2D top down game, work in progress

Showcase In Development
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Hello! I’m relatively new to all this, and wanted to share what I’ve been working on as a way of introducing myself. It’s a 2D, top down, action RPG inspired by the original NES Zelda and GB Link’s Awakening (with a lot of influence on the visual style from Earthbound, and bits from various other 8 bit and 16 bit games, like Secret of Evermore, etc.)

There’s not really much of a game here yet:

Youtube video

I’ve mostly been trying to get the game functionality, and then the look and feel of the game working before actually making the game world. There’s not really a plot, or game objectives, or anything like that yet. Just a few test scenes slapped together to get the idea of what the game would look like.
There’s a basic combat system, with healing items and the ability to increase the player’s healthbar over time. I have an inventory system, although so far only for the useable/equipable items and weapons on the left hand side. Seemed like that would take more effort, so I focused on getting that working first. The right side of the inventory will have key items that once picked up will appear in the inventory screen and affect things in the game world; for instance picking up a certain type of key will cause it to appear in the inventory, and then corresponding doors can then be opened when the player interacts with them. I hate the idea of a key disappearing after it’s been used.
These are set up using custom resources, allowing changes to persist through scene changes, and game progression (when I get that far) will be handled in a similar way. This should make implementing a saving and loading system pretty straight forward.
There’s also a basic dialogue system… although I don’t have any characters created yet for the player to interact with- just the chickens.

I want the game to focus on exploration, and the plot to be more about something personal to the character rather than a generic “save the world” or whatever. Also a somewhat whimsical tone. Planning to include a trading sequence, like in Link’s awakening, but I might put more weight on completing it as an integral part of beating the game.

I’m finding Godot to be pretty easy to learn and work with, at least for a relatively simple project like this. However, as this is something of a passion project, I’m insisting on creating my own assets for it- something that I don’t have much skill with, and is easily the most time-consuming aspect. There’s a lot left to do.

Anyways, let me know what you think.

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Save menu options for a retro styled game
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Looks great so far.

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Great progress on the technical side! You’ve built out a lot of functionality, which is awesome.

Before diving deeper, I recommend taking a step back to clearly define the game’s core story and purpose. Mapping out the narrative and key objectives will give your project a solid foundation and help you to start to identify the core components you should concentrate on and develop further.

This is a great start though. Congrats.

PS Even just getting a working title for your game is a great starting point to start narrowing down the direction you should explore, and even the style for your artwork.

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Thank you!
And yeah, I think I’m at that stage where I need to nail down what the story is going be and then have a sense of how it will progress before I can do much else in developing assets or gameplay. I’ve had some vague ideas, which have guided it this far, but a lot of those are things that I don’t want the game to be. Like tropes that I want to avoid.

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I’ve never played Zelda and I saw the video before reading the actual post.
And that’s really an amazing work!

Even if I never actually played that games, I could in the first seconds recognize the style of Zelda!

I’m not able to say any advice that wasn’t already mentioned here on the replies, so good luck with your project and don’t give up!

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I have seen YT gameplay. It look pretty developed already. Nice job. Good luck :slight_smile:

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This project kinda got put on the back burner due to work and life issues, but I’ve recently started working on it again. Here’s a little video showing more of the functionality that’s been added.

There are now locked doors that require specific keys, branching dialogue, and saving and loading. Although it’s not shown in the video (I’m reworking what the various world scenes will look like), when the player transitions scenes, the scene and which entrance was used will be stored such that when a save is loaded the player will start at that entrance of the scene where they saved.

I’ve also changed the bombs, so that they’re now thrown (with a throwing animation) and explode on impact, like a Molotov. Not shown in the video (I might upload another one for it), but the icon at the bottom shows that they now look more like a small jar.

I’ve made progress on outlining the story, but I still haven’t settled on a title. For what it’s worth, the main character is named Barry, but this was something that I had in mind before I even started working on the game. I want to avoid having Barry’s name in the title: I guess kinda like how the game Metroid is named “Metroid”, and not “Samus”, if that makes any sense.