Kuzgakai's Dungeon

Flareonz44 - March 01 2021

Overview

This is a top-down 2D game created using Game Maker Studio 1.4. It goes about a guy who receives a mysterious message from a friend, only to find himself trapped in a nightmarish world. Your mission is to defeat an enigmatic foe named Kuzgakai. Who is Kuzgakai? Does he seek revenge? Is there a connection between this malevolent adversary and the protagonist’s dark past? We don’t know.

Game trailer

My experience

While this isn’t my first game development project, it is the first one I’ve published on the Internet. I’ve worked on some unfinished projects and prototypes during my learning process, but unfortunately, they are buried in unindexed sectors of my old HDD :(

Soul Knights was a significant source of inspiration for me (yeah, I spent hours playing it during my Latin classes), and as a result, the core mechanics are similar. You can purchase various guns, and there are traders scattered throughout the map who sell ammunition. It’s a straightforward concept: buy-shoot-kill-repeat, but as you reach higher levels, the difficulty increases. The later levels can be incredibly challenging, especially if you’ve been careless with your ammunition and resources. In some cases, suicide (I mean, restart the game) may be the only way out.

Coding this game was an incredible learning experience for me. I discovered that game mechanics are more complex than a simple algorithm like while not dead: go kill player It involves intricate logic and clever programming tricks to make everything work seamlessly, particularly what involves enemies AI (don’t think about neural-networks, that was lightyears far from my knowledge) and some gameplay improvements. I know that this game is super basic, but I made everything, from the music to the sprites, and I take pride in it. If you’re interested, you can try it out for free:

See you!