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[Gorgoo]

Fractured Crown

Fractured Crown is a fast-paced top-down 2D shooter where you play as two people trying to stop a demonic invasion. Instead of conventional weapons, you use magic-charged gems which can be combined with each other to create new attacks.

Story

The game follows Darius and Parisa: a soldier and princess who are investigating an invasion of their homelands by demonic hordes. They spend the game venturing into demon-infested territories and ancient ruins, in hopes of discovering how the monsters are escaping their underworld prison. But to succeed, they’ll have to uncover the secret history of their empire, and learn how Parisa’s ancestors won a similar war centuries ago.

Gameplay

Fractured Crown is a top-down 2D shooter. Its most notable element is probably the way that players equip their weapons. Enemies occasionally drop attack gems, each of which gives an elemental charge to the heroes’ attacks. But they can hold two attack gems at a time and combine their properties, giving each character a total of fourteen possible moves. And the player can switch between characters at any time, bringing the real total up to twenty-eight.

But they won’t have access to all those powers at once. They can only add or swap attack gems by finding new ones, and they can only hold two gems at any given time. But they still have flexibility in their attacks. They can choose to use one gem, the other, or both at once. And they can switch between Darius and Parisa at any time, changing their attack style entirely.

Darius combines the gems with his sword, using close- to mid-range magic powers like a cone of flame or a shockwave. Parisa, meanwhile, uses the gems to power long-range magical attacks like rapid fireballs or shield-penetrating lasers.

Attack Gems

We’re still working on figuring out what each gem does, so this list is entirely tentative, but here’s what we’re thinking so far.

Fire is a medium-damage, rapid-fire attack.
Parisa gets repeating, long-range fireballs.
Darius gets a flamethrower, shooting a constant cone of flame from his sword.

Earth is the hardest-hitting gem, but is also the slowest.
Parisa gets exploding rocks that need to charge up, but can hit several enemies at once.
Darius gets a shockwave attack that spreads out in front of him and knocks enemies back.

Order is about getting past enemies’ defenses, and can pass through obstacles that stop other attacks.
Parisa gets energy beams that pass through walls and shields.
Darius gets a magically-charged sword strike which can slice through obstacles to hit enemies on the other side.

Chaos is about covering the battlefield with damage.
Parisa gets a long-range spread shot, which fires bolts of energy in a wide arc.
Darius gets medium-range magic grenades that have a delayed explosion and can stick to enemies they hit.

And of course, each gem can combine with any other gem (or another of its own type, for amplified effects). Darius’s combinations aren’t done yet, but most of Parisa’s are at least provisionally in the game, albeit in a rough form.

Thanks for reading. If anyone’s got any questions, suggestions, or comments, I’m happy to answer. I’m especially interested in people’s thoughts on the attack gems, since that’s what we’re working on right now, but I’m happy to talk about any other aspect of the game, too.

Media

[Yxven]

The gifs you have so far make the game look like a lot of fun.

[Gorgoo]

Thanks! We've got a few of Darius's moves working now, too. It's all using preliminary graphics (like the ones in the first post), but I'll try to upload some gifs of the flamethrower and sword strike when I get the chance.

But until then: a mockup!

On the coding side, we've been focusing on the weapon combinations and haven't really done much to make our test maps look nice. But Jeremy, Fractured Crown's artist, has spent his time making awesome graphics.

We're planning on using those particular sprites for same level as the spinning enemies from our first post. The grey walls in that gif are just my temporary, programmer-art version of Jeremy's rooftop battlefield.

[Gorgoo]

We have attack gems!

That weapon-switching system I talked about in my previous post is now in the game. Barring a few minor bugs, it's all implemented. And that means I can show it off.

In that gif, each sphere is an attack gem, and the player picks them up whenever they walk over one, changing out their current weapon for the new one. Plus, they can switch from Parisa to Darius at any time, switching between two versions of each elemental combo. As an example, near the end of that GIF, the player has order and fire (the white and red orbs). With that combination, Parisa gets a rapid-fire series of laser strikes, while Darius gets a close-range but lingering blade attack.


The attack gems have another feature, too.
This is one I haven't discussed yet, and we're still not entirely sure if it'll remain in the game, but I think it's interesting enough to run with for now, and change if it doesn't work out. That is, your attack gems are also shields.

Attack gems don't have ammunition, but they do have an energy bar (it's in the top left of the screen). That energy depletes when you're hurt, diverting damage to the gem instead of your character. What that means is that, on the one hand, you can heal by finding new gems (as long as you're willing to switch your current weapon loadout). But on the other hand, if you take enough damage, your weapons get weaker. One gem will break, and then the other will too, unless you're able to find a new one in the meantime.

I'm especially interested in hearing people's opinions on that shield system. Personally, I think it's a neat way to encourage weapon-switching without discouraging the player from shooting a lot (in the way that, say, limited ammunition would do). On the other hand, I'll have to be careful to avoid "Gradius Syndrome" (in which the game's difficulty swerves dramatically as you gain or lose powerups), and there's something to be said for ammunition as a pacing mechanism.

What do you think?