Escape Path PORTMORTEM

**Spoilers Ahead – Be Warned**

This game has come a long way in years in development and I wasn’t sure if I was going to ever really finish it, the last update being leaving it in Escape Path Beta perpetually. The first iteration of the game is Cave Escape published all the way back in 2019, one of my first games in Unity created from a 2d roguelike tutorial. This is where Escape Path gets its turn-based movement and procedurally generated levels from, as a fun puzzle to navigate through each room. My mom, who is not a gamer, suggested I added tutorial help, and that’s where I got the lightbulb moment to add dialogue through a friendly demon helping you through the cave, and a storyline based on the choices you are making. 

I then challenged myself to make a real game out of this doing all of the art myself and improving on the game’s design fundamentally with new mechanics, boss battles, and more environments. By reading the book Pixel Art for Game Developersby Daniel Silber, I created the art and animations in Aseprite. I created the UI menus and general game design help from youtube tutorials, notably Brackeys, Thomas Brush and blackthornprod. The music was one thing that I felt was really important for setting the mood so I wanted to feature amazing songs I found on opengameart, especially from the very talented artist neocrey. I made a lot of sound effects through Audacity but also went to opengameart to fill in gaps. The dialogue system, with different fonts specific to characters, and choices meaningfully impacting the story is inspired from my favorite game Undertale.  It’s safe to say with how much fun I was having creating so many different secret interactions, funny dialogue lines, and different paths to change the story the scope was getting out of hand pretty fast.

The original plan for Escape Path was to have four separate environments, the first world being the Cave, then the Shadows – a darker cave with spiders and flying ghosts where you would fight Cacomor’s brother Shade, a molten lava area where you would have to avoid lava geysers and goblins, and the lab a futuristic underground high-tech area. As I mentioned, creating just the first 25 levels took incredible effort, hours upon hours and the scope for everything I was adding kept growing. While that was all really fun, my motivation for the project started to suffer as I considered what it would take to finish the game with the other areas. That’s when I took a pivot, and submitted to the Finally Finish Something game jam, deciding to mark the end of the game after level 25 and including the path you were on after that. 

The biggest lesson that I’ve taken from developing this game is the importance of feedback. This game would look incredibly different if it wasn’t for the comments of people playing the game, and I got a lot of advice from that game jam. It is so much better as a result of the playtesters, from the dialogue, to bug fixes, to improving the gameplay and mechanics. For that I truly thank and appreciate anyone that gave feedback on any iteration of this game. 

Now, after a couple years break, I have returned and fully finished the game out with a smaller scope than I had originally planned, but overall that’s a good thing. The game is no longer stuck in beta and gives actual conclusion to each run to escape the cave. There are 25 different possible endings, ranging from easy to very difficult involving hidden interactions or difficult gameplay by making certain choices. 

I would love to hear your thoughts on the game and which endings you are able to discover!

Thank you for reading and I really hope you enjoy playing this game that I have finally been able to complete.