Game Design Document

Overview

Feared by all, the GREAT AND POWERFUL SHADOW LORD was finally reduced to a silent slumber, but soon doomed to awaken once more. You are a young adventurer embarking on your first quest: to defeat the treacherous evil that has risen from the depths of the abyss. Is this quest too great for a little adventurer like you or will you survive all odds and bring peace back to the world?

Genre: adventure, platformer

Delver is an extreme platforming adventure inspired by the award-winning Ori series and the grand platforming title, Celeste. This adventure will lead you through the dungeons of the Shadow Lord and face you against his toughest henchmen. Obstacles and death traps await your attempts to pass and as the player, your challenge is to collect enough gold to upgrade your weapons, defences, and skills to then overcome enemies and platforming challenges. 

Audience

Age: 10 - 15

Gender: all

Game Experience Level: basic knowledge of standard controls

Play Time Expectancy: a total of 1 – 2 hours with the ability to stop playing frequently

Interests: fantasy adventure stories and comedy

Delver is intended to engage casual players for a long period of time in an adventure after a tiresome day at school or elsewhere in their downtime. The target audience is primary and middle school students of all genders, similar demographically to popular web games like coolmathgames. This allows for assumptions regarding the player’s game experience, such as the player understanding the standard computer controls of a platformer, although they will be provided with a small tutorial to introduce them to any controls and mechanics unique to this game at the beginning. The game will provide an option to save any progress made, allowing a casual player to pick up and put down the game at any point, without encouraging them to leave the game.  

Gameplay

Run-through of the game timeline

The gameplay loop is quite simple and easy to pick up. The player will enter the dungeon and continue deeper and deeper, defeating as many enemies as possible along the way, before either choosing to return to the old merchant’s hut or having their health reduced to zero. If their health is reduced to zero, they may lose a small percentage of the total gold collected. When the player has returned to the old merchant’s hut, they can choose to upgrade their attacks, defences, or movement abilities using the gold from their explorations. With the new upgrades, they are then able to explore further into the dungeon and get closer to defeating the great Shadow Lord.

Mechanics

The cost and improvements of each upgrade will follow a linear progression to prevent the cost of upgrades from becoming near impossible to achieve or the benefit of the upgrade from becoming obsolete. There will also be a cap at how high of a level the player can upgrade each of their features to allow for game balance and for there to still be a challenge during the final stages.

The difficulty of the enemies as you explore deeper into each dungeon will follow a parabolic transition in difficulty. This encourages the player to return to the old man’s hut without taking away the option to continue by facing them up against enemies that are impossible to defeat regardless of the player’s skill. Features of the enemies that will improve as the player continues their exploration includes: attack damage, attack rate, movement speed, decrease in recalibration time (eg. Time for an enemy to recover after missing the ram attack and colliding with a wall.), shooting accuracy, and dodging methods. However, the gold dropped by the enemies as the player progresses will increase alongside the difficulty to reward you when you choose to persist.

Finally, with the risk of losing a larger amount of money if the player’s health were to be reduced to zero, the player is faced with a risk and reward system as they can choose to collect more gold but by doing so they must face challenging enemies.

Game feel The character movements and impacts are highly valued in Delver as it allows the player to visually and audibly interprets and experience the character's situation. Imprinting a sound or visual effect into an action will better immerse the player and increase the enjoyability of each exploration.

Concept art and further information can be found in the full Game Design Document.