My project: Dodge Arena

Hey all!

Like I said in my first post, the primary purpose of this blog was to show off my improvement as a programmer and coder. Right now, I am attempting to best do this by working on my own projects. My current primary project is a game developed in Python using Pygame, called Dodge Arena.

Dodge Arena is highly influenced by a game I played often years ago called Crimsonland. It's a very fun top down hectic shooter that I recommend you all check out. The basic idea of the game is you hold off wave after waves of minions which give experience, and every time you level, you can choose a Perk which gives you various benefits; shooting faster, different gun, more experience game, etc. In addition, powerups and weapons spawn on the map at random locations, which adds choices (do i try to power through this horde of minions to grab this powerup?). Here's a screenshot showing off Crimsonland:

When setting out to make Dodge Arena, I had a similar idea, but I wanted to add features and game mechanics missing from Crimsonland. I wanted a top-down shooter where you hold off swarms of minions, and where power-ups spawn. However, there are three key differences that I want in Dodge Arena:

• Crimsonland has no terrain; it's simple a wide open map. I wanted to spawn less minions and have a maze-like terrain set-up, with corridors and twist and turns. This has the additional challenge of not getting caught (i.e., walking into a dead end, or having minions coming from both ends of a two-way tunnel). My general idea (and consequently the first map I'm working on) is something like the Pacman map:
  
• Crimsonland levels give you a random list of Perks to choose from. In Dodge Arena, I want a skill tree (Similar to Diablo 2, WoW, League of Legends, etc.) I think this adds more strategy and allows you to better tailor your character to how you want to play (i.e. straight up damage, more movement and utility, etc.)
• Crimsonland has random power-ups that cause abilities, such as adding fire to your bullets or setting off a nuke, but there are no abilities. I want Dodge Arena to have abilities like those in League of Legends, such as jumping, knock backs, blinks, terrain hooks, and so on. This combines well with the maze-like (or to keep the LoL analogy going, jungle-like) map that I have; you'd be able to jump over the maze walls, funnel minions into one tunnel then knock them all back or deal huge AoE damage, and so on.

Dodge Arena is still in very, very, very early alpha, but just to give you a feel for how the game will feel, I uploaded a very quick video (again, very very early alpha, it isn't pretty):

Later blog posts will show off code snippets and videos of specific game progress, but this post was just to show off my general game idea and my philosophy going forward. Thanks for reading!