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Two player level in Skullkeys

We have started experimenting with a multiplayer level in Skullkeys. At the moment we call the game mode “Bomb Match”. The game mode is a bit inspired by the good old Nintendo 8-bit game Ice Climber.

What’s the bomb match about?

Simple, the first player reaching the top of the dungeon and fetching the Skullkey wins!

• Each player gets 6 bombs to begin with.
• Players can use bomb jumps to reach higher ground (note: the bomb takes 1 full heart in damage) Plan your bomb jump wisely!
• If player 2 dies, player 1 wins.

In the level there are spear-spitters, moving platforms, destructible blocks, spikes + irritating bloodsucking bats….and an opponent, to make the journey a bit troublesome for the player.

Bomb jump inspired by Metroid

Obviously, a Metroidvania inspired game needs to have bomb jump. In the multiplayer level Bomb Match you make good use of the bombs to reach the top of the dungeon and capture the Skullkey before your opponent.

Beware that the player takes 1 full heart in damage when the bomb hits!

Godot with splitscreen and canvaslayers

Yes, we want to use splitscreen for the multiplayer mode. But somehow we couldn’t get canvas-layers to work properly with the splitscreen functionality in Godot. They just don’t show up. Which is crucial for our current game layout with lighting, shadow layers etc.

So we decided to save time and just make a single screen camera that zooms out slightly as the players move apart. It works, but the gameboard looks kinda small. 😉 We will dive back into the splitscreen coding at a later stage and see if we can solve the issues with Canvaslayers.

Health in our game

In our current early demo of Skullkeys, health is measured in hearts ♥️. Heart-parts to be precise, a whole heart is split into two parts. 3 hearts * 2 = 6 heartParts. 😃 So a player can take a maximum of 6 in damage.

Tinting player 2

Nicklas also experimented with tinting / replacing colorvalues on player 2 to get a blue-ish kinda vibe on that one. Just to separate player 1 and 2. That’s all for this little game development blog update. Hope you enjoy the content!

// Mattias

Today we will talk about how I designed the Skullkeys game logo. It can sometimes be a real joy to go back and look at the progress of your work. Dissecting the design process will give you perspective on your work and also help you out in future work.

Before we dive into the process, let’s look at the final logo of Skullkeys.

How to design a game logo for Skullkeys

First we want to brainstorm and find keywords for our logo. What kind of concept are we working with, what’s the mood?

Here we are making a game with dungeons, skeletons, adventure and…bombs. The game needs a name and ultimately also a compelling logo.

The key words gave us the suggestion to name the game: Skeleton Dungeon. ☠️ Yeah, cheesy, but it was a quick and dirty name suggestion.

This is what the first sketch of the logo looked like. 8 bit font with a simple skull that I modelled in Blender.

Right. So the key components are there;

• A name – Skeleton Dungeon.
• A skull 💀
• Main light – yellow.
• Secondary light – blue, lighting from the bottom give you a very dramatic effect.

Now we just need to make some minor..hrmf…adjustments to make it golden. And more polished.

Plenty of changes though. I replaced the name to Skullkeys. It’s shorter, more punchy and a quick domain-lookup said it was available! It’s hard to come by simple, short and available domain-names these days so I quickly registered the domain.

I made the vectore lettering quickly in Affinity designer with another font as template. Imported the vector into Blender and did some quick modelling to get the text as mesh. Added some modifiers to break the logo apart and added a border around all the text.

I made some small adjustments to the skull and also added better lighting to the scene.

My brother also thought this second draft looked awesome so I went ahead to make the final polish on the Skullkeys logo.

Some minor adjustments to the Skullkeys text and lighting again. I wanted to give it a more golden polish, and carved chisel kind of vibe. Added some bloom lighting and made a proper render.

I think it came out great.

Finally I also made a small animation suggesting how we would present the logo in the game.