Avenight Devlog #1

Hi all, I am the sole developer of Avenight.  This is my first game or more precise, the first demo of my first vision of a game. Not sure if anyone is ever going to read this devlog, so I will use it as some kind of documentation for now. Future devlogs will probably be shorter and only go into recent changes and additions, but for this one I want to present the vision for the game.

The Vision

Avenight is an action adventure game inspired by the old top-down Zelda games, especially Zelda 1 and the GB(C) games. Although lacking some basic features of nowaday-games, Zelda 1 had some great concepts. The whole world is basically accessible right from the beginning, you can go exploring and find lots of items before seeing the first dungeon. The order in which you visit the dungeons also gives you a certain degree of freedom. And there are secrets everywhere in the overworld. Although you would not consider many of the secrets worthy to find, it really encourages you to simply go exploring. This is something I want to recreate with Avenight.

The GBC games, Links Awakening and the Oracle games, are far more polished gameplay-wise and had really great dungeons. I will try to create a similar dungeon experience like in those games. But there is a third aspect, which I want to put into my game: RPG elements. I have already decided against experience points (and, therefore, a level system), since that would encourage grinding. Instead, the upgrades you can find (or maybe receive on some other ways) for the main attributes health, magic, and stamina are an indicator for the character level. You don't have to collect them, but it definitively gets easier if you do so. Other aspects might follow as I see them fit into the game.

Speaking of the attributes, I adapted the stamina system from the Dark Souls games, since it makes combat much more tactical if spamming the weapon is not an option for longer combats.

I am really excited to see where this is going. I have large plans but since I don't have much time, I will be progressing slowly. My first goal is, therefore, this small demo version of the game, with a rather small overworld map, some underground passages and one or maybe two dungeons, depending on how it is going. If I ever hit that milestone, I will evaluate what went well and what aspect should be improved. ... and then start to build the full game I have in my mind.

Version 0.3.0

The initial version of the demo contains almost one third of the overworld I have in mind, a couple of enemies and one boss fight. You can also find a dozen of chests and some secret weapons. There are some NPCs with random dialogs, a merchant, and a couple of puzzles everywhere. Enemies may resist certain type of attacks and weapons do not deal the same amount of damage in every situation, timing is important.

Version 0.3.1

For this first update, I have added save/load to the game, although there might be some aspects that don't get saved yet. The game will not hold your hand here; there are a few NPCs that offer to save your progress and you will be able to continue your journey from that point. If you close the game without saving, you might lose progress. However, there is one safety mechanism. The game will create an autosave file in certain situations, like moving the game to background on Android or closing the game with the escape key dialog. You can chose to start from that autosave slot, but it won't save your position on the map, only the progress you made.

I also added a simple animation for non-sliding map transitions, like entering a cave.

This should feel more natural if you ever played a game of this kind.

And that's it for my first devlog. I really hope you enjoy exploring the world in the game I am also really eager to hear your feedback, may it be bugs, improvements or a general like/dislike because of X.

Until next time.

stedu