Lost Party was a mid-semester project at my school, mostly meant to familiarize us with Unity, simple scripting, 2D animation, etc. It’s a one-level 2D platformer in which you simultaneously control three adventurers on their way through a dungeon.
I created the characters and level tiles and programmed controls, camera movement, and most of the game logic.
You can play Lost Party on itch.io.
The gameplay arose from an early programming error that caused every character on screen to be controlled by user input. We developed that into the core gameplay: The wizard, fighter, and rogue all move on the same input, and the player must take care to protect them all as they move through the level. If an adventurer dies, either by falling off the level or being hit by an enemy, the player keeps on controlling the remaining character(s).
In essence, this means the adventurers represent the player’s three “lives”. The game gets increasingly easier as you lose these lives, as there are fewer characters to control and keep track of, so the game self-corrects if you’re struggling to complete the level. A scoring system based on how many adventurers survived at the end of the level would be a great addition here.
The level was made, as these things often are when you’re on a really tight schedule, without testing, so it wasn’t until we showcased the game that we noticed an interesting pattern in how people would play Lost Party: by walking the group of heroes into a wall, you can overlap them, making it much easier to control the heroes. We hadn’t thought to make the heroes collide with one another—this would likely fix the issue entirely.
NMBJ 