Sorcerer's Quest
Q1 2021
University Year 2 - Game Design
A metroidvania-style game project where you need to siege a castle using teleportation, elemental powers and swords.
Walkthrough Video
For this project we were given another base framework to work off of - called "Nightbreed" - which involved a vampire-like character in a 2D-constrained world. Our task was to design and create a metroidvania, a game which has a congruent map that the player travels through, around, back and forth to progress.
The base framework had a merchant character that was honestly quite creepy and fell into uncanny valley - the entire class made jokes about it during our online class calls (this was during lockdown when schools were not in-person!) so I decided to run with that and make him part of the story.
The EVIL merchant had stolen everybody's riches, and his mercantile magic had turned these riches into metal monsters that protected his holdout at the castle!
I wanted to heavily modify the framework rather than just create a metroidvania level with the assets and mechanics provided, so I began writing down ideas for core gameplay mechanics and took inspiration from non-metroidvania sources such as Little Big Planet for its level design mechanic where you could jump onto different "layers" of foreground and background, and Super Smash Brothers for some directional fighting moves (up/down air, and command grabbing).
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Having different layers in a 2D level allows me to add (literally) much more depth to the level design, offering alternate routes and puzzles that involve traversing between these layers.
In metroidvania fashion, the core idea of the game was to progress through this level with routes that overlap on themselves and progress with key items found throughout while encountering enemies. I decided a way I could let the player progress was by unlocking elemental swords embedded in pedestals throughout the castle dungeons.
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These swords allowed the Sorcerer character to gain powers related to these elements. In some examples, these swords are required in order to progress in the level, such as using the special ability of the Windmore to gain extra height in a tornadic jump, or spawn ice monoliths to travel across an underground lake.
An early layout design using a bubble map format.
Annotated level design with hazard placements.
A near-complete pass of the level design.
An early layout design using a bubble map format.
Development stages of the level design