Knight of Dale
Knight of Dale
You are the valley's last defense from the corruption and its army of slimes. You must defend the precious heart of the valley with everything you have left as the corruption mounts greater and greater assaults.
Game
This short prototype is a sort of idle game. Once you gain enough XP (shown in the bottom right), you can purchase new upgrades for your knight to better hold off the corruption. Every moment the slimes of corruption persist in the valley, they further the corruption of the ground itself. Once this corruption encompasses the heart of the valley, the game ends and corruption overtakes. Every so often, the flower connected to the heart of the valley purifies some of the ground. The values in this prototype are not fully tuned, so you can just survive as long as possible, but eventually corruption will overtake.
Upgrades
ATK SPD: Raises the attack speed of your swing
RST SPD: Raises the frequency at which the flower resists and purifies the valley
RST LVL: Raises the amount of corruption purified by the flower
XP INC: Raises the amount of XP gained for defeating the slimes of corruption
Controls
Arrows: Side to side selection
X Button: Select option
X Button (When Prompted): Restart at the end of the game
About the Project
This is a short original game by Jordan Grayson with a given prompt of "A game you can continue to play while looking away from the screen." This game was created during a one week period in Pico-8.
Author
The game design, art, programming, and sound effects for Knight of Dale were made by Jordan Grayson. The music was inspired by Robby Duguay but made by Jordan Grayson.
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Comments
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is it impossible to lose? I still had fun
Thank you for playing! I'm glad you had fun.
As I mentioned in the description, the values can use some tuning, and the scope of the prototype ended up with a cap on the upgrades, in theory though I would like them to continue with further upgrades. So right now, if you play well enough you can get to a point where you have maxed out the upgrade paths and then you may still lose but it could take a long time running the game until that happens so it appears stable.
Really appreciate you playing the game to completion though!
In idle games and clickers the fail state, such as it is, is usually that you're using your own time inefficiently, as you build towards something. In the case of your game, the player is building to delay and hopefully stop something that is otherwise going to happen.
There's definitely something interesting there, but I think the challenge will be how to avoid it becoming an optimisation task, as the player's inefficiencies will eventually determine whether it's even possible for them to win (I suspect it won't be fun if the player has effectively mathematically lost after 5 minutes, but won't realise this for another 5 or 10 minutes).
It might be worth exploring some secondary loop that exists independently of the loop in the prototype. For instance, perhaps you can invest experience/some other currency in long-term upgrades that allow each failure in the underlying loop to set you up better for the future.
In terms of the prototype itself, I wonder whether you could find another dimension for interaction. In idle games there's often a tension between clicking and passive abilities, with upgrades being available for both.
Good luck with it :)
Hey thanks so much for playing!
I definitely agree with the extra wrinkle of coming up with a secondary loop to complicate the gameplay and strategy. And I really like the idea of the primary loop failure states being soft failure states that allow the player to continue and potentially be working on a larger meta strategy that is focused around a higher level gameplay loop.
I appreciate the feedback!
the mouse dissapears when over the game screen unplayable...also what is this game coded in.... so i can avoid it in the future
Hi! This is a prototype game made in one week in Pico-8. The game does not use the mouse, but instead uses the arrow keys and x button to select.
I hope you give it another try and enjoy it. I worked hard to make it.
Nice art!
Thanks!