Melee Dungeon Concept Devlog

Melee Dungeon

Concept Statement   

Melee Dungeon is an action game that focuses on hardcore melee combat against sneaky creeps and bosses in narrow space where player could use various weapons with different combat styles providing players with challenging gameplay.

Genre and inspiration

Melee Dungeon is a 2D soul-like action game with difficult combat against enemies. Basically, this game is inspired from Dark Souls and Bloodborne, the most iconic action-RPGs in the world. These games are praised for their brilliant gameplay and level design. Player got to fight each enemy with effort.

Melee Dungeon tries to convert the original game into a quarter view 2D game, cancelling the stats growth and emphasizing on the battle skills to be challenging, no exp gain for killing enemies, no level up, players can only hone their battle skills to deal with powerful enemies. However, the game allows players to choose from various weapons with unique features, battle strategies for each weapon can be completely different.

Player’s max health will be fixed, attack damage varied by the weapons, which also apply different attack range, attack frequency and even movement speed. Killing enemy will not gain player exp but energy, which can be used to store health or cast powerful weapon ability.

Audience and competitive analysis

Melee Dungeon’s target audience are people who like 2D action game and want some challenge from games (for those who played Soul-like games before, it may not be that hard). The control of player will be quite easy, applies only movement control plus 2 buttons for attack and a special function which differs from weapon player chooses. But it might take some time to get familiar with the enemies and traps for the first time playing the game.

There are quite a lot of soul-like games available now, but most of them are the TPP-3D games or platform-2D games. The vertical view will hopefully provide this game with very fun and unique gameplay, also making map design intuitionistic, player is going to explore the environment and take advantage of it to defeat enemy, but sometimes it could also be deadly.

Game Treatment

You are trapped in a dungeon, trying to find your way out (or going deeper?), all you have is your weapon. You will have to defeat every enemy you see and make yourself a better warrior to deal with stronger enemies. Be careful of the dangerous traps in the dungeon, they can be deadly to you or your enemy, there are always more than one way to kill an enemy. And watch out for the enemies hidden in the shadow, they are tricky and will show no mercy to you.

Key Features

-multiple weapons to choose, each of them have different combat style, players can play this game more than once and find more fun with it. E.g., sward and shield give player ability to parry and counterattack; claymore comes with higher damage, larger attack range and capable of knocking back enemy.

-Combat happens in narrow space where many kinds of traps can be found, knocking back enemies out of cliff can kill them instantly while they could do so to player too.

-Players are encouraged to explore the map as possible as they can because there are shortcuts and hidden room available where players can restore their health and energy.

Concept Art

The majority of the game scene will be sunless to match the dungeon theme. 

(Sony & FromSoftware 2014)

Enemies varied from human-like monsters to Cthulhu style creeps.

(Sony & FromSoftware 2017)

Reference

Sony & FromSoftware 2014, Dark Souls: Design Works, Tokyo, Japan.

Sony & FromSoftware 2014, Bloodborne Ofiicial Artworks, Tokyo, Japan.