WizzaMan Post-Mortem

A Pac-Man Dungeon Crawler

Pac-Man is one of the most well-known games in the world. Created in 1980, the game took the arcades of that era by storm. GamePyong wanted to try a new spin on the classic Pac-Man gameplay and in so doing, WizzaMan was born. WizzaMan retains a similar feel to the original game especially with the layout of the dungeons. However, it adds its own new twists to the game which will be described in this post.


Mixing Genres

One of the things we love to try at GamePyong is mixing different genres together to see what happens. That was the case with WizzaMan which is a mix of classic arcade gameplay and roguelike dungeon crawling. Just like in Pac-Man, the objective of the game is to collect all of the shards (or pellets in the original game) in the dungeon. Unlike the original, however, the dungeons are teeming with enemies which WizzaMan can kill by using his spells. Defeating all of the enemies in a level with automatically draw all of the shards in the level towards WizzaMan. The player can have up to 2 spells in his arsenal at any point in time and these spells have a cost and cooldown. The player must collect a certain number of shards before they can use a spell and after using it, they must wait until the cooldown period expires before they can use the spell again.

There are many different types of enemies in the game and each type has unique attributes such as movement speed, homing in on the player and health.

Game Features

WizzaMan has a number of features including:
  • The game utilizes procedural content generation heavily and has an infinite number of levels to play. The levels in the game are procedurally generated and therefore the amount of replayability in the game is immense. The game's backgrounds are also procedurally generated using the techniques discussed in this post. The enemies are procedurally generated as well using a sprite generator.

  • 12 different spells and buffs to employ against the enemies. Each spell has a specific effect such as speeding the player up and freezing all enemies. Spells can only be unlocked by acquiring gold which is gained randomly by beating dungeons and from lucky tickets.

  • The game has a reward system in the form of Lucky Tickets. This is a scratch game like the one described in this post. The player obtains Lucky Tickets randomly on completion of dungeons or by watching advertisements. Players have a chance to win gold and spells from the tickets.

WizzaMan was released for desktop and mobile browsers as well as for Android devices. You can play it here: Play WizzaMan







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