SECTION 2: THE MAZE (BLUE/YELLOW WALLS SECTION)

SPOILERS AHEAD

Solution:

• The first section of the maze leads to two areas.
  • The first door leads to the training area, where you just get to fight a slime and practice fighting on a dummy.
  • The next door leads in the next level.
• Note that throughout the maze, most monsters reappear if you exit an area and come back. This is useful if you want to stack up on coins.
• On the next level, you have access to various areas.
  • The toilet:
    • where you can sit on it and get eaten by a monster. You should fill up the empty bottle at the water fountain.
  • The vending machine:
    • You can buy a fruit that can fills up most of your health (3 coins), or a water bottle which can add extra health (1 coin). The fruit is gone after consumed, but the bottle can be refilled.
  • The arcade machine:
    • Use coins to play. You should try to get a score higher than the lowest in the score table (around 10 kills). Keep note on the highest score on the "High score table". It's the combination of a code in the later level.
    • In case you don't have patience with the mini game, you can shoot the machine with your gun to bust it, and it will flash the score table constantly. You can see the top score while it flashes.
• The next level has yellow walls.
  • Go straight on the first corridor, you'll reach a map.
  • The big loop leads to an area where you can get a key, after beating the red slime. There's another map there so you can find your way back easily.
  • One door leads to a locker room. One locker is locked with a combination. You might recognize the symbol similar to the one found in the arcade machine. That's because the locker belongs to the player reaching the highest score, and that person used that score as the combination. While it's all in alien digits, the combination looks like the number "1906". From that locker, you get an access card.
• The next level has the alien shop. You can buy various things from the alien, but you don't need to in order to continue.
• At the next level, you will find several cages. The end of the long corridor shows a map.   For any locked door, use the key that you found on the previous level. The side doors have monsters, chest, and cages for other prisoners.
  • In one of the cage, you will find a rope. Use the access card on the scanner to open the cage.
  • In another cage, you will find Yupa lying on the ground.
    • Use two bottles of water on him. If you don't have enough water, you can go back to the shop and buy one, or at the same level one of the enemies drops a bottle of water when defeated.
    • Talk to Yupa, introduce yourself.
    • Show Baby Hitler's photo to Yupa. He will follow you for the rest of your journey.
• .When you keep going, the last door leads up to the purple floor. (see you next walkthrough)

Extra:

• Sit on the toilet and get eaten by a tentacle monster .

Creator notes:

This part of the game has an elaborate maze. I got inspired by the game "Phantasy Star" for the dungeon crawling part.

I really liked those dungeon crawling sections in Phantasy Star, especially that feeling when you suddenly see a monster appear. I can see why not everyone shares my opinion. I was playing at my cousins' who took the time to draw tons of maps with pencils. On paper, the dungeons look so simple while in the game, it was a goddamn maze, and all the walls looked exactly the same some it was hard to tell where you were.

To mitigate that, I put a few maps on the walls. I didn't want an interactive mini map like in most game, because I didn't want the player to just be looking at the mini map when going through the dungeons. Also, I added lights on the ceiling so that each area wouldn't always look the same. At the end, the dungeons are really straightforward, because the take you to one section to another pretty much linearly, but at first glance they might look daunting.

Noteworthy additions to this area is the arcade mini-game. It's pretty difficult to insert a game inside another game, but to me, shoot-em-up is the easiest kind of game to implement. So as a mini-game it was doable. The shoot-em-up part would also tie to a later part of the overall game.

The combat section took a while to implement, because I didn't really have a good idea on what to do. I was first thinking about the classic turn base combat, like in Phantasy Star where you select your action. But then I'd have to fill up the game with content such as magic, skill, etc... I also wanted the game to feel a little bit more dynamic. The combat system I came up with is similar to one in Prince of Persia's sword fighting. Basically you attack, and the opponent can block the attack and counter-attack, but you also have a chance to block. I never really understood exactly the strategy in Prince of Persia's duels but I just knew eventually, if you kept blocking then attacking, you could win. At some point, I wanted to add "skills" stats for combat, but that would be a lot of work. Instead, things like "critical hit" when life bar is low are included by default (That's why you do have more chance to kill the enemy when you're about to die!).

Adding Yupa was also an interesting challenge, because Yupa had to be there, but you can't really put Yupa in your inventory, that'd be weird. I also didn't want to dangle an extra UI element throughout the rest of the game. Instead, I opted for the part of having Yupa follow the player, and you would see him when you turn around (which does happen often in the maze.). That way, I could make the player feel like they have a friend on their journey, while not clobbering the UI so much.

See you next walkthrough, with more solutions and dev notes!