The Elemental Palace - Trailer
Long Play - The Elemental Palace
The Elemental Palace
The Elemental Palace was a mid-term project created by me in conjunction with other students from Full Sail University. It features a fantasy setting with fast gameplay and a challenging difficulty. Feel free to click on “More information” to learn more about the development of the project, or “Download Now!” to download the game for yourself and try it out! (Windows Only)
Development
The development of The Elemental Palace took place over a 3 month period, with each month being a different phase of development.
Phase 1: Concept and Game Pitch
Phase 1: Concept and Pitch
During this phase the team threw around ideas of what kind of game we wanted to make. We needed to decide on a genre and basic features. We were careful to keep scope in mind as we knew we would be on a tight timeline to get them implemented. These kinds of decisions were made using Bartle’s Taxonomy. We wanted to create an experience for players whose arch type we were targeting. We had decided on a top-down roguelike game where the player would explore 10 rooms, on 10 floors. Each floor would contain a boss battle and when the player died, they'd start at the beginning of the floor they were on. We also decided to implement a collectible "trinket" system in which the player could randomly obtain by defeating enemies, visiting shops, or finding them randomly in treasure chests. These were used to decorate the hub world you'd return too upon losing a game. We also pitched various items and stat boosts to level up your character.
As you can guess... we were a little too ambitious.
During our initial pitch to the instructor, we were asked about all the various features. He warned us that the scope was too great for the allotted time while suggesting we focus on the core aspects of gameplay, so we removed the trinket system entirely and worked on making the game more fun than stat oriented. It took a few sessions to bring the game to a workable and actionable concept. You can see prototypes of our game play in our paper model found below.
Phase 2: Planning and Sprint 1
During this phase we started using a Scrum Agile approach to development. We spent a lot of time adding our user stories into Trello and assigning timing estimates. Since I had experience with Agile development, I also led planning and tasking. We also started each working on our assigned tasks. Our goal with this second month was to get all the core tasks down and start development.
The alpha test for the ability system I created.
The alpha test for the combat system I developed.
Phase 3: Going Gold
The final month was purely a development month. Each week we were required to show off progress of what we had been working on. This month proved to be the most challenging because we were not working in our own little sandboxes anymore. We were implementing everything we had all been working on separately into the actual game. To make matters worse, we lost our AI developer, which means that duties had to shift on the team. One of my team members, Daniel, and myself picked up the extra work this created. We worked hard to keep everything on track. The one thing that made it difficult was that team members kept wanting to add more and more features as development continued. It was a tough battle to keep everyone focused on the end goal. In the end, it was a fun project to work on and we are proud of what we created!