Hello! 

I'm back with another development update for Spell Crawler. I've been diligently at work these past couple months and I wanted to provide a bit of an update on the project as a whole. The biggest thing is that I'm putting the project on hold! This blog post serves as a bit of a postmortem about my experience working on the project and includes a very rough demo that is available to download, but more on that later!

I started this project back around August of last year and this has been the first real project that I've stuck with long term and have worked diligently on. One of my favorite games of all time is Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Sky. This game gave me the idea for SpellCrawler and if Nintendo wasn't going to continue to make Mystery Dungeon games, I would do my best to make something fun as well. Ultimately though, I bit off more than I could chew! Working solo on a project takes a lot of time and commitment so choosing a RPG as the genre wasn't the best decision. I'd still like to continue this project eventually, but I want to work on some other things first, take what I learn from that, and then come back fresh to this. The core for what I want SpellCrawler to be is there and made, but it isn't the right time yet.

From this project though I did learn a lot and I'm excited to apply that knowledge elsewhere! I've dabbled in art before, but this was my first time doing pixel art and learning how to use Aseprite. I certainly am no expert, but it was fun creating some basic animations, tilesets, and design work for SpellCrawler. One thing that I encountered a lot over the course of development was how much rework was needed for some of these systems. I would learn about a better way to approach implementing dungeon generation or menu systems and then spend a lot of time redoing said implementations. In future projects, I will be doing much more detailed planning to prevent this as much as I can. With a RPG that has so many interconnected systems, planning out things in advanced will help a lot.

Demo

Yes there is technically now a demo available for Spell Crawler, but I would like to emphasize a bunch of asterisks around this. The game is playable with a lot of the core functionality. You can explore two dungeons, accept quests, encounter a bit of the story, and use items and spells, but a lot of it is unfinished I'd like to make clear. You might then ask why release a demo if everything is so scuffed and the main reason is that in case I don't come back to this for a long time, I would at least like something out there for all the effort that I put into this so far. It may be missing sound effects for a lot of things as I'd always be listening to music and testing muted, there may be some menus that look bare bones, but I'm proud of what I've put in so far. Since the last update I added in a build mode, a basic cutscene system, actual characters, revised menus, quest reward screen, and probably a bunch of other stuff that I'm forgetting. If you end up trying it, thanks in advance!

Some basic controls:

- Build mode in home base can be activated with B (do this after completing the first dungeon). Use F to confirm or SPACE to cancel placement.

- Spells in the dungeon can be used with TAB or a basic attack with Q. Use I to open the inventory and then shift + movement for fast walk.