Dreamweaver

Information

"They've given up on this inn already. It's crawling with dream parasites, and if I'm being honest, I'd given up too, until you showed up. And I think, maybe, you will be the one to save it."

Art and Design

Character Art

There are total of seven characters in the game that I had to design, and out of those, the main character was probably the hardest. Unlike most of the other characters who already existed in my other works and thus had been designed before, the main character was completely new. I wanted them to fit the vibe I had in mind, with the only requirements I had in mind being androgyny. Their robe was later designed with dangling threads to associate it with the weavers. On the right is a sketch of the main character's portrait (for the record, the pupils will not be omitted in the final illustration). To prevent spoilers other characters will be revealed when the game is released!

UI Design

Graphic design has never been one of my strong suits, so coming up with a dialogue box that fix the theme of the story but was neither overly complicated nor too plain was admittedly a difficult task. I choose purple and white as the main colours to match the main character and the overall game's aesthetic, and I'm quite satisfied with how that turned out. Similar to the those on the main character's outfit, the threads around the box are meant to symbolise those used to weave dreams. The text is meant to be centred for better consistency, while the font will likely change when I find one that I like better, given that this is within Clip Studio Paint and I won't be typing every dialogue line there.

Map Design

Designing the map was one of the biggest challenges for me, or at least starting it was. I had never designed a map before this one and the closest I'd gotten was sketching a rough outline of entire areas for my other metroidvania. This game, being significantly smaller in scale, had only one main area and a few smaller ones that were more like extensions than their own areas despite the different themes. There was also the challenge of making it work fluidly with the ability-loss mechanic. Luckily, the said mechanic also made it easier to lock access to places.

The way I ended up designing the map was by imagining paths that the player could take and ensuring that one, they would always have a way out of wherever they ended up, and two, they would not be able to go back to places they aren't supposed to. Given how small the map was, shortcuts were not as vital but I did try to include paths that would make traversing the inn less frustrating.

I worked primarily in Google Sheets, using each cell to correspond to a tile on the game map (as per Unity's grid system). I marked cells with colours based on a code I came up with to differentiate platforms from spawn points and so on. Though it was hard to start, I actually had a lot of fun designing the map and coming up with ways to make each area fit seamlessly together. Above is an example of what I did for an area that the player will be able to access throughout the game. Each colour and each letter has a meaning that I recorded in a reference list. Although the full map is complete at this point, I will not be displaying it here until the game is released.

Music and SFX

The music for the game was made with Musescore and Cubase. I'm working on a total of seven — potentially eight — tracks, including one for each unique location and a boss fight theme. They will be released on SoundCloud once recording is done. Each area's track is meant to convey the emotions and atmosphere of that place, with the lobby track designed to be something a bit more calming than the haunting ones that soon area have. Though I did not have knowledge of music theory (I used to, but unfortunately, I've forgotten almost all of it), I can still read music scores in treble and bass clef so it wasn't too bad when I composed tracks using certain instruments.

Game Elements

Mechanics

[WIP]

Combat

I think anyone who has watched my gameplay can agree that I'm horrible at boss fights, and particularly so at certain kinds of bosses. But in designing the bosses in this game, I didn't just take into account my preferences but what I've heard from other people as well. My goal was to make each fight unique and memorable, testing a different set of skills so that it wouldn't get repetitive. Each boss has a unique introduction meant to mirror the nightmares of the character they are associated with, though in some cases, it is not the boss but the style of the fight that reflects the nightmare. I thus believe that different people will find different fights most enjoyable, and I hope that players will have fun challenging the various bosses.

The mana system was a little harder to balance. I had my reservations on setting health and mana as a single resource (essence) without any mechanisms to convert one to the other, mostly because I felt that players might be less inclined to use spells if it would impact their health. I sounded this out with several people and eventually came to the conclusion that it's a case of "greater risk, greater reward." Lifesteal from hitting enemies also makes it fairly easy to recover essence, which is a system that I plan to change for my future games. I only planned for five main rooms so I didn't want to overdo the number of spells too, so there are only two in this game: the basic forward spell and a shield that is meant to help the player with the first boss fight, one that might pose a challenge to those unfamiliar with the genre.

Background

Dreamweaver was quite a spontaneous idea, especially compared to my other projects. Before I started working on it, I had just started relearning C# for Unity in order to start my metroidvania game. I realised that the project was becoming much larger than I'd initially planned and I wasn't keen on scaling it down, but I was also worried that I was biting off more than I could chew as a newbie game developer. I considered just doing a demo of it as a first project until I decided that I didn't want to release a potentially poorly made version of the game and be off to a bad start. That's where Dreamweaver came along. It took me a good two hours to finally come up with a plot idea for the game and mechanics that would make it stand out while not using any unique ones I had for my other projects. Now, it even features some of my original characters from various other stories too!

Meant to be a short, experimental game, I don't expect Dreamweaver to be a long game, which is part of the reason I will be offering it for free. It's more of a means for me to practice and hopefully get useful feedback before integrating some similar mechanisms into my other games. Since I didn't want to outsource the assets, they're all done by me: the art, the programming, the music and so on. Because I'm doing a lot of this for the first time (especially music composition), they're probably not as good as many games out there but I do hope that they add positively to your game experience should you choose to play. Once it's out, if you play it, I'm always open to listening to your experience, so feel free to send me an email or hop onto a stream to chat. For now, the game is still in the works, and I'll update this page with more information soon~