Toil - Project Insight

Toil is a first person shooter “roguelike-esque” game with light platformer elements. The game can be played through your browser here!

In the game, the player must go through rooms in a circular loop in order to upgrade their stats, when the player feels their stats are high enough they can attempt to reach the goal.

Breakdown

The players goal, the golden hourglass

The player will start the game with their objective partly in sight, quickly they will realize it will not be possible to reach their goal so they must first spend time upgrading their stats.

Once the player enters the first room, random enemies may spawn from various spawn positions located throughout the room. Defeating all of the enemies in a room will unlock the door leading to the next room. Once the player goes through 3 rooms filled with enemies they will reach an area where they can decide between 2 randomly generated pickups, these pickups will increase the player’s stats.

Once roughly 20 loops are completed, the player should be able to reach their goal.

Design Breakdown

Originally, no platformer section was planned for the game and the player would just continuously level up their stats, in an attempt to give the game more of a goal, the platformer section was added.

In the game, I liked the idea of doing one task to help something else make progress, for example, going through the loops in order to upgrade your stats for the platforming section. This kind of game design is present in other game genres as well, in the Persona series, the player will go through very contrasting parts of the game which benefit each other. In Persona, the player might go through a dungeon in order to save/reach another character, when they are outside of the dungeon, they may interact (hang out) with them which might give them skills when they return to a dungeon again.

In Toil, the player is rewarded for putting their “time in” into the repetitive shooter section, and they are allowed to show off their rewards/progress by attempting to reach the end of the platformer section.

Conclusion

The design idea of doing one thing to make something else easier/accomplishable is definitely something I would like to work with again in the future, perhaps it may even expand upon the idea of Toil, or include other mashups of game genres as well.