Overview

Die Castle is a small Pico-8 title programmed in lua that I created in a single week. 

For this project I wanted to make a spin off a small but classic core game mechanic, in the same lane as other recent indie games such as "Shotgun Chess", "Tetris 99" & "Peglin". The game I wanted to spin off is Club Penguins "Thin Ice" minigame and it's gameplay centered around moving on and off tles that slowly decrease in health.

The "Thin Ice" minigame has the player walking on tiles that slowly destroy, forcing the player to think strategically to follow the correct path to reach the goal while walking on every tile. I wanted to take this core mechanic and turn the core gameplay loop from a handmade puzzle game into a endless, procedurally generated experience.

Every mechanic in the game is tied towards the central tile health mechanic:

• Players can only survive if they ensure they have access to safe tiles to move to

• Players can only slay enemies by destroying tiles and leading enemies into them

• Enemies remove the amount of safe tiles the player can access on the map, while also damaging tiles every turn by moving

• Slaying enemies rewards the player with consumable dice items that modify tile health across the entire level

This leads the player to focus on a single mechanic, with the other mechanics flowing with it rather than contrasting against it while also ensuring as a developer the games intent and focus is exclusively on this core gameplay mechanic, with no unnecessary filler content and ideas that may not build towards the experience I'm looking for. 

Enemy AI was reduced as much as possible to ensure consistant mechanic behavior while also reducing the production time of the mechanic. 

• Enemies will always spawn on the edge of the level, and never in the same row and column as the player.

• Enemies will always move to a tile that makes them closer to the player's tile

• When their are two tiles of equal value to the enemy, the choice is decided by their enemy type. Zombies prefer to move up and down, Slimes prefer to move left and right.

Broken tiles respawn after a certain amount of turns. Tile respawning and enemy respawning are based on counters that slowly decrease based on turn count, ramping up difficulty the more the game progresses. This is to start the game off slow and dynamically ramp up it's difficulty. Through two variables i'm able to tweak the difficulty equation to adjust the rate that this ramps up by. Tile background and tile edge colours also shift after a certain amount of turns to visually represent a change in game progression, Music tempo is something I also want to adjust based on turn count but was shelved due time restraints.

Showcase of multiple gameplay features working, including player movement, enemy AI, UI, tile updating, item spawning and various lerps