Nathan McCoy has completed and released his latest game, Dragondot 2, which is now available for Windows, OS X, and Linux. Nathan is a fellow game designer that I'm close to, and have worked with in the past. A few years back, he spent about a year developing and publishing one game prototype per week. Several really notable gems came out of that, two of which I later helped him make into Flash games for profit, and one of which directly inspired Andreas Illiger to make the hit iPhone game Tiny Wings. Dragondot 2 is a sequel to one of his most popular of these one-week gameplay prototypes. It is a side scrolling action game in which you play as a dragon defending your territory against a menagerie of monsters and men.
One of the things that has always impressed me most about Dragondot is the way that Nathan puts so much personality into the game, despite its traditional theme of having literally zero art. Everything in the game, from the particle effects to the ground textures to the characters themselves, is made up of flat circles of different colors and sizes. From happy pale green kobolds that jump up and down and emit pink less-than-three <3s at the sight of your character, to fast black ninjas that zip through the air and dash back and forth using smoke bombs to dodge your attacks, to a lumbering gray circle colossus whose size dwarfs all others and whose massive club strokes are enough to send the main character flying. All of this is expressed through gameplay, color, movement, and sound -- there is no representational art of the characters, no changing animation set on a character, just particle effects, sounds, wind up times, meaty impacts, attack cycles, interrupts, tells, charge attacks, all kinds of juicy action stuffed into a circular package. It's quirky and cute and a little brilliant.
Dragondot 2 was made in Unity, and is available cross-platform and DRM free. If you enjoy action games, are interested in game design and game feel, or just want to support an indie developer, check it out. The full game costs $3, and there's a demo that you can play right in your browser.
www.nmccoy.net/dragondot2/
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Topic: Dragondot 2: Circular Dragon Combat (Read 1398 times)