Demon Lord Postmortem

Been a while since I posted here, and after some deliberation, I decided to post about the development of Demon Lord, the Dungeon Crawler Jam version of the game that turned into Demon Lord Reincarnation. I hope this will provide additional insight into the design process and how the jam version affected the final game.

The Initial Idea

The jam version started as a different concept — it was about a summoner who traveled between two worlds (Light and Dark), recruited monsters, and aimed to defeat an evil wizard. The theme was “Duality” and the concept seemed to mesh well with it.

The plan was to have two variations of a single level with slight differences — a blocked path in the light world could be open in the dark world and vice versa, and the player could freely switch between worlds via portals.

Since jams like these are perfect opportunities to experiment, I decided to try my hand at SaGa-style systems, such as skill sparking and avoiding the leveling system, focusing on stat gains after surviving through battles.

Switch to Demon Lord

About three days into the jam, it became clear that the campaign would require more time than initially planned, so I decided to rework this concept into something else. After some deliberation, I recalled my love for Wizardry I & IV and I thought it would be neat if a single project combined the experience of playing both games into a single package — and it fit the theme too, which was another plus.

That’s how the concept shifted to a simple premise: defeat the Demon Lord as a party of heroes, then escape the dungeon as the Demon Lord as his army of monsters.

Around that time, I stumbled across Torio's archive and found out that his amazing artwork could be used in personal and commercial projects, which was inspiring and gave the project another push.

This sudden change of direction halfway through the jam hurt the final version quite a bit, as there was no time to develop the combat system in the way I wanted, so I opted to keep the automatic combat of the initial concept. The game balance was also all over the place, and slow progression didn’t help either.

The main criticism went towards the game balance and shallow combat, as well as lack of QoL features, such as lack of an auto-scrolling combat log, which made battles more arduous than intended.

With these problems at hand, few players got to enjoy the “dark side” of the campaign, but those who did praised it for its originality.

Aftermath

Fortunately, the player feedback aligned well with what I wanted to do, which gave me confidence that an expanded and improved version would be an enjoyable experience, and the project managed to attract attention on social media, making it easier to market.

The development of the expanded version titled Demon Lord Reincarnation started shortly after the jam ended. Unfortunately, the development hit quite a few snags along the way, and I’ll talk about this in the next post.