Crypt of the Forgotten
Engine: Lex Talionis
Date: October 2024 – November 2024
Crypt of the Forgotten is a single-player, grid-based strategy level built in the Lex Talionis engine — an open-source, Python-based engine that seeks to replicate the style of the Game Boy Advance Fire Emblem titles. This standalone map follows the mercenary Zeke and his employer, Sky, as their band ventures into the titular crypt to retrieve an ancient tome. The map was made to familiarize myself with Lex Talionis, which I was using for the first time and I planned on using for a larger scale project in the future. So, while the level design is a large aspect of the project, I also did all the programming, narrative, and some art as well.
As I said, the map is supposed to be a sort of dungeon crawl, which was the original inspiration for the map. I wanted to have a two-phase map where the player explores the dungeon, and then has to retrace their steps to escape. As such, one big design challenge was making sure the map was fun to traverse through not only once, but twice. Naturally, the level went through a lot of iteration throughout development.
I had originally designed the map to be more square/horizontal, as seen in my initial sketches below. However, this left the map feeling cramped and caused the escape sequence to feel shorter and less tense, so the map was expanded vertically. Along with adressing these issues, it allowed me to create a point in the center of the map for the player’s units to convene after splitting up (which I found to be the most effective way to tackle the map), and overall just made the payer’s movement around the map flow a lot better.
A core part of this level’s design is the inclusion of Fog of War, a obscuring layer over the map that hides terrain and enemy placement from the player outside of their units’ visibility ranges. To fit with the mysterious, dungeon-crawling nature of the level, I decided to make the fog pitch black, completely obscuring the map’s terrain from the player. This, however, posed a problem regarding the map’s difficulty, as obscuring enemy plcaements from the map can make it easy for the more frail units to get swarmed from the shadows and killed.
I tried a variety of things to make fog of war seem more fair, including larger vision ranges, or making enemies weaker or less plentiful. However, my eventual fix adding several braziers around the map that the player can interact with, lighting up the surrounding area and giving them a Torch, which can temporarily increase a unit’s vision further. Not only did this fix the issue of lower-visibility and added another resource for the player to manage, but it also offered another reward to players who went out of their way to explore the dungeon — the more braziers you find in the first phase of the map, the easier navigation becomes in the escape sequence.
All in all, I look back very fondly on this project. I had done a number of Fire Emblem-based projects before, but this was the first one I was able to see to completion, and I’m quite proud of it. I think the difference in design decisions that go into a single chapter as opposed to a full campaign are very interesting. The former tends to have quicker unit scaling and more moment to moment gameplay, while the latter can have more of a focus on long-term difficulty and narrative. It was also an excellent excercise in iterative design and problem solving, as issues like the ones I mentioned above forced me to think about the core design philosophy of the map, and come to fixes through constant play testing.