Minerva Labyrinth - A dark magical girl dungeon crawler

[Antiquity]

Hi there, I wanted to talk a bit about my upcoming RPG, Minerva Labyrinth, if it's OK! It's a traditional-style dungeon crawler in the Wizardry / The Bard's Tale / Experience vein.  It takes place in a mid-sized city in the southeastern USA, a few decades from now, and casts you as a squad of neophyte magical warriors who must defend the city from a demonic horde called the Hate.

Some background: I've been trying to make an RPG like this for a number of years, though my last major attempt collapsed from overscoping and poor technical design.  In 2020 I tried again, but started small this time. I joined a two-month RPG game jam and released a small, bare-bones dungeon crawler called Tower of Metal using Unity.  It's fairly crude, but I am still pretty pleased with what I managed to do in only two months.  That project formed the basis for this one, which I started on in early 2021.

I made slow but mostly-steady progress until Unity blew itself up at the end of 2023.  After flailing for a bit, I decided to convert it to Godot, but this was stressful and overwhelming, and I had to take a break before completing the migration.  Unfortunately, I then had to take an even longer break for health reasons, but I ultimately finished the conversion, threw Unity in the trash, and moved forward with finishing the game.

As of now, it is almost done, and I have a demo out on Steam and Itch.  I'm trying hard to have the final game ready to release this year.

I'm a part-time solo developer with no artistic or musical skills to speak of, and I do pretty much everything myself, so I work slowly and don't produce anything attention-grabbing.  I'm making the game that I need to make, though.  I can't really do it any other way.  ML is a huge step above ToM in size, complexity, and quality, which is why it's taking years instead of months.  I hope that it will also be a step towards making even better and (maybe) bigger RPGs in the future.

Here is a modest trailer!

[Jubal]

Nice! I'll try and have a go with the demo sometime soon

I very much empathise with the slow/rocky paths to getting an RPG out, my own that came out at the end of last year was six years with a lot of breaks for life being, well, life. And I'm also in the part-time solo developer bracket myself!

[Antiquity]

Thanks, I am actively updating the demo, so I am open to any feedback.  It's just a dungeon crawl, not a massive and detailed RPG, but I hope it will be fun.  Start small, get better.

What kind of updates do folks like to see in Indie Alley threads?  I don't really post formal devlogs on Itch anymore, since it is too much effort for something that nobody really reads.  On another forum I post informal babble and reflection every week or so about what I've been working on.  I enjoy writing those, but I'm not sure how interesting they are to read.

[Antiquity]

It has been kind of difficult to focus on finishing the game, since I keep having to make updates to the demo.  I just pushed a large update on Friday, but the next day I found one more unrelated gameplay bug that really needed fixing.  I didn't want to go through the whole release process just for that, though, so I bumped up a small feature to bundle with it: the option to skip the prologue.  The prologue is a short linear mission that serves to set up the scenario and introduce the mechanics (most of the tutorials are here), but it's always good to be able to skip past that sort of thing on subsequent playthroughs.  I definitely want the option sometimes when I'm playtesting.

Currently I am working on a new music track.  Music is easily my weakest skill, so this is always difficult for me and ends with mediocre results, but the only way to get better is to do it.  The track I'm working on was one that I had started on before releasing the demo.  I had intended it as low-key background for character creation, but it ended up feeling too sinister for that, so I'm repurposing it as one of the dungeon themes.

This track fills in one of the last missing pieces in the middle game.  There are four main dungeons in the game, and the first three are now complete, except for a last round of polish.  The fourth is pretty close to done, but I need to finish the final boss and then playtest the whole dungeon.

Hopefully the demo is stable enough now that I can leave it alone for a while.  I intend to participate in Next Fest in June, though, so I guess it's good to find these issues now, instead of during the festival.

[Jubal]

What kind of updates do folks like to see in Indie Alley threads?  I don't really post formal devlogs on Itch anymore, since it is too much effort for something that nobody really reads.  On another forum I post informal babble and reflection every week or so about what I've been working on.  I enjoy writing those, but I'm not sure how interesting they are to read.

I find the informal babble interesting! It's interesting for me to see little bits of other people's processes and how they're feeling about the game, if only because it makes me worry less about my own jumble of feelings and time issues and all that around dev projects.

What sort of process/system are you using for the music?

I did Next Fest late last year for The Exile Princes: I should really do a little write-up of how that went sometime.

[Antiquity]

I am using LMMS and some sound fonts I found online.  I don't know anything about music theory, so I don't have much process. I just have to force myself to sit down and fool with it until I have something that is not completely unlistenable.  This usually takes me several sittings at least, then I am likely to go back and tweak it repeatedly over time after seeing how it plays in-game.

The biggest difficulty I have is with choosing instruments that aren't piercingly awful.  Not sure if I've selected unsuitable sound fonts or if I am just using them poorly.  Second to that is just not making the track too short or repetitive.

[Jubal]

Right, I finally got a slot to sit down and play the tutorial and do the first run around base - sorry for taking so long over it!

I like the setting - it's something a bit different, echoes of a sort of superheroey setup with the modern theming plus Greek myth terms and the Hate being vaguely reminiscent of Venom. The music works fine for me, visuals all work, it's simple but I think it's effective

Gameplay: all worked smoothly and well, I found the combat system reasonably intuitive, and didn't take any casualties through the tutorial fights. I felt like I wanted to understand enemy attacks and effects a bit more than I was managing to.

My single biggest problem with it was that for me the WASD should be set up such that A and D are for turning (which I want to do a lot when walking around) and the strafing move-without-turning keys are the (less natural and less utilised) Q and E. I found that frustrating, especially as I couldn't see a way to rebind it in the menus.

Other notes:

• I feel like "Status" might be better as "Party" or "Team" in the menus, I'd have found that a more intuitive way to know where to look for the party members' readouts.
• I'd like to be able to move through characters in the the Equipment and Status menus with A and D as well as the scroll wheel. This already happens for the Inventory menu tabs and I think it'd be a very logical bit of functionality for those other menus as well.
• A button to switch easily between a party member's status readout and their equipment screen would be really valuable.
• In the equipment screens, I'd have liked to be able to see a party member's max health and which row they were in - which would both be useful reminders of which characters are in which functions and might need which kit, especially for a new player where the characters and functions aren't well embedded yet.
• My only graphical suggestion would be to make the three characters at base a bit more visually distinct from the party if that's possible. It certainly felt very visible that e.g. Crowe and Alis have exactly the same hair, and that's not something I'd worry about for throwaway NPCs but for characters we're going to be seeing regularly it'd be nice to make them really distinctive.
• I don't know yet if I'm going to get to find out more about my party/team as we go or how 'characterised' they are/become, but I'd have liked a little bit more introduction to them in the early stages, like a dialogue at base where we get to sit down and have each of the five members tell us something or something like that.

I don't think any of that is particularly in need of urgent fixing, just my first impressions from the demo/food for thought for the final version if it's helpful. Will try to play a bit more soon

[Antiquity]

Hi, thanks for trying it out and posting feedback, I really appreciate it.  I have not heard the Venom comparison before, but I can see it.  Combat is a bit rapid-fire at times, is there anything you felt was missing to make it more readable?

You can rebind the controls from the Controls menu at the title screen or System > Controls in-game.  You should be able to set them up the way you describe¹.  There are next/previous character keys (Q/E by default) as well as character hotkeys (1-5 by default) for those menus.  Since my submenus page left to right, I used the "shoulder" buttons for character switching.  There's a tutorial message about this, but an in-menu prompt might be helpful; the problem is that I only have so much space, and if I do that, I need to be able to display something like "[Backspace] / [ScrLock]" if those are the active bindings.  I will look into it more, though.

You can use the scroll wheel to switch characters as well, but I think this is only mentioned on the help screen.

The party doesn't speak, since it's a create-your-party game and the starting party are just the default blank slates; how they behave and interact is pretty much up to you.  I do have a loose head canon backstory for the default characters, but I haven't written it down anywhere.  Normally I would put this in the manual, but I didn't write one this time because nobody reads those.

Fair point about the main NPCs not looking distinct enough.  I am not sure how I can necessarily do that better, but I'll think about it.  This was probably less noticeable to me early on, when I first drew them, because at that stage the "transformed" portrait was always on; you didn't visibly power down at HQ, so there was more of a visible distinction between the player characters and NPCs.

Also interesting points about switching directly between equip/status and showing position info; I have not thought about that before, but that could be useful.

---
¹ I feel like whether A/D should be for turning or strafing is a bit of a contentious debate, haha.  I guess it depends on how you prefer to move around.  The defaults reflect my opinion, but you can definitely change it.  Now... the arrow keys are set in stone to turn, because those are the always-available fallbacks, and while you can play without strafing, you can't play very easily without turning.

[Antiquity]

• A button to switch easily between a party member's status readout and their equipment screen would be really valuable.
• In the equipment screens, I'd have liked to be able to see a party member's max health and which row they were in - which would both be useful reminders of which characters are in which functions and might need which kit, especially for a new player where the characters and functions aren't well embedded yet.

I've been considering what to do with these while working on some other updates. I did add a left/right character pager to all three character-specific menus.  On the skill screen, this displays aspect (class); on the equip and character screens, it displays position and row.

I originally did not include HP/MP on the equip screen because there's no equipment that affects those, so it seemed superfluous; I can see how it might be helpful, at least at first, but it still seems awkward for that reason.  Still considering this.  I am also considering where they would best fit, since stats are aligned in offensive and defensive columns.  HP is arguably a defensive stat, but MP is somewhat questionable as an offensive stat.  It also feels odd to me having MP on the left and HP on the right.  They could go under the portrait, either as a new row or replacing the name, but that has other concerns to think about.

As for swapping directly between menus, I don't remember if I disallowed this for some technical reason at the time or just to keep the interface flow tidier, but it does raise a couple of issues.  First is one of consistency; if you can swap only between that pair of menus, it raises the question of why you can't swap directly between any two menus, which is something I'm not sure I want to do.

However, there's also a question about button behavior, especially on gamepads.  There's already a small inconsistency with how menu hotkeys work: pressing one while in that menu immediately closes the menu, unless that hotkey is also bound to confirm or cancel, as these functions take priority (and I'm just now wondering if the other menu functions should take priority, as well, which would make this a bigger issue).  If I enable additional menu hotkeys while in other menus, this inconsistency gets more significant, as it becomes more likely to create a conflict with priority functions.  This is probably not very noticeable on a keyboard, but would be pretty noticeable on a gamepad, where buttons are very limited.  For example, if you bind A to both confirm and the character menu, then you can't switch directly from equipment to character, because the confirm function has to remain available.  If however you rebound confirm to X, then you can.

So, this leaves me thinking about the root problem that needs solving.  Other than max HP, is there anything in the character menu that you really feel is useful when making decisions about equipment?  All that's really there that isn't shown on the equip screen are support skill, HP/MP/XP/level, and base stats.  None of those are really directly relevant to equipment except for base stats, which are used to determine equipment weight, but weight is already shown explicitly here in several ways, so I don't know that the stat score itself is important to know here.

One thing I could do that raises fewer questions (and which might be a good idea anyway) is to have the character-specific menus remember which character was selected last.  There is no real reason they need to always default to the first character when opened, and the last character viewed will often be the one that the player wants.  In the worst case, it's no more arbitrary than the character in the first slot.  The point is that this would make it easier to view all aspects of one character without constantly losing your place.  Maybe there could also be an option to link the menus together so that after closing one menu, the others automatically open to the same character.  Would this be helpful?

[Jubal]

First is one of consistency; if you can swap only between that pair of menus, it raises the question of why you can't swap directly between any two menus

I think this one is answerable, being because only those two menus form 'character profile' sections IIRC? Or is there another menu I'm forgetting? But I get it if you don't want to go down that route - I hadn't thought about the gamepad problem at all, being a strictly mouse and keyboard gamer, so 100% get it if that's an issue.

Weight I'm not overly worried about, or XP & level. I still kind of think health and mana would be useful to have, because they help tell me about the function of a particular character in ways that might help me remember what sorts of gear I want to put on them.

One thing I could do that raises fewer questions (and which might be a good idea anyway) is to have the character-specific menus remember which character was selected last.  There is no real reason they need to always default to the first character when opened, and the last character viewed will often be the one that the player wants.  In the worst case, it's no more arbitrary than the character in the first slot.  The point is that this would make it easier to view all aspects of one character without constantly losing your place.  Maybe there could also be an option to link the menus together so that after closing one menu, the others automatically open to the same character.  Would this be helpful?

Yes, I'm not sure this would wholly fix my concern but I think it'd definitely be helpful

Sorry for the slow reply by the way, work is a bit of an avalanche at the moment and I'm not keeping up with life super well!

[Antiquity]

Currently trying to gauge whether I am actually ready for Next Fest, which is almost here. The more polish I add to the demo, ironically, the less it feels like it's ready, and the less confident I feel that I can hit my original release goal in just a few months.  I'm also not sure if I need to do a significant content-level pass over the demo.  What I have always struggled with is making the early game interesting enough to keep the player going (and interested in playing the full version) without making it too complicated or difficult.  You can't have Mangar's Tower as the first dungeon.

I have to decide pretty quickly if I still want to go through with Next Fest, but I am just having trouble knowing what to make of my current state.

[Jubal]

It kind of depends why you're most doing Next Fest, I think. In an ideal marketing strategy from purely financial perspectives, you'd probably want to put it off until you were really sure you had maximum polish: on the other hand, if you think you need feedback to improve the polish, Next Fest earlier might be a good way to get the extra feedback.

[Antiquity]

Good point.  The goal is to make the best game I can, not the most money I can (and if making money were the goal, I would not be making what I make).  There is only so much I can do to improve it without feedback; if I can get a little bit more feedback now, instead of 4 months from now, it will be helpful to the final product.

I did end up doing another content pass over the demo levels to add a bit more of interest and make better use of space in a few spots, but there's not a whole lot more I can do.  The first level in particular has kind of a lot of empty space, probably more than what it should have had, but that is just how it was designed.  The first dungeon (the hospital) is represented more as a once-real place that has just been twisted around, as opposed to the later dungeons, where I just do whatever the hell I want, unconstrained by any concerns of what humans might plausibly build.  I think this was partly to make it a bit less hostile as a low-level dungeon, but also because I had something a bit different in mind aesthetically early in development.  The now-optional subway prologue is also not at all representative of how the real game plays, so although in my eyes it does exactly what I wanted it to do, I'm still afraid of it turning people off.  I don't know if just cordoning off the early game was the best choice as a demo, but I also wanted the type of demo that players could start in and then continue playing in the full game.

Completely redoing the first level is not something I am prepared to do right now, so I just have to hope that it's good enough, I guess.  I suspect that I won't get any slack from players for substandard dungeon design.