The Princess in an idle rogue like where a princess needs to fight her way in a tower to free her prince.

Concept

In The Princess, the player only chooses and equips items on its character.

The depth of the system comes with the synergies of the elements

(weapons and upgrades) and the diversity of said elements.

I created some weapons and a wide variaty or upgrades,

under 4 main catergories:

The runes, that changes the character's statistics.

The gems, that changes the current weapon's statistics.

The scrolls, that changes the damages applied by taking into account

other factors such as applied ailments.

The spells, that do something on hit, such as applying ailments.

The main sub-system is the way to equip upgrades onto weapons, it is the system that connects the two elements (weapons and upgrades). That system interacts with a second sub-system, the drop (that itself has a tier sub-system).

In fact, the main sub-system is connected to the tier sub-sub-system rather than the drop sub-system itself.

The better tier a weapon is, the more space it has to equip upgrades on it.

The better tier an upgrade is, the more space it takes to equip.

The twist, in comparison to a classic ARPG like Last Epoch, is that the shapes are difficult to fit and require "Tetris"-like skills.

Code architecture

With the time I had during the jam, the quickest way I found to iterate on the code architecture was PostIts on a board.

Each elements have a script that gets attached to a prefab,

and some datas, hold in ScriptableObjects.

It allows me to create 1 instance of each element

(level: 1 scene with a data reader inside,

enemies/weapons/upgrades: 1 prefab with a data reader inside)

and create many instances of each ScriptableObject

to have as many levels, enemies, weapons and upgrades as I need.

Level design

There is a small adventure with some different path you can take. To maximize replayability, I added an ever-looping last level, the "End Zone"

Save system

Always in that replayability goal and to add a little "Arcad-y" feeling, I added a high score that is saved between runs. The system just saves a text file of the last level's name plus, if in the "End Zone", the number of "End Zones" completed.