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About

Warp Realm is a short, 2D puzzle adventure game created in Dragonfly, an ASCII art based game engine. In Warp Realm, you play as a trapped adventurer, trying to make their way out of a dangerous dungeon.

The player must use their wit and reflexes in order to dodge the dangerous traps, solve puzzles, and make it out of the dungeon alive.

Development Info

– Project Type: Game

– Role: Programmer and Design

– Tools Used: Visual Studio

– Team Size: 2

– Project Length: 2 Weeks

Game Info

– Genre: Puzzle Adventure

– Platform: PC

– Current Status: Completed

System Design

Player Abilities

Capturing a sense of adventure was our biggest goal and challenge in this game with its simple engine and graphics, so my decisions focused on enabling such a feeling as much as possible.

Upon acquiring the Warp Ring, the player is able to shoot out two projectiles that each spawn a portal. Players can move through these if the other side is safe terrain, and can move projectiles through them as well. Portals were the chosen mechanic because they work as a mix of a traversal tool and puzzle solver. Giving players this extra movement helped to make the game feel more open.

Level Mechanics

Outside of player mechanics, levels are filled with other functional terrain that can require some thinking to traverse, featured in this slideshow.

Level Design

Level Design

The first rough draft of our plans for the dungeon level layout.

An example of the text document (left) to level (right) generation used in Warp Realm

An example of one of the many branching rooms in Warp Realm

Facilitating a feeling of adventure was a big focus when creating the dungeon as well.

The solution I came up with to evoke this feeling was a fairly simple one, but one that worked well within our scope. To use branching paths. For Warp Realm, paths came in three forms, open, selective, and puzzles.

Open paths were paths the player could access whenever, with no resource consumption required.

Selective paths, are paths that required players to pick which they wanted to explore. These paths made use of keys and locked doors, only giving players enough to dive into one way at a time.

Puzzle paths relied on puzzle solutions to open. Sometimes it was as easy as them both opening when the puzzle is solved, but other times it required different solutions to be achieved in order for the each path to open.

Whenever we had a room that would connect to another directly, I’d try to see if I could twist the level in a way that would turn it into a branching path. I wanted the area to feel open-ended, so filling it with these branching paths helped to bring it closer to that experience as the player was constantly given choices of where they wished to go.