Thornbridge Saga - Metroidvania

Thornbridge Castle is under attack!

Monsters have begun appearing out of thin air within the castle walls! The knights of Thornbridge assembled to defend the king in the inner sanctum, but the outer structure collapsed and they were all trapped within, their fates uncertain. Meanwhile, our heroine Vanisa is undergoing a trial to join the knights to follow in her father’s footsteps. Now, as the last knight of Thornbridge, can she find a way into the castle to rescue them and find out what happened? Are they even still alive? Who orchestrated this attack, and why now? What are their intentions? How did they get their army inside the castle walls? What does this mean for the future of Thornbridge?

Thornbridge Saga is a metroidvania inspired by classics such as Super Ghouls n’ Ghosts, Castlevania, and Zelda: Adventure of Link. Explore landscapes, caves, dungeons and castles. Use strategy and tactics to battle deadly foes. Discover magic items that enable new strategies for battling monsters. Use the landscape to your advantage, or trick monsters into fighting each other.

I was largely inspired to start development after seeing Jetrel’s castle platformer artwork: https://opengameart.org/content/castle-platformer

Current Status and Future Plans

The basic actions the player can execute are all implemented. Eight different areas are implemented, nineteen different monsters are implemented, and one boss fight is complete. Five different music tracks have been written. A Kickstarter campaign is planned for November.

How am I making Thornbridge Saga?

Thornbridge Saga is written entirely in C# using MonoGame. I’m writing the music myself. I do a fair amount of art, but visual art is my weakest skill, so I rely heavily on contributions made at OpenGameArt.org and a few talented artists who make their works available on Patreon and itch.io.

Tools I’m using:

  • MonoGame
  • Tiled
  • PyxelEdit
  • FL Studio

Links and videos:




http://www.vermiliontower.com/thornbridge-saga/

5 Likes

I’ll definitely play this one :slight_smile:

Looks awesome.

Would love to see the source code!

Very curious to see how you’ve done slopes.

Ugh, yeah slopes have been a pain. At first I had implemented collision detection with arbitrary polygons, but it turned out to be too slow on XBox and Android. So now I’m using algorithm #2 from this page:
http://higherorderfun.com/blog/2012/05/20/the-guide-to-implementing-2d-platformers/

Ah, I see.

I’ve been on that page about a dozen times over the years, and still never actually read it!

You may have inspired me to write a demo project for it!

Go for it! One comment I’ve consistently received from playtesters is that they really like the slopes and not having to jump over every small elevation change.

I wrote a blog post about my implementation of the algorithm. I hope it’s helpful.

http://www.vermiliontower.com/2017/08/23/map-collision-detection-and-slope-implementation/

1 Like

This must be a good article as the first screenshot is from Flashback