Introducing (And Releasing) "Crawl"; a First Person Adventure/Action RPG

Crawl has occupied most of my development time for the entire past semester. It started as a basic project for a game design course, but I decided that the idea had enough potential to fully flesh it out. Whether or not that potential was indeed realized can be brought into question.

Each time I release a game I always say I am done with Game Maker, and this time, I am super duper serious about it. Really. I will be going out with a bang with this engine, pushing it to its limits in Crawl with complex three-dimensional environments and timing based battle systems.

Though I do have a lot to say about the development of this game, I do not currently have the will to say it; this project, amongst other circumstances, has sucked the life out of me and I would rather not dwell on the experience of its creation for while. Maybe someday in the distant future I will be able to force myself to manifest some sort of postmortem.

Crawl competes with The Pac-Man in scale. It contains 32 large, unique stages, has something like two dozen enemy types, boasts nine "verb" powers, and has a narrated (though awful) script. There quite a few secrets in there as well. The game itself is a first person adventure-action RPG game, if I had to describe it in classical terms. As the title foreshadows, the game takes inspiration from retro dungeon crawling games. However, though it shares the tile-based movement and perspective, Crawl is very much its own game. The final design might have turned out a bit too simplistic, since I tried to cut much of the crap that comes with the RPG genre.

My hope is that at least some people out there will be able to extract some enjoyment out of this. Going forward as a developer, I have a few options in front of me, all of which are looking pretty neat. First, I ordered an Oculus Rift devkit. It might be a while until it arrives, but I have always been super fascinated with virtual reality and I have plenty of ideas of what to do with it. Second, I am going to (for the fourth or fifth time) try to teach myself Blender and hop over on to Unity as my new engine of choice. Having learned much about 3D design from creating Crawl, I feel that I am now ready. Third, there might be a chance I get involved in a mod project of some sorts. I will see about that one. I chose not to take up an internship this summer break because I am a terrible, lazy person and I feel that I do not yet have the software engineering experience to get one. Hopefully these other projects will suffice to keep me from sliding down the slope of sloth.

By the way, here is the horribly recorded and cut trailer for Crawl:

Crawl Trailer: WATCH CRAWL TRAILER!

Oh, and of course, the link that allows one to download the game.

Crawl Download: DOWNLOAD CRAWL!