Skeleton Dungeon

Welcome to the Skeleton dungeon! In this map, you are against a horde of skeletons who are at the command of the Skeleton King. In this adventure, your goal is to defeat the skeleton king to clear the graveyard and receive an award to pay off your debt that you owe to a bar.

 What people liked about my map is that the enemies in this game are balanced. I tried my best to make sure that the players are approached with low level skeletons at first to get a feel of the mechanics of the game then went up the difficulty to make the players focus more on teamwork. However, the enemies were spaced out where it got to a point where the two players were in different areas fighting their own enemies. 

The players then explained to me that there were too many unnecessary ledges in the game. The purpose of the ledges is for the players to remain hidden from the boss and the enemies. They are also there to prevent the ranger from shooting the skeletons from afar in one room which makes them take the alternate path in the map. To reach the alternate path, the player must roll to jump on the lightly shaded line to climb up the ledge. Then when they drop from the ledge they enter the bone pit which contains two skeleton guards that are high on defense but low on attack. Once the player(s) defeat the skeleton guards they are awarded a path to the final room which grants them access to a ledge where they could observe the whole room without being seen. 

My plan to make the players work as a team worked as they both took the optional path in fear that they will be faced with a 1 versus 2 battle again. What I would like to improve for my next map design is to make optional paths feel optional. I felt that in this level, the optional path is what most players will likely choose. I want both paths to feel as they got their own rewards to them. I could perhaps place valuable items that are only attainable in the paths that you have chosen. There was a health potion in a corner where one player is supposed to go but since the player did not know about the potion they instead felt that the optional path was more enticing. 

The overall flow of the game went from fast paced to slow and steady. The reason it became slow and steady at the end was because I did not predict the enemies getting ridiculous rolls for defense. In this game, the players chose the warrior and ranger class. In the room with the two guards, the warrior was in the front becoming the shield for the ranger. Although this was a good strategy, if the players were to choose the mage and the ranger together they would have a bad time. There were times in the game where the combat felt tight spaced leaving little room for the range classes to maintain their distance from enemies. 

Even though this is the first level, it felt like a level that you would find mid game. The players never got to the boss but if they did they would be in a world of hurt. The skeleton kind can heal his skeleton guards and revive them. I found this ability to be broken because during the game the players finally defeated the guards to reach the boss but they were unprepared for the battle since they were at such low health. I plan to remove this ability from the boss to prevent that from happening and plan to make a layout of the map where it is more opened spaced where the players could run pass the guards and run straight into the Skeleton King.