Deuce’s Silent Tower

Introduction

Welcome to the devlog of Deuce’s Silent Tower! Here you will find updates regarding the development of the game as well as discussions and decisions taken during the process.

I’ll take the opportunity to introduce myself, and discuss our game concept. The rest of the team will do so as well in separate Devlog posts!

About Me

Greetings, my name is David Pereira. I’m a long-time gamer and a first-time game developer. I’m eager to get some hands-on experience and to learn and overcome the challenges that come with designing and implementing a game from scratch! I enjoy playing several genres of games, such as driving sims (WRC 2004 on the PlayStation 2 is the first game I recall playing), combat and adventure, the occasional FPS and MOBA, etc. My favourite games are Middle Earth: Shadow of War, the Pokemon series games (Emerald is my all-time favourite) and Portal 2.

Our Game Concept

Choosing our initial concept was not simple. All of the team members presented great ideas, and we had a blast discussing each one of them.

One that particularly caught the eye was this idea of having a turn-based game, where the players took action at the same time, introducing a luck component. We decided to take that route and polish it a bit. We agreed on the idea of having a board where units would be controlled (movements and actions) by two players, against an AI enemy.

We also wanted to play around with the idea of having “friendly-fire” active. This was achieved by having both players penalized when moving their characters to the same square, creating a sense of unpredictability. This is a decision that will need some play-testing, as we are not sure if this may lead to frustration, and take from the experience.

Other noteworthy aspects of Deuce’s Silent Tower are character-specific traits (every character, depending on their class will have access to some special ability, like spells or buffs) and the progression system. In order to address progression, we designed a tower. The two players enter the first floor, and after defeating the enemies in that encounter, may climb to the next. After clearing the tower, a character is unlocked and the traits of the characters used are upgraded.