Minerva Labyrinth by Midnight Spire Games

A dark magical girl dungeon crawler

itch.io

I'm experimenting with more lightweight symbols and environmental art for gameplay events (such as item caches) and supplemental decoration. To support the change from the big plate icons in ML1, I added a "search here" HUD icon and slightly focused view (for certain objects) to mark searchable tiles. Some of them will be secrets, though. 🀫

Again, this is all highly experimental, but overall I like the results so far.

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I was very happy to receive this kind review of Minerva Labyrinth this morning.

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A basic but overdue technical upgrade: migrating my portrait components from hand-colored sprites (a prototyping solution that I never replaced) to palette-swap shaders. This should clean up my sprite work quite a bit and make it a lot easier to add new models and colors. Hair in particular was getting to be unmanageable, with six styles and ten colors split into three layers.

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I implemented preliminary support for difficulty settings with several different factors that I can control. This is something I wanted to do for ML1, but by the time I was considering it, I felt it was too late in development to do it in the way that I wanted (it would require an editing pass over every encounter in the game, just for starters). This time I'll have it ready on the ground floor and can test and refine it as I go.

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First draft of item enchanting. It took some iteration to figure out the layout and what information is needed. How this all actually works and what options are available (or even if it's a worthwhile addition at all) will need playtesting, but it's a start.

The idea is to add a small additional vector for gear customization and loot via these rare enchanting materials.

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I'm messing around with adding enchantments to items. Here's a weapon with an accuracy bonus applied. I'm not sure yet if I'll actually use this in the game or not, but I felt like implementing it just for fun. Plus, I had to do some refactoring to how items are managed in order to support it, and those changes will allow me to track other instanced item data, if I want.

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I'm working on some shop GUI enhancements. I added a "buy and equip" feature so you don't have to leave the shop interface, and I tried to simplify the compare panel on the right. It now gives a basic up/down based on item tier and displays a more readable full stat breakdown in buy+equip mode.

The goal is to reduce menu friction and make it easier to find what you want. I'm open to feedback.

Video is "after," screenshot is "before."

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Some work for my next game that I wasn't looking forward to: upgrading the automap with a scrollable viewing area to support bigger levels. I actually didn't need to add a whole lot of code, though. It was mostly updating a bunch of finicky math to work for a more general case.

ML1 was locked to 16x16 maps, but I can make them much bigger now. πŸ€”

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I officially started coding work on my next dungeon crawler today. I'm starting out by refactoring some years-old pain points and implementing my tentative new design for how stats will work.

I'm moving up to #GodotEngine 4.6.1 this time. So far so good. It seems more streamlined and performant than 4.4.

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