Demons Dwell Here

With the basic dungeon and dungeon layouts implemented it was time to add some enemies for the player to face. With time running out before the end of the jam, I decided to peruse OpenGameArt for an enemy. I settled upon this night demon made by nubex.

I implemented some randomly placed spawn points with a minor edit to the dungeon generation algorithm. A timer spawns enemies at random intervals.

Next, I gave the demon some AI, I pulled in a bunch of scripts from another project and set to work integrating them into my scene. And this is where I hit a significant bottleneck…

Baking a huge nav mesh at runtime is a monumental task and I managed to crash my PC multiple times. I certainly have some ideas on how this can be accomplished, but this is something for a post-jam version. For the jam itself, I decided to limit navmesh generation and placement of enemies to the dungeons only. This also allowed me to do the navmesh generation only as a player entered the dungeon, saving on initial load times.

With navigation in place and my AI scripts set up, it was time for some playtesting. With a little tweaking combat was starting to feel somewhat passable.

Wrapping it up

It was time for the finishing touches. I added some more graphical elements to the title screen implemented a simple credits screen and scoured open game art / itch.io for some CCO music and sounds. I have no idea why I always underestimate how long it takes to do sound and music but I managed to do it again. 

I realized my placeholder town NPCs were still kicking around and updated them using some humanoid models from a project I created a couple of years ago.

Finally, I downgraded the resolution for that crispy PSX feel and it was time to export the project!