Game Development Conversations
The Legend of Roto
A farsical adventure through the backstory of the Dragon Warrior/Quest series. This game makes light of some differences between the Japanese and English versions, and even plays into a Dragon Warrior reference contained in the English release of Final Fantasy for NES. Throughout this parody, we attempt to explain the reasons behind the random location of Erdrick’s/Roto’s Token, Armor and Sword. The star of our adventure is Lota, Roto’s sister. She is joined by a friendly slime (yes, a friendly one) who follows and helps Lota in battle. Her quest is to preserve the memory of her brother in the minds and heart of the people.
The system in this game is simplified. It’s an action-adventure, similar in gameplay to the Zelda series, where items alter your power rather than building up character statistics. It features randomly generated dungeons, which progress in difficulty throughout the game.
The game was built in one month with a team of three programmers. Art assets were collected from the internet and used for educational purposes. All tools and editors were also built during pre-production for this game, and were expanded during the month of production. We achieved the creation of an enormous world, and yet did not quite fathom the effort required filling this world with content and NPCs. So there are some empty walks between towns and dungeons. However, there are two main quests in the game, one of which must be discovered along the way. This makes for about an hour of gameplay, depending upon the difficulty mode selected. Two player mode is supported for keyboard and one joystick controller. Overall, I’d call it a success for being a one-month creation.
Read fellow developer Robert Walker’s blog post about this game.