Skeleton Dungeon

This game is a simple five level game made at UCSC for the game design summer course I took in 2017.  It was a group project made in one week with Gamemaker Studio 2, using a trial license.  Our group was made up of three people, including myself; we had one person volunteering to do the lion's share of coding, one person to do the art and polish, and then I was to do the design. 

The first thing we realized as a group was that we were facing two serious limitations on what we could feasibly create in the time we had.  The first of these was that none of us had ever used Gamemaker before. The second of the two was that we were using a trial license.  This limited us to a meager cap of five unique sprites that we could make and use in development, and restricted the number of levels we could create to five as well.

To circumvent these limitations, our programmer and I both spent hours watching Gamemaker Studio tutorials to learn the basics, and then scaled back our vision for the game appropriately.  We were forced to cut a final boss stage we had planned, cut music and sound effects from the game, and to stitch multiple levels together to stay under the room cap. 

Our goal with this game was to make a one player game where the player controls two characters at once who both feel unique to control and play as.  The gunslinger isn't any faster than the knight, but turns much faster, and is more freely moveable in the air.  The knight, while sluggish, and a larger target, can take much more damage, and can block arrows with his sword.

The level design is fashioned to do four things: teach the players how to play without a blatant tutorial, force the two players to use teamwork to beat each level, increase their depth in subsequent runthroughs of the level, and to ultimately keep the gameplay moving at an enjoyable pace while still ramping up along the difficulty curve.

Known bugs to patch once I have the time to come back to this: The ghost sword glitch (if a skeleton dies with a hitbox extended, the sword's hitbox does not die with it, floating in the air as a deadly invisible instakill). The Gunner gun jam glitch (the Gunner doesn't always fire consistently when the player hits mouse 1, possibly related to walk cycle animations?).