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[Coopaloops]

Hi everyone! Very excited and happy to announce Sword Legends, a retro top-down action/adventure game. I'm a huge fan of oldschool Metroidvanias and Zelda-esque action adventure games, and wanted to take a stab at creating one of my own. I'm not necessarily trying to reinvent the wheel, but definitely trying to make a fun and unique 2D action adventure experience based on the games I love.

Here are some screenshots of a dungeon I'm working on! It's still pretty early in development, but you can get the gist of the game style so far. (NOTE: These are suuuuuper old now...going to update the images here soon)

Influences

I grew up in the golden age of the SNES, and Sword Legends takes design cues from games like A Link to the Past, Super Castlevania IV, and Super Metroid. I'm hoping to evolve on them a bit and create gameplay mechanics and a unique style that the game can call its own. Dark Souls is another big inspiration...that game is just brilliant.

Gameplay

It's difficult to describe the gameplay at the moment, as I'm still trying to wrap my head around it myself haha. I think maybe for the time being, the best way to describe the game so far is that it's more like Zelda 1 than anything else. In Zelda 1, there wasn’t really a lot of puzzle solving, and one could argue that gameplay was centered more around combat. Dark Souls was the same way – the combat system was really deep and allowed for some very interesting situations. That being said, most of my design direction for Sword Legends revolves around how to make combat and mobility interesting. Second, I am hand-crafting an open game world. That means going where you want right from the start and doing the dungeons in any order. I want the world of Sword Legends - the dungeons, the monsters, the secret nooks and crannies - to be something that people will remember. I can still remember almost everything about the Link to the Past world map, and my hope is that I can create a game world that will resonate in people’s minds after they have completed the game. Last, there's going to be very minimal story. It's not that story is a bad thing, but I kind of miss the days when you hit the start button, get thrown into the game world, and then you're on your own. I think Super Metroid was a perfect example of this: brief opening cinematic --> baby Metroid gets kidnapped --> exploring an alien planet. The rest is just figuring things out on your own and getting some implied story through the environments. There's definitely a story for Sword Legends, but it's not super heavy at the moment, and I'll probably tweak it as the game progresses.

Will be trying to post updates on progress here periodically. Thanks for checking out the game! Hope y'all dig it.

[richard]

For those just checking this project out for the first time, Hello! I am Richard, the main developer of the proj.  This weeks focus has been doors door doors!  You'd be amazed at all the subtleties of a door.  Closed doors, magic doors, locked doors, open space doors, stairs!   We've been getting old school inspiration loading up Zelda Link to the Past and checking out room to room transition.  It adds such a nice dimension of depth when you can enter into the archways of doors leading from room to room.  No magical teleportation!

[richard]

Hah, just saw this on Reddit.  Running in games with stamina.

[Coopaloops]

Here are some monster concepts...going for kind of a cartoony/windwaker-ish vibe. These guys will get pixelated soon. =)

[Coopaloops]

Recently I have been working on designing a title screen (among many other things!). Still figuring out the logo, but am hopefully going to have that done soon. Check it out!

Does it look like it could live on the SNES? I've been looking at title screens from old SNES games that I love for inspiration and reference - Pilotwings, Star Fox, Super Metroid, and Super Castlevania IV to name a few. I'm still working on it and might change a few things, but am liking it so far. There are going to be some cool particle effects in the foreground, and if I really feel like torturing myself I'll animate the cloth attached to the sword. Woot!

[mrscience00]

I really like the look of that title screen. The symmetry of the sword and the sun seems in opposition to the asymmetry of everything else in the image.

[Coopaloops]

Thanks mrscience! I have been debating the symmetrical aspects of the picture, but I think I like it as well. Am planning on putting the logo above the sword/sun...I think it could either ruin the image or make it better depending on how the logo turns out. We'll see. =p

[devi ever]

I really like the look of that title screen. The symmetry of the sword and the sun seems in opposition to the asymmetry of everything else in the image.

Ditto! 

[Coopaloops]

Here's a new environment I've been working on...it's the first area you wind up in, and the entrance to the first dungeon in the game. Am trying to make it really unique and atmospheric. What do you think of the leaves for the trees? I have had the hardest time with those (esp getting them to tile the way I want them to), but I think I've ended up settling on a flatter/more simplified look. It's a bit less rendered than some other pixel games I've seen, but I think that's ok. It's just the style I've got going I guess. Anywho, more to come soon...

[Conker534]

Wow I like the looks of this.

[aberrantmind]

very nice

[richard]

Heyo everyone   isn't the new art awesome!  We've been keeping up pace at building Sword Legends, life in dev land has been good. We wrapped up alot of the door and room transition stuff, and dived head first into enemy AI.  When we were creating the game, we thought we might want to try some finite state machine system for representation of enemy behavior.  We used a 3rd party library called Playmaker, which is very cool, but... coop and I are a stickler for details.  It just ended up being alot more easier to use a programming language to describe all the nitty gritty details of monster brains and have it all easily presented for viewing and modification.

So we have two monsters right now that are pretty smart-ish, well, smart enough for first level dungeon anyways.  The first is an eyebat which has pretty simple logic of chasing, attacking, and backing off.  The second more interesting one was a simple guard with four directional walking around logic, shielding, attacking, and visibility.  He's taken some time to get right, but I'll be really happy when he's finished.  I can already feel that we'll be able to reuse a lot of monster logic and frameworks so everything won't be entirely baking something from scratch and I can get onto other cool things!

Coop and I are really excited about the logo screen, it's like.. been in our dreams, we have some really slick plans for what the intro experience in our game will be like, I hope we can make a video for you all of that first moment you press start.  It's going to be awesome.

Anyhow, back to the code mines!

[richard]

Heh, s'the small things that take you back sometimes

[jO]

Wow, your updated art style is really good. I like the simple elegance of the tiles and colors.

[karlozalb]

Excellent visual style

[Coopaloops]

@jO, @karlosalb - Thanks so much guys! I am really liking the art style so far...simple but hopefully very personable. Will post some more pics and gifs soon

Also jO, The Curious Expedition is looking fantastic!!!

[Coopaloops]

Hey all, Richard and I have been slowly plugging away at some stuff over the last 3-4 weeks, and we have some cool new things we want to share!

First up, we are trying out a new in-game hud. You can probably deduce how some of the game will work based on what we've got in the new interface. From top to bottom on the left: health, magic, and "shield power." We're experimenting with some shield mechanics for our main character, hence the "SP." Also, we have keys and money.



On the topic of in-game currency, we are also working on a merchant/shop system. It's going to be very reminiscent of Zelda 1, I think. Here is the concept art for a merchant character:



And here is his pixelized idle animation:



We also have gems dropping from stuff...nothing revolutionary, but it's definitely fun to run around and pick up gems that drop from monsters, pots, bushes, etc. Observe:



Last but not least, we have the beginnings of a text system. Everything still needs a lot of polish, but at least we've got something working! Woohoo!



And that's it for now! We are plugging away at this stuff slowly but surely...very excited about some things we'll be doing soon. =)

[richard]

Heyo everyone  Sword Legends dev Richard here poking my head out of the code today.  I've been working on adding more sweet ass actions to our workflow.  Today's was pretty useful, so I thought i'd give you a glimpse of how we make things.  On this dead gaurd here we have a key just laying on him and when you go to press action button on him he gives you a choice to pickup or not.



 I generalized this to a standard binary action dialog that can be used all over the place. We use playmaker to create finite state machines that can describe little micro interactions like dealing with this guard.  So now! We can create a whole bunch of dialogs that let you choose between 2 actions and have potentially good stuff or bad stuff happen.  Should be fun to see what our new story designer does with these powers! Muhaha.  Have a good weekend all.

[Coopaloops]

Figured out how to do animated tiles today...I made some spikes. ^_^

[Coopaloops]

Hey TIGS, Coop here with a quick update on Sword Legends. The last couple months have been kind of crazy..."life" has happened and priorities have shifted (as they often tend to do), and now it looks like I'll be the main person working on the project going forward. The bad news is that things are going a bit more slowly than I would like...previously I was focused more on art and creative direction for the project, and now I'm basically teaching myself how to code stuff. The GOOD news is that I am loving the project now more than ever, and am having a blast! I'm in the process of building up everything from scratch in Unity, using our old codebase as a tool to help me learn and grow. Luckily I have a background in comp sci, so it's been a great refresher for me to get back into programming things. I'm actually really enjoying it. So far here is what I've been able to get up and running on my own:

- camera system that tracks (or doesn't track) the player as necessary
- room transitions
- basic player input and movement
- collision with walls
- basic ai for an eyebat (still a work in progress)

I'm really happy with the direction things are going right now. I'm confident that I can keep pushing things forward, and am more and more excited about it every day. Will post more updates soon. =)