three days for Ludum Dare 33 (the theme of the jam was "You are the monster"). The only aspect of the game I didn't directly produced is the soundtrack, which I licensed under Creative Commons from Avgvst.
The game was made using Clickteam Fusion.
THE GAME
The Legend of Monsters game is a NES-style adventure that plays around with the concept of navigating simple adventure dungeons through very restrictive patterns of movement (mimicking the simple AI of NES era video game bad guys). As the game progresses more monsters will join the player and they will be able to switch between them at will (meaning that to overcome the obstacles the games puts in their way, the player will have to combine the various movement patterns in fun and interesting ways).
DESIGNER'S COMMENTARY
Where The Legend of Monsters fails is... well in being a game made in three days with Clickteam Fusion. Don't get me wrong, there are design issues there: the controls would have worked a lot better if they only used the "WASD" keys (at the time I wanted to add more buttons to make it more "accurate" to NES control schemes, but it overall made it less fun to play) and the third level has a huge difficulty spike. But the biggest issue of the game is that Fusion tends to be quite an unstable engine and in three days I just didn't have the time to properly polish some things (like the diagonally moving skeleton, of which the movement speed randomly spikes, making it annoyingly difficult to control).
Despite that I think that the game's nostalgic style and humour make it an extremely likable experience (it scored decent results in the Ludum Dare ratings) that I would love to come back to at some point, making it into a full and more polished game.
The iteration that I would start from when making a full release would definitely be re-thinking the design of the monsters. While the ones currently included in the game are functional, I feel that there's a lot variety to be mined from that design space. Also making the player start off with a different movement pattern than simple “up and down movement” would probably help making the first and second level a bit less boring.
RECEPTION
The Legend of Monsters ranked #99 in the "theme" category for Ludum Dare 33
The Legend of Monsters ranked #100 in the "humour" category for Ludum Dare 33
The Legend of Monsters ranked #109 in the "innovation" category for Ludum Dare 33
