Crusade of Possession

"Crusade of Possession" is a grid-based puzzle game about killing every enemy in the dungeon through the power of possession! Click on dead enemies to become them, and use their abilities! Clear rooms in less moves to earn more stars.

This game was prototyped in about 4 weeks. It was the first digital game that I actually worked on as a "rapid-prototype," where you'd create a game quickly and somewhat sloppily to see how effective it is as an idea. This was a struggle for me to grasp initially, because I didn't enjoy making games in a quick-and-dirty manner. I much preferred giving all of myself to an idea, working on it until I reach some abstract level of satisfaction. For rapid prototyping, this is not a valuable skill, and it instead held me back quite a bit. Crusade of Possession did not suffer from this bad habit of mine, but I sure did. I put a lot of time into polishing menus, code, mechanics, artwork and more just to ensure the game looked and felt good to play (and whether or not it actually does is very debatable).

However, let's look at what I actually got. We can see a grid, as I really love working with grids, especially in a "puzzle" format. The game also has a star-based progression system, where you don't unlock levels only linearly, but based on how well you've completed previous levels. This allows players to take a flexible path through the game, skipping levels they find frustrating or confusing and returning to them later. The game itself was pretty easy to teach, and I feel like we paced mechanics pretty well through our development time.

I am wondering how this game would've felt if, instead of putting all this time into polish, we put it into making the core mechanic of the game make more sense & feel better. I'd change quite a bit about this game today.

I worked on this game with the following people:
- Sean Forrester
- Cole Stranczek
- Nick Rice