Summary
Æsir Quest is a simple arcade adventure game. A string of mini-games which tell tales from Norse mythology.
My initial concept focuses on The Tale of Utgarda-Loki, where Thor and Loki travel to Jotunheim, and encounter many opportunities for Game & Watch style mini-games.
Concept
I made this when still new to GameMaker Studio 2, with only a simple grasp of coding, and use of the engine. After working on God Is Debt, I believe I could now comfortably finish Act 1 in a few days, and the whole story in a month or two, which is the most compelling reason to return to this project.
I also took the opportunity to add some traditional games in. Mia, a push your luck dice game, and Tafl, sometimes referred to as Viking Chess. These would be optional extras that the player could find hidden in the world. I also wanted to add them to the Castle of Utgarda-Loki, and give Roskva, the girl from the tale, her own challenge. In the original story she stays at home, so it would be a fun addition to add a board game tournament to the castle.
Tafl was an interesting addition, my friend Lucas, who I worked with on Project Chartae, introduced me the recursive Minimax algorithm which I used to implement opponent AI. This did work somewhat, but I could only have it go to a depth of 3, meaning it only calculated 3 moves ahead. GameMaker Studio 2 simply couldn’t go any deeper, so the AI was quite limited in its strength. Sometimes it would work at depth 4, but would often crash due to running out of memory. In hindsight I don’t think this was the right approach, but I learned something new by trying.